Lessons To Be Learned From Turkish Development of Water Resources

Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) organized a round-table meeting titled "Lessons to be Learned from Turkish Development of Water Resources" with an American delegation of researchers from the Global Strategy Institute at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Sandia National Laboratories in the US. The delegation was headed by Erik R. Peterson, who is the senior Vice-President at CSIS and the Director of the Global Strategy Institute at the same institution. Other members of the delegation were Laura A. Keating from CSIS and Jeffrey J. Danneels, Peter B. Davies, Ray E. Finley and Howard Passel from Sandia National Laboratories. During his power-point presentation, the head of the delegation, Mr. Peterson, outlined CSIS's current thinking on how water supply, water demand and water management are affecting overall economic and geopolitical stability across the planet. He made an overview of global water challanges and explained what CSIS expects to learn by examaning the historical and current developments of water resources in Turkey. Peterson said that the delegation hopes to test their key findings on the development of water resources on key countries and Turkey is one of these key countries together with Brazil, Mexico and India. The question and answer section of the meeting proved to be very interesting. Some experts from the audience shared their views stating that the total freshwater stocks on the earth is not the real problem. The real problem, according to them, is the distribution of water across different regions. They explained that the best way to deal with this problem is for the water-scarce countries  not to subsidize agricultural products or water-intensive industrial products like textile but rather to concentrate on trading these goods from other countries.