If the world's growing water crisis remains unresolved -- depriving clean water to more than one billion of the world's six billion people -- it will jeopardise the U.N.'s longstanding battle to reduce global poverty, hunger and disease by its targeted date of 2015, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) warned Thursday.
The international giants are in trouble, with reserves shrinking, taxes and costs rising, and producing nations reneging on deals or nationalising their assets. The answer to their problems could be massive mergers.
Multinational oil companies have reaped record profits the last two years due to the high oil price. But behind the scenes, they are playing a longer game. Civil society should learn from their approach.
"Sometime this month, the U.S. population is projected to reach 300 million. In times past, reaching such a demographic milestone might have been a cause for celebration. In 2006, it is not," says Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute.
Emira Woods points out that “Yet as in many communities in Nigeria’s oil rich Delta region, most people of Yenagoa live in mud huts. Some reside only a few feet away from the oil wells. But they lack electricity and indoor toilets. They have no hospitals, no running water, no schools. And there is unemployment too. Oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil bring in foreign workers for even the most menial jobs. ... Like many Africans, I fear that oil companies look to Africa for its resource wealth without seeing the people. Resource-rich communities are dehumanized and the color-line is ever present as the greatest profits flow steadily to wealthy white men who already control enormous wealth and power.”
It always comes back to oil. The continuing misguided interventions in the Middle East by the United States and the United Kingdom have their roots deep in the Arabian sand.
More than a billion people still have no clean water to drink as the international community falls far behind in its plan to halve their number by 2015, two U.N. agencies said on Tuesday.
