Water for the Deserts of Africa

Water is imperative for life, for all people, in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Water security is very important, especially for the poor people of Africa both north and south of the Sahara desert. We Americans need the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) to bring water down from Alaska and the Yukon, before large parts of the Western United States dry up. Quoting Marcello Vichi: "Already in the 1970s scientists, scientific journalists and serious politicians had already launched a warning, but people was not yet dying for lack of water in the millions and nobody was concerned about the forecasts, albeit they were scientifically proven. Today, still only a few people are concerned, but [the media] are preparing the ground for 'more interesting,' 'more marketable' news to come." Italian engineer Marcello Vichi, author of the Congo water transfer program named "Transaqua," blasted the "Global Water Security" report newly released by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (see EIR Vol. 39, Issue 14). Vichi wonders whether "this is the current level of knowledge and awareness about facts" by the Office that collects information from 16 intelligence agencies of the Federal Government of the United States." The report claims that on the African continent, only the Nile River is a resource, "ignoring that soon it could no longer be a resource because of its exploitation, and ignoring that on the same continent there exists a river named Congo." Today 1.6 billion people are in need of water, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says, which "notoriously made great efforts to solve these problems at the root," Vichi sardonically remarked. That same FAO tells us that 10,000 persons a day die from drought. International media indifferently, with no criticism whatever, pick up the U.S. intelligence Water Report to claim that there is no solution to this tragedy. The solution is at hand, but it is not wanted by the interests dominating the current economic and political global system. In the 1970s, Mr. Vichi developed on behalf of an Italian state company a project to transfer water from the Congo River to the dying Lake Chad, which if implemented would have solved all food problems in Africa and would have built a modern water, transport and energy infrastructure for Central Africa. Under the name of Transaqua, the project envisioned the transfer of 100 billion cubic meters of water annually (1.5 times the Rhine), a 2400 km long canal and 12.7 million hectares of agricultural development. One hundred million people would be fed by this project, the entire economy of the Central African region would be revived and the desertification of the Sahel region would be contained, helping to stem the mass migration from Africa into Europe.