You're absolutely right. Transboundary water management is a huge mess. They do not trade very well. The mountain regions are really important, because they begin in Kazakhstan and China, and then they become the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, and the Himalayas. These are peaks of 7,000 metres. They are glacier caps. They melt. This year the water will not be a problem because of the climate change issue, which we understand from some of our colleagues does not exist, but it does exist there.
The rivers run north, downstream. There are upstream and downstream considerations. One is agriculture. It is about irrigation. It is about cattle and grain. It is also about drought, and it is about flood plain management. CIGI did a security governance conference in Astana a year ago. We're proposing one in May in Ottawa, because one of the things that we can do with all of our thousands of lakes and rivers and the International Joint Commission between Canada and the United States is transboundary water management.
They have begun to speak to each other. The Kyrgyz ambassador said last week, “We don't need to speak to the Uzbeks, because we will control the water.” The Uzbek ambassador said, “Kyrgyzstan is very poor. If we pay them, they'll give us the water.”
In the meantime, and it is an exaggeration to call it this, perhaps a successor nation in the central Asian grouping might be Kazakhstan. For the last seven years, it has paid probably $100 million a year to pay, correctly, the transit tariff of gas or oil through Turkmenistan to Kyrgyzstan for the winter, in return for water.
Most recently there were proposals through the World Bank for a hydro dam development. Manitoba Hydro International was one of the bidders. But in Tajikistan what is being built instead is a huge dam, and that dam will divert, will flood, and climate change on top of it will cause mudflows, as we've seen in the past.
Transboundary water management will also.... We are used to water management for hydro, for food, for recreation. Water will become an issue in terms of food security. I don't like to put it on the table as a food security item, but within a year, it might become a food security item.