''In this new century, water, its sanitation, and its equitable distribution pose great social challenges for our world,'' Annan said on the occasion of World Water Day 2001 being observed Thursday.

Yearly polluted water contributes to the death of 15 million children under five

Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP

The difficulties in achieving full access to safe water and adequate sanitation are compounded by increasing competition for scarce water resources in most countries of the region, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), based in Beirut, Lebanon emphasised.

''There are many countries that are today in distress when it comes to water .... drinking water is going to be a serious problem,'' Annan stressed.

More than one billion people lack access to a safe water supply, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report released Thursday.

Forty percent of the human race, some 2.4 billion people, lack adequate sanitation and 3.4 million die every year of water-related diseases, said the WHO report entitled 'Water for Health - Taking Charge'.

Polluted water affects the health of 1.2 billion people yearly, and contributes to the death of 15 million children under five, Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Thursday.

Vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, kill another 1.5 to 2.7 million people per year, with inadequate water management a key cause of such diseases, said UNEP's Global Environment Outlook Report 2000.

''These disease outbreaks create widening circles of misery, illness and death with dire economic and social impacts for the people concerned,'' Toepfer emphasised.

Annan emphasised that those most affected by water shortages rank among the poorest in the world - as well as the least healthy. ''In fact, the absence of a safe water supply contributes to an estimated 80 percent of disease and death in the developing world,'' Annan stressed.

''History provides grim reminders that failure to manage our water resources properly has caused the end of civilisations,'' Toepfer said, pointing to the fall of the Mesopotamian civilisation in what is now Iraq and Iran and the Aksum empire in what is modern Ethiopia.

''If we solve every other problem in the Middle East but do not satisfactorily solve the water problem, our region will explode,'' the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a water engineer once said.

Indeed Israeli officials recently raised the spectre of a 'water war' with Lebanon as Lebanese villages prepare to pump water from the Hasbani River which flows through both countries.

''Nobody heard me say wars break out over water, but factually that is correct,'' Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's hardline minister for infrastructure told The Financial Times, hinting at the prospect of military action if Lebanon began pumping Hasbani water.

Syria and Iraq embrace the cause of Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan in the bloody rebellion he set in motion against Turkish rule as a way of applying pressure on Turkey to release more water into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which are held back by a series of dams in Turkey's southeastern provinces.

Ocalan was given money, arms and political cover though both Syria and Iraq have fiercely repressed their own Kurdish populations.

Stressing that water is a ''major security issue'' ESCWA emphasised Thursday that ''water scarcity continues to be and will remain through the near future a leading concern for all water consuming sectors''.

Seven of the 13 ESCWA member states are among the world's poorest countries in water - with per capita water shares of less than 500 cubic metres per year.

According to ESCWA, though progress has been made in urban areas, rural communities are still inadequately served