Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
From your link
> Now, water suppliers across our region are now racing to fix the contamination.
I'm confused between 'racing to fix' and 'permanently contaminated'? Is it that it will get better but never be fixed completely?
Given the changes at the EPA recently it would not surprise me if they simply change what is deemed acceptable and claim that the problem has been solved.
I live downstream from W.L.Gore in Maryland, the creator of this miracle substance, and a few years ago I myself began asking questions. I came to learn that they just dumped the stuff in the stream for decades and that stream is the source of my family's water via the town system. I had my water tested and came back at 70 ppt of which I then spoke to some doctors. This inspired me to write up and speak before the political board of my town and they did not believe me. Hilariously however someone knew because they stopped publishing PFA numbers in our water reports in 2022 but as a result of my speaking a few months later they brought in Inframark Corp who runs our town water and sewer. After they spoke to the town board at the meeting the town board was no longer smiling nor doubting my words. They were told that they must filter the drinking water and the operation will capex at about 4 MM USD with an opex for filters of around 2 MM USD annually. The town board was floored, but wait there's more, Inframark then told the board that they also must filter the sewer too since it must be removed as liquid products we use have pfas as well as RO systems which just re-concentrate it back into waste water. This sewer system capex was quoted at 10MM USD minimum and no opex stated since the plant already runs and filters costs were not known at the moment.
My story is real world for nearly the entire East Coast of the USA but since the problem cannot be seen few know about it or even concern about it. A town close to me, Newark DE, just announced a few months back going to spend tens of millions to filter their water with taxes ballooning from that and more. While a town to my West stated needing to spend about 20 MM USD to filter theirs. This is an absolute issue and I'd wager, polymarket conveniently makes it easy now, that this post ages well with time, or maybe I should say unwell. I have also been speaking with a lawyer in a big state that is running a class action and his information of course should be blasted on the news as more and more folks continue to consume liquids from plastic containers. Veritasium did a great piece on it a while back too but I have yet to have my own blood tested. For perspective I immediately bought a PFA specific filter and I installed it by extending our existing 3 stage to a 4 stage kitchen water tap at a cost of 600 USD for supplies. I then bought a whole house PFA filter a few months later and installed it too, costing me about 2000 USD in supplies, it is the size of a large compressed air canister so room is needed. I have so much more on this PFA topic but I am already going on too long. Your health doesn't matter until it does and no pill is going to filter this stuff from your organs.
So the problem from the post then becomes: the water that we do have to drink probably isn't safe either.
This leads me to question how many other chemicals we continue to "create" that in time will too show health impacts to many. We are certainly leaving our mark in this layer of soil for some future species to find and ask their own questions about us, such as how smart we really could have been given what they dig up.
Stay Healthy!
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
https://www.ft.com/content/bda390bc-8cc4-4fa4-9a90-36af08651...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/05/the-real-proble...
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
EDIT: The UK water regulator has the capital investment data here: https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/long-term-data-series-o.... What does it say?
You certainly can reach a conclusion, and the GP did.
What you can't do is to compute the rate on return on their investment. But as a user of a water system, why do I care about that?
As the user of the water system you do have to care about the return on investment. Because the alternative is to have the government take out bonds to pay for that work, and you’d have to pay the interest on those bonds with your tax dollars.
Now .. what to do about that? That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued.
What is the number for the capital investment? You’re comparing a number to words. That’s a type error.
> That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued
Not without knowing how much capital has actually been invested to date. Because you’d be have paid out interest and principal on that over 30 years out of that 86 billion.
A larger water system has bigger capital projects, but also a larger customer base (and they also likely charge more per liter of water than we do). So it is absolutely not a given that capital investment in water infrastructure requires bonds or loans (though I acknowledge that these likely cannot be avoided).
Again, how much money did these UK water companies invest? What's the number? Without knowing that, you're in no position to say it's in the range of what a government utility would be able to pay out of operating surplus, without issuing bonds.
