We are looking for an island nation that is just a scattering of dots on the map. The country’s nine tiny islands are located about halfway between Australia and Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Together they rank as the 4th smallest country in the world.

But as small as it is, this place has big problems. There is almost no drinking water.

Supplies have all but run out after five months of drought, so the government has declared a state of emergency.

New Zealand and Australia are mobilizing to help.

The answer is Tuvalu.

The Polynesian island nation is located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. And the urgent need there this week is for drinking water.

Tuvalu declared a state of emergency this week. The neighboring Pacific territory of Tokelau, north of Samoa declared a similar water emergency Tuesday.

To find out more anchor Marco Werman talks to Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute based in Oakland, CA.

It’s August and that means summer fun, right? Well, not in the former Soviet Union. The month is considered by many to be unlucky because of several catastrophic events and crises that have happened, over the years, including terrorist attacks, raging forest fires and even war.

A forest fire raged out of control near Moscow last year in August. The blazes were caused by the worst drought and highest temperatures the country had ever experienced.

The beginning of the end of the Soviet Union came on August 19, 1991 and the Russian government defaulted on both its domestic and foreign debt in August of 1998.

Given, that it is already August 3, 2011, are Russians on edge? Do they think history will repeat itself?

Some like Natalia Belyaeva, who works at Deutsche Bank here in Moscow, thinks so.

“For me, it’s difficult to explain why. I think that there are different reasons from different aspects, and so maybe it’s only our expectations, superstitions,” Belyaeva said.

“I don’t think so. It seems to me that Russians don’t have the mysterious souls,” said Nikolai Petrov from the Carnegie Center in Moscow. He said he doesn’t think Russians are making things up. Black August is the real deal.

“August is a time of vacations, and, as in Russia, there is a kind of menial management. A lot of decisions should be made by very high-ranking boss. It means that if the boss is absent then decision-making is even more complicated than usual,” Petrov said.

Petrov said it is not that August is cursed; it’s that the system simply doesn’t react well to crises.

And maybe Petrov is right. Remember those deadly forest fires we mentioned?

The heat and smog from those blazes nearly doubled Moscow’s death rate, caused billions of roubles in damage and forced thousands of people to flee the capital.

And where was Moscow’s then mayor during all of the upheaval? Yuri Luzhkov was nowhere to be found. Many media reported that he didn’t want to cut short his August vacation.

“I think August is such a transition point in the economic cycle,” said banker Artem Prigunov. He said he can’t explain the natural disasters that have happened in Russia in August in the past. But he does say that political upheaval is often connected to the economy, and the Russian economy is connected to August.

“A Russian scientist developed the theory of economic cycles, and all economic developments in the world depend on them. And I think August is a transition point from one period to another,” Prigunov said.

Prigunov said when cycles change sometimes bad things can occur.

So is Prigunov expecting a whiz-bang August event?

“It’s superstition,” he said.

Even if August is a bad month, the Russian scientist Prigonov is referring to, predicted that the cycles will come every three, 10 and 40 years. So Russia should be okay this year; at least in August. Some Russians are speculating that a ferryboat accident last month in which 120 people died is this year’s “August event.”

MARCO WERMAN:  Picture the scene.  There you are, minding your own business in a tiny town in northern Australia and suddenly you find yourself under siege from thousands of marauding camels.  Welcome to the real life situation that confronts the people of Docker River in Australia’s Northern Territory.  Docker River is home to about three hundred fifty humans and now about six thousand camels.  Civic leader Graham Taylor says the result has been chaos.

GRAHAM TAYLOR:  All of the supplies have been broke and damaged.  Sewers underneath the ground are getting trampled and crushed.  The airport is actually virtually unusable.

WERMAN:  And even beyond Docker River, the camel problem is getting worse, so says Adrienne Francis of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

ADRIENNE FRANCIS:  At the moment, the population’s doubling every seven years and we’ve got an estimated population of 1.5 million of these feral camels across northern Australia.

WERMAN:  All those camels are looking for something to drink.  The drought has made water scarce so the thirsty camels head into populated areas, such as Docker River.  But hold on, all this raises kind of an obvious question, what are camels doing in Australia in the first place?  Journalist Adrienne Francis has the answer.

FRANCIS:  They arrived here actually with the pioneering explorers’ broken wheels in the 1860’s and then the pioneering Afghan cameleers, about 3,000 of them, brought the camels to provide transport through this remote, harsh, arid landscape.  They helped lug the overland telegraph polls and also some of the slathers for the railways and since that time, their numbers have just continued to grow and grow.  It is extremely remote country so it’s a little bit out of sight, out of mind.

