Under the patronage of HRH the Crown Prince, the 31st meeting of the 31st annual plenary meeting of the InterAction Council (IAC)is being held in Bahrain. Participants in the meeting warned that the wars to come will be for the water resources, rather than oil or something else, calling for the rationalization of water consumption around the world in general, and in the Arabian Gulf region in particular, which will witness severe shortage of underground water facing a large population growth.
The day two of the IAC Plenary Session Meeting in Manama tackled the water scarcity and energy issues and the ways and means of creating a balance between water resources and rationalisation in consumption pose a major challenge to the global community.
During the morning session on Friday under the theme “Water and the Energy Links” the participants called on more international coordination to find solutions to the problem of water shortage by facilitating the transfer of developed technology in this area specifically from Germany to the third World countries. They also called on holding awareness campaigns through the United Nations and do further researches about food security and agriculture which consumes about 80% of the water around the world.
The participants pointed out the growing need to address the lack of energy, which affects the human needs and growth, highlighting that the electricity was not available to 55% of the population of low-income countries, where about 1.3 billion people around the world do not obtain energy as required.
The participants also said that the basic problem now is to find a mechanism to know what will be the price of oil at least during the next ten years, of which will enable the producing and exporting countries to carefully set their economic policies and avoid the negative effects of price volatility for both parties. They said that the exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa are mainly concerned with this issue for they depend almost entirely on oil and gas exports, pointing out that energy prices are always unpredictable.
The participants also said that the only way out to address the weak demand on oil, is that the oil exporting countries should diversify economy in a way to diversify sources of income, for oil and gas industries alone cannot create jobs which may accommodate the numbers of young people joining the labour market.