Apparently rather more
"Earlier this year, Corporate Watch calculated that £2 billion a year could be saved – or £80 per household – if the water supply was in public ownership. The government can borrow much cheaper than the companies and there would be no private shareholders demanding their dividends"
The research is cited in the document if you would like to critique
https://corporatewatch.org/the-severn-trent-takeover-corpora...
We waste billions of tax dollars on frivolous pursuits, misaligned incentives and defense contractors rather than investing in communities and infrastructure, and that’s just at the federal level. Plenty of states and localities follow these same patterns then turn around and say they have no money for proper maintenance of civic infrastructure while being bilked by private companies
I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.
What I'd like to see, is more agricultural reform, both on water management, and export taxes. We have a lot of agricultural production based on legacy design that doesn't account for current water supply issues, and much of the end product is shipped and sold overseas for profit.
Depleting a critical local resource to profit a few is the type of issue that feels like it has a chance to gain public support for legislative change, once the situation is dire enough. I think we're still the frog boiling stage, but at some point it'll be too hot for the masses to ignore.
"Marginal" land for agriculture used to be America's Serengeti and now it's a vast, dead monoculture. And let's not forget- these animals feel, and they have a perspective with which they relate to and understand the world, just like we do. If we have a choice, we should choose to not consume products of cruelty which destroy our planet. It's easy.
Wisconsin produces lots of cheese. Are they using water faster than it's being replaced?
Ocean seafood I have to imagine uses near-zero fresh water.
But, It's also likely that most of these farmed fresh water foods are in areas with highly renewable freshwater resources (SE Asia, US South), rather than arid locations.
The map titled "Freshwater withdrawals as a share of internal resources, 2022" shows that SE Asia withdraws a fraction of their renewable freshwater every year.
> Colorado River is vulnerable and arid, yet we waste this water on cows.
Define 'waste.' Producing cows creates food. Rain-grown corn from the mid west is fed to the cows. What should we do with the water from the Colorado River otherwise?
Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.
Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.
Any evidence for this?
First principles reasoning about the problem shows this to be eminently doable.
How much ocean water is available in the world? Virtually unlimited compared to human need.
How much energy can we produce to power desal plants? Well we can easily calculate the amount of fissile material we can produce. We have enough available material to power for all of humanity's energy needs (carbon free) just from nuclear alone for many hundreds of years.
There is nothing stopping us, with our vast wealth from desalinating ocean water. Israel has already demonstrated it's feasible on a large scale and can provide water for millions.
Also your choice of the midwest as an example is baffling. That is the one part of the US that will never have a real water shortage. The great lakes, tons of rainfall, and plentiful groundwater (the water table is like a few feet down isn't it?) mean that talking about the midwest makes absolutely no sense.
Places like California, Nevada, Arizona are the places that have real water problems. Yet they also happen to be right next to the ocean. California has so much vast wealth they could easily build enough desal capacity to provide water for the western states. It could be pumped to neighboring states via pipelines in the same way that oil is currently piped.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
Any temporary payment will not be trusted, since future governments can undo it.
The government should buy the land, and the rights, at full market value, discounted by the value of a new perpetual right to graze what is left after the flooding. Peat bogs are also the best carbon sinks we have, aren't they?
One interesting part of this, is that there are plans to reforest some of these areas (which were deforested perhaps 1000 years ago), and the main opposition to that is from the general public, who like to look at the hills as they are! People are complex...
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
Another poster mentioned real estate peaking in a zip code of AZ for having limited access to fresh water. I wonder how long until real estate along the great lakes starts becoming a long term hedge.
Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked.
Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live.
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Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
What about the rest of the west?
Arizona? New Mexico? Nevada? etc etc
Water needs to be brought in from somewhere? Who's going to pay for that? How do you do it safely, sustainably. And on and on.
I know people forget the rest of the west a lot. (Or maybe they just don't care about us as much?) But it's actually more of an issue in those places than it is in California.