WERMAN:  Well, in Docker River at least, camels are neither out of sight, nor out of mind and state government’s spokesman Rob Knight says authorities have authorized a cull of the animals.

ROB KNIGHT:  We’ll be pushing them out 15 kilometers and shooting them and letting them decay into the desert.

WERMAN:  Animal rights campaigners say using helicopters to round up the camels and shooting them by the thousands is barbaric.  Still, Docker River’s human residents say they are determined to get their town back.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Ethiopia is hardly the only part of the world plagued by drought these days.

Two thousand miles or so to the north, parts of the Middle East, and the eastern Mediterranean, are suffering water shortages as well.  One of the worst-hit regions is the island of Cyprus.  The World’s Aaron Schachter has our report.

AARON SCHACHTER: I’m standing beside what sounds like a raging Kouris River.  But this 10-foot-wide swath of muddy brown water that runs into the Kouris dam represents a trickle compared to what the Greek Cypriot city of Limassol needs, just down below.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Water was once plentiful here.  Then in the 1960s, Cyprus started promoting itself as a tourist haven, and officials scrambled to get water for new swimming pools, gardens and golf courses.

GEORGE PERDIKES: For many years the policy was to make drills and take out the water from the earth.

SCHACHTER: George Perdikes is Secretary General of the Greek Cyprus Green Party. He says development helped deplete the island’s groundwater.

PERDIKES: When they destroy the underground water, they tried to make the big dams.  Everybody was celebrating that it’s going to be the solution, the final solution for the water problem in Cyprus.

SCHACHTER: But since the late 1980s, rainfall has dropped by 15 percent.  Last year was the fourth straight drought year, with half the average rainfall.  During recent summers, Cypriots have sometimes found themselves without water for up to four or five days a week.  They’ve had to import hundreds of millions of gallons from Greece and Turkey. And experts fear it’s only going to get worse. Nicolas Jarraud is a scientist with the United Nations based in Cyprus.

NICHOLAS JARRAUD: The eastern Mediterranean region, as a result of climate change, is going to face increasing aridity, increasing desertification and a rather smaller amount of rainfall.  And this we are very much certain about.

SCHACHTER: One recent study predicted that by the end of the century, the once relatively lush island could become a Saudi-Arabian-like desert.  But climate change is only exacerbating a problem that Cypriots helped create. Islanders have been profligate in their use of water.  Kyriakos Kyrou works for the Water Development Department in Nicosia. He says officials are just starting to take the problem seriously.

KYRIAKOS KYROU: The situation was getting worse and worse and worse, but the decisions are not being taken by the technocrats.  So, it’s very frustrating.  We are under tremendous pressure here because we need to produce the water, but in reality you have no say in how the water’s being used.

SCHACHTER: Despite the development binge, the number one offender remains agriculture.  Farms suck up three-quarters of Cyprus’s water, often for thirsty crops like citrus and potatoes that are sold outside the country.  The UN’s Nicolas Jarraud says Cyprus’s farmers aren’t greedy or callous.  They’re just stuck in old ways.

JARRAUD: If one can provide farmers with alternative crops that would per input of water provide more financial returns, for example the production of pomegranates instead of citrus, I think it’s a question therefore of convincing the farmers of the financial benefits and secondly of showing the methods they can use.

SCHACHTER: Of course convincing farmers to change their ways takes time.  But many in Cyprus think they have a quicker fix.

BURAK CELIK: The cheapest, and maybe the best way, is now desalination.

SCHACHTER: Burak Celik is a Cypriot environmental engineer.

CELIK: The sea is endless.  If you do not destroy the habitat.  I mean, maybe if all the countries used the sea, so maybe it will be a problem, but no need for all countries for desalination.

SCHACHTER: There are three desalination projects now in Cyprus and more being planned.  Dozens of similar plants exist all over the Mediterranean and Middle East as water shortages continue to grow.  But the plants are expensive, they use a lot of energy, and some worry about the impact of the tons of salt dumped from the plants back into the sea.   Meanwhile, the broader solution to the region’s water woes requires money and political will.  Both are lacking.  The small island has been divided into a Turkish north and a Greek south since a conflict in 1974.  Turkish and Greek scientists have worked together on water solutions in recent years, but the politicians have yet to reach agreement.

And while the Greek Green Party’s George Perdikes says ordinary Cypriots understand there is a problem, they don’t seem to feel much sense of urgency.

