by Alex Stonehill

Created on: April 22, 2008

Water is the new oil. I've spent the last four months reporting stories on water from Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries at the forefront of the world's coming water crisis . And while western politicians and consumers fret over the declining economy and increasing oil prices, the news from East Africa is that with a growing majority of the world living on less than a dollar a day, the liquid that fuels bodies is becoming even more contentious than the liquid that fuels cars.

Our team uncovered distressing stories about people in the region facing water scarcity issues: women who walk for miles each day to collect drinking water; farmers pushed into deadly conflict with wildlife by dwindling river flows; city water supplies drained by overzealous irrigation. But the big picture that the smaller stories hint at is one of ecological disaster and conflict over resources that will affect millions and have repercussions around the world.
As disturbing as it was to see the harsh realities of this crisis come in to focus before my eyes, equally upsetting was the realization that there is no journalistically viable way to write and publish that larger story.
Africans' struggles for water inevitably read to American audiences as happening "over there" in a chaotic and distant world. Connecting them to a looming global trend requires a prescience that doesn't hold up to the exacting principles of print journalism. This is especially true because developments on the ground often outpace the scientific community - in many neglected areas, for example, the only way to find out if rainfall has been declining is to ask a subsistence farmer, because the formal scientific data simply doesn't exist.
I've made the mistake in the past of being too timid to put something I felt strongly about in print because I didn't have the sources or the clout to back it up. I can vouch for the fact that being able to say "I could have told you so, but I didn't" after the fact doesn't provide much satisfaction.
In fear of repeating the same frustrating experience again, and in faith that we can still mitigate this disaster, I'm offering the story behind the story on the coming world water crisis here. Off the record.

"As you may know, Alex, the coming World War Three will be fought over water, not oil."
The director of a local water NGO told me this just a few days after I arrived in Ethiopia in January. Variations on that refrain were echoed by aid workers and researchers across the region over the

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