A personal illustrative story. I used to live in Scottsdale. The water issue is such common knowledge out there that people started trying to get into the magic zip code. (Phoenix sits on like a gazillion years worth of water that they squirreled away.) I had moved into the magic zip code just about 1 year before everything went crazy. As it happened, about 18 months after we moved to that zip, we decided to move back to the Great Lakes region. Fully expecting to lose money on the house. But the word had got out on that zip code, and the final offer was over 60% more than we'd paid just 18 months prior.
That gives an indication of how even individuals are thinking. It just kind of felt like a lot of people, governments and organizations know there will be an issue, but money is gating everyone's ability to do anything about it.
Whereas of course, money's not as much of an issue in California.
I think large parts of the west will need help in the future. Or people will need to pay significantly more in taxes to live in those places.
It can't go on forever the way it has been. That much is certain.
Only for agriculture. Residential water needs are 7% of the available water.
Also, the aquifers under/near Phoenix are not segregated by zip code.
Also, higher taxes don't make water when there isn't any.
If you live in Scottsdale, not in a certain zip, and the ish hits the fan water-wise, Phoenix is not giving you water. It's up to Scottsdale to provide you services.
That's why they call it a "magic zip". Not because of the zip itself, but because you get Phoenix services in that zip.
It's actually really important to know things like that when buying property down there. Some places have aquifers and reserves and others don't. Who is providing your services can have a critical impact on not only your quality of life, but also your property value.
Also, higher taxes is what it takes to create the new infrastructure to bring in water.
You gonna do a deal with California to get in on their desal plants? The infrastructure to pull that off will cost money. You gonna go the other way and desal through Texas? Even more money. Gonna continue to trust the Colorado and upgrade that infrastructure? Probably cheapest, but still a lot of money.
Essentially, whatever solution you come up with, it will cost money. Either the feds will have to pay it, or, as I said, the people who live in those areas will have to acclimate themselves to paying significantly higher taxes.
I don't think that moving water from CA is a part of the future for Arizona. If it was, then sure, taxes will play a role in that.
Even the solution I prefer - massively reducing agricultural water usage - will require money, but money is not going to create water near Phoenix IMO.
But when I was in Scottsdale, I still considered it a long shot. The hot idea down there at that time was that giant Arizona desert PV farms would feed California electricity. They would send it back in the form of water.
Definitely works on paper. Only gets cheaper to operate the solar farms over time. But enormous capital costs.
Who's paying all that? I don't really think most of the people down in Arizona have the money it would take for that up front charge.
That's what I meant. California can float those kinds of costs. So for a place like California, it's definitely something they can do if the issue is pressed on them.
Places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, I don't think they can? Maybe? But I don't think so. That's why I believe if the issue is pressed in western states outside of California, you would see much higher taxes that would likely make some people have to move.
That's correct. For reference, the simple upfront build cost of the desalination plant in Carlsbad in 2015 worked out to approximately $300 per county resident, which was peanuts to become effectively impervious to drought conditions in a populated and economically prosperous desert. San Diego had an over-$200B economy at the time, over $300B now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
https://www.sdcwa.org/study-shows-carlsbad-desal-plant-offer...
California absolutely has the resources and ability to desalinate, it's just a question of priorities and political will.
True, but most of the groundwater under phoenix was contaminated by three superfund projects . Article [0] is from 2019 and says it’s “delayed”. They hit some targets in 2024, supposedly working on it with review due sometime this year [1]
[0] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...
[1] https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
Some of the suburbs haven’t been reached by the groundwater plumes, but phoenix itself was 2/3 in scope. So you don’t have a supply issue in maricopa city (which is a whole separate water district.. and an expensive one too: $100 bill even if you don’t use a drop), city of Scottsdale, etc
Residential use is 7%, about the same as evaporation and retail/commercial/power-production.
The people living in the desert are not the problem when it comes to water.
