Caribbean Water and Hydro-Piracy

Abstract

Outside the region, the salt-water-imagining and imaging of the Caribbean is so powerful that the idea of water scarcity challenges belief; the recent years of drought were significantly under-reported. The Caribbean is a kind of blind spot in world water thinking; and even in regional perspective, it is not easily disaggregated from Latin America. The UN estimates the renewable water resources of the combined region as the second highest per capita in the world. In theory, then, the amount of water naturally available at any given moment is highly favourable to the local population. But very few people across the combined region actually receive the allocation that this kind of arithmetic might suggest is their entitlement. In practice, more than 130 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean lack access to safe drinking water. The combined region has the greatest theoretical potential of naturally renewable water, but takes from that pool the least amount per capita of any region in the world (World Bank 2007).