PERDIKES: If you go to the street and speak to the people the majority will say, the Greens are right, saying that we have a problem with water; that Cyprus will be a desert.  But then they do nothing.  After all, god is blessing our country and the people.  <laughs>  That’s not wise, I mean, the solution is in our hands.

SCHACHTER: For The World, I’m Aaron Schachter, Nicosia, Cyprus.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: One of the worst droughts in living memory is taking its toll in Kenya.  Clashes over land and water have turned deadly and community leaders are warning of more violence.  People aren’t the only victims.  In Kenya’s Samburu District, the BBC’s Peter Greste found one of the dozens of elephants that have either starved or been shot by poachers because of the drought.

PETER GRESTE:  Hoof, what a stench.  We are looking at a young dead elephant, apparently it’s been here about two or three days at the most but boy, it’s already starting to smell something horrible.  It was down here by the river, obviously trying to get food and water, but it must have laid down and was simply too weak to get back up again.  It obviously died where it lay.

GRESTE:  The death of the infant elephant is one of countless small tragedies happening across much of East Africa.

IAN DOUGLAS HAMILTON:  It’s desperate; it’s the worst that I’ve seen in the last twelve years.

GRESTE:  Ian Douglas Hamilton from the conservation agency, Save the Elephants.

HAMILTON:  If rains fail in October and November, we’ll go into a total crisis.  I can’t even imagine how awful that would be.

GRESTE:  This drought of course isn’t just about elephants but they are an indicator species.  What happens to them points to trouble right across the spectrum.  A few kilometers from the first dead elephant, a Save the Elephants researcher, David Dublin, guided us to another, this time the victim of human hunger.

DAVID DUBLIN:  I think what happened here is this elephant must have been shot, you know, just browsing here and just collapsed here and it looks like it’s from people.

HAMILTON:  And she’s missing all of her features.  She’s missing her trunk, she’s missing her tusks.

DUBLIN:  Yeah, a clear indication that it’s people who are involved in her death and that’s why we don’t see some of her, you know, patia like the feet and the trunk.

GRESTE:  Is this kind of poaching normal?

DUBLIN:  Not, but it looks like people are desperate and now they’re going for anything.

GRESTE:  Including the meat?  They wouldn’t normally eat elephant?

DUBLIN:  No, this is what I mean by saying you know, this is not quite normal for people to go, especially on the meat.

GRESTE:  Down in the middle of the Ewaso Ngiro River, we find a small herd of elephants trying to sip water from a muddy pit.  The river is a sea of bone dry sand but local herders have dug a well and the huge animals are helping themselves and in the process, they’re destroying the water hole.  Only once they’ve finished can the women help themselves.  If the rains fail, we’re in trouble the old woman told me.  It’s not just going to be the animals dying.  We’ll die too and it’s not going to take long.  The conflict isn’t just between wildlife and humans.  Like everyone in this region, the community of [SOUNDS LIKE] Kananpiro are nomadic herders.  Their survival depends on their animals. It’s that search for water and grazing that really runs these people’s lives.  Earlier this week, raiders from a neighboring community attacked them just before dawn, about five thirty in the morning.  And although the conflict has some very deep roots, fundamentally, this is about a struggle over land and water.  We weren’t expecting the middle, said one of the men, who fought off the attackers, but they were after our land and our water.  The drought has made the tensions between us much worse and I think we’ll have more fighting.  And just how serious is this struggle?  Well thirty two people died in the gun battle.  Eleven raiders and twenty one from [SOUNDS LIKE] Kananpiro, including women and children.  This drought has become a battle for life itself.  For the World, I’m Peter Greste, Samburu, northern Kenya.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH-Boston.  A part of the world once synonymous with drought and starvation is facing another food crisis.  Twenty-five years ago images of malnourished children in Ethiopia focused the world’s attention and sympathies on East Africa.  Today, a lack of rain as well as political violence again threatened the region with starvation.  In a moment, we’ll examine the causes of and responses to a recent African food crisis and we’ll consider the legacy of green revolution pioneer Norman Borlaug.  But first, listen to this aid worker.  He’s just visited Northern Kenya where he and his colleagues saw some wrenching sights.

NICHOLAS WASUNNA: We saw an elderly lady just faint. She just passed out.  Her thin body, frail hands.  I remember going to where she was just to hold her hand, and I looked in her eyes which were half shut. And I remember thinking to myself; does it really have to come this? What can we all do to ensure that in our day and age we do not see these kinds of things?