No this goes the other way. Massive economies of scale easily outweigh the economies of local agriculture.
1. crops in the desert are generally OK if they are directly for human consumption. The problem is growing alfalfa and other crops intended to feed livestock - they are incredibly thirsty crops, and the end result is not a lot of food in terms of nutrients or calories. Plus the little detail that a huge amount of the meat produced in the SW is exported to Asia, and so it might "look local" but actually isn't
2. even human-consumption crops are a lesser problem if the farms use the old techniques collectively known as "flood irrigation". Farming in the SW needs to switch to drip irrigation, which requires a significant capital investment by farmers, and I don't think they should be required to bear the whole (and perhaps not even the majority) of that cost.
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
Nope. Agriculture in the southwest is structurally unsustainable, that's all.
Of course, for California, that has enormous consequences, but then say California, not "the southwest".
Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd.
Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency.
Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now.
The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible.
So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...
California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.
And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.
Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
Unless the new people are used as an army to take the needed resources from others...
If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.
2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.
3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.
4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.
I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.
I'm choosing to ignore a lot of the problems with people from disparate backgrounds living together, people not actually wanting to leave where they live, people not wanting to share freely available resources, etc. Those are very hard to solve problems.
I'm only saying that over-population is not the cause of resource problems. If we can solve the other problems then a lack of resources stops being a problem, which proves population size is not the root cause.
New York doesn't magically receive food. New York is a large net recipient of food imports. It produces value to society and exchanges some of that value for food farmed by others. The U.S. (and most of the West) is structured in such a way that productivity per capita is high, and it means everyone in the food supply chain can live a reasonable lifestyle with enough food. Most African nations do not structure their society this way. It's not an accident. This is the way they choose to live. I grew up in Africa and I'm happy to explain the many ways in which American and African cultures differ. For example, corruption isn't corruption in most of Africa. It's good manners. Gift giving has been happening in tribes for thousands of years. In business it is a common courtesy to provide a gift during negotiations. Of course the person with the largest gift is the most generous and the nicest person, so of course they get the contract. This is a fundamental difference in our cultural and social understanding of what is right and wrong.
What you appear to be exercising is a typical Western hubris: "if we can just get the savages to live with us, they would see the light and live like we do." This assumes that everyone want to adopt your values and way of living. They don't. The reason there isn't much food in Africa (relative to the population size) is not by chance. They live on some of the most fertile land in the world. Africa should be the breadbasket of the world. The issue is that they don't like the way you live and don't want to live that way. Any kind of mass migration strategy would merely result in lots of hungry people in America.
You chose to ignore all that, and argue against the point I explicitly didn't make. Congratulations on winning that argument. Your prize is a huge straw man.
Gangs can only want so many machine tools and steel plates, if you don't use them they are just in the way. But people who do use them and learn how to do it well become immensely valuable and beneficial to all.
Gangs don't use the farm equipment. They steal it and sell it. They will steal any equipment they can and there is an unlimited appetite for equipment on the black market. Especially in China and Southeast Asia.
One part of the problem could be sending them super cheap/crappy tools because it seems like a better value per dollar and also the constraints of total funding. Sometimes maybe getting ripped off by foreign suppliers because there is a LOT of really crappy steel out there disguised as tools and engines that are all but useless. But tractors and tools that break down that easily are a complete waste of money and time to people who will barely get to use them before they stop working and they likely are right that it is junk. We have the technology to make a tractor that is robust enough that you wouldn't expect any maintenance for years if not a decade and minimal even at that point. I definitely don't see many decent manual CNC machines and lathes or other machine tools getting sent over in numbers enough.
Of course a lot of this still ultimately comes down to cost which is not an easy issue to deal with.
For example for Algeria: "available resources dropping from 1500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year in 1962 to 500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year by 2016, far below the 1000 \(m^{3}\) threshold set by the World Bank"
the main factor is a region overpopulation.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.