WERMAN: That’s Nicholas Wasunna in Nairobi, Kenya.  He’s a humanitarian advisor for the aid group, World Vision.  He and his colleagues witnessed the effects of the drought as soon as they began their mission.

WASUNNA: Already we could see the carcasses of cows, donkeys, goats and I was shocked when I saw the carcasses of camels as well, but this does show you the severity of this drought.  These communities they really rely on their livestock.  We saw a lot of communities there that they … When I looked in their eyes, there was an emptiness.  There was a despair.  These kids were hungry.  The women were hungry.  Of note were the elderly people.  They were all so … Their body was thin.  You could easily see their ribs.  Yeah, this was a real concern.

WERMAN: Are there people literally on the verge of starvation?  Has anybody died yet?

WASUNNA: No one has come to us specifically and reported a death due to a lack food.  We also have spoken with the government, and they don’t seem to have any figures on death.  But when we’re talking about figures, we’re talking about 3.9 million pastoralists or agro pastoralists are in need of food.  But this crisis also goes wider than just the arid regions.  It also goes into urban centers.  In Kenya, for example, there are 2.5 million people in urban centers that need food assistance, and we also have some people which are still displaced by the post-election violence, and these are about 100,000 people who still need food assistance.

WERMAN: So what brought this about, Nicholas?  I mean, how much is it due to political unrest, the ethnic conflict that you mentioned and the post-election violence and how much is it due to just bad rain for the last two years.

WASUNNA: I think everyone can cite climate change as one of the factors, but actually, if we start working backwards, we can see in places like Northern Kenya, the infrastructure is just so poor.  These are areas that have never been prioritized in terms of infrastructural development.  Getting there by road could take two or three days.  A pastoralist community in Northern Kenya who are looking for a market for the livestock it would take a businessman three days in a [SOUNDS LIKE] lorry to get to Northern Kenya.  By the time he gets there, the quality of the livestock, the body condition is poor so the price will be poor.  A meager sum that can hardly buy cereal for the food.

WERMAN: There is some suspicion that rains will arrive in October, but do you think that would bring any relief?  I mean, a big rain at the end of the growing season seems a little too much too late.

WASUNNA: Some areas are flood prone and we are already preparing to respond to communities where there might be flooding episodes, but normally in places like Takana [PH] in the north, we see that the rain really helps the grass to grow so the animals can start to graze again, but the future trends are there will be more droughts, there will be more episodes of flooding.  We’re expecting and El Nino to be coming from October.  Then we’ll go back to a series of droughts again.  So this will become what we’re calling the new norm.

WERMAN: Nicholas Wasunna is a humanitarian advisor for the aid group, World Vision.  He joined us from Nairobi, Kenya.  Greatly appreciate your thoughts.

WASUNNA: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Water has been a source of tension in the Middle East for a long time now, and now a prolonged drought and even the threat of even less rain in years to come are raising fears of worse times ahead.   In fact, there is a concern that a shortage of water could lead to a violent conflict in the region.  Linda Gradstein reports from Israel and the West Bank on the growing impact on the region’s water crisis.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: Khaled Rahayla, a 43-year-old farmer, lives in a corrugated tin shack in the Jordan Valley, a fertile agricultural area, where he grows vegetables like green peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini on rented land.  In a good year he can make a profit of a few thousand dollars.  But lately there hasn’t been a good year.

KHALED RAHAYLA: There is a scarcity of water, there was not enough rain this year and our crops were destroyed.

GRADSTEIN: Rahayla says he tries to collect rain water in the winter in shallow pools.  In the summer he goes to work in the nearby Jewish settlement to help make ends meet.  He has to buy drinking water from tanker trucks.  It is a similar tale of scarcity about 100 miles away, at the Sapir Pumping Station on the Sea of Galilee.  Huge peach colored pumps draw water from the sea, where it is then distributed throughout the country.

AMBI OF PUMPING STATION: Here we stand near the boats port which is dry now, totally dry  because the water level is 4 meters below what it used to be a few years ago.

GRADSTEIN: Doron Markel of the Israeli Water Authority says the Sea of Galilee, which is Israel’s largest freshwater lake and the source of more than a third of its drinking water, is fast approaching what is called the “black line.”  Once that happens, all pumping will have to stop or the Sea itself could be damaged.

The Middle East has had several years of drought.  Last year was the driest in Israel in 70 years.   This was a little better, with most areas getting about 80 percent of the average rainfall.  Scientists here say rain patterns are changing.  It’s raining less often, but more heavily.  That means less water is absorbed into the ground and that instead, the intense rains can cause floods.  According to Israel’s meteorological service, average temperatures in the Middle East have also risen significantly in recent years, which means more evaporation. Daniel Pedersen, a lecturer in environmental studies at Hadassah College in Jerusalem, says water stress is growing throughout the region.

DANIEL PEDERSEN: We’re now in the third or fourth year of lower than average rain, a drought year.  And across the region in Lebanon, in Israel, in the Palestinian Authority, in Jordan, in Iraq there is more use of water and less water available so there’s a crisis of water across the region.

GRADSTEIN: If the pattern sounds familiar, Pedersen lays much of the blame for the problems in a familiar place as well, climate change.  And the heightened water stress is exacerbating long-time problems and tensions.  Dr. Shaddad al-Attili, the head of the Palestinian Water Authority, says like everything else here, water is political.  Since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it has taken control of all of the territory’s water.  Palestinians are not allowed to tap the aquifer that runs under the West Bank without Israeli permission.

DR. SHADDAD AL ATTILI: I have water underneath our feet here but we’re not allowed to drill a well.  Because Israel, they took the water.  They don’t have the right policy, we’re living with the consequences of the Israel policy.

GRADSTEIN: In 1995, as part of the Oslo accords, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed a deal on water sharing.  Since then, the Palestinian population in the West Bank has grown by tens of thousands. And the freeze in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations means the water agreement has not been updated.  Attili says the problem is growing more acute.

ATTILLI: The problem is not only here in the West Bank, it’s also in the Gaza Strip.  The water available to them is not enough.  And the quality of that water is not acceptable for human drinking.

GRADSTEIN: A recent report by the World Bank sharply criticized Israel, saying Israelis use four times as much water per capita as the Palestinians. The report also criticizes the Palestinian Authority for mismanagement and says Palestinian pollution threatens local water supplies.

Both sides take issue with the parts of the World Bank report, and they disagree on some of the causes of the crisis.  But Israelis and Palestinians do agree that it must be addressed. For its part, Israel recently cut water quotas to farmers by almost a quarter. There is also a new ban on watering private lawns. And consumers who use more water than the average will be charged a hefty premium. But Israel’s further options are somewhat limited, in part because the country already uses water very efficiently.  The country pioneered water-saving drip irrigation.  And Doron Markel, of the Israel Water Authority, says they’re already reusing most of their wastewater for agriculture.

DON MARKEL: Israel is the most efficient country in the world regarding the water system.  The most efficient part is the use of sewage of retreated sewage.  We use more than 70 percent of the sewage.

GRADSTEIN: Palestinians do not have this option, partly because they don’t have the resources. Clive Lipchin is Director of Research at the Arava Institute, which encourages Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmental cooperation.

CLIVE LIPCHIN: Currently there is not one wastewater facility in the West Bank that is running as it should and there’s no facilities in Gaza at all.  And again, it’s not just the Palestinians problems, if we’re not treating sewage in the territories its polluting the aquifer that were using.

GRADSTEIN: Given the dearth of other options, Israeli is turning to desalination.  Two desalination plants already produce about five percent of the country’s needs. And officials hope to boost that to more than 20 percent by the end of next year.  There’s even an ambitious idea called the Red-Dead canal, which would move water from the Red Sea to the shrinking Dead Sea, and then desalinate some of that. But not everyone thinks desalination is the way to go. Environmentalists protest that desalination burns dirty fossil fuels. It’s also relatively expensive. So some say one of the only options left is agriculture, which despite all of its efficiencies, still uses about half of Israel’s water. Environmental scientist Daniel Pedersen says that has to change.

PEDERSON: Why should we take our precious natural resource so people can grow flowers and ship them to Europe or grow oranges or grow cotton?  These are all water-intensive crops and we are not a water-rich country.  We can grow our own food but there’s no real reason why we can’t rethink this division of our resources.

GRADSTEIN: Back in the Jordan Valley, farmer Khaled Rahayla doesn’t know anything about desalination or a new canal. All he can do is hope that somehow, he and his family get more water.

Everyday his wife Taysira bakes 20 round loaves of pita bread. That, along with olive oil and vegetables is what they and their young children eat. They can’t afford, meat or dairy products, since they have little to sell from their farm.  If the current water crisis continues, Khaled says he might have to give up farming altogether. For the World, I’m Linda Gradstein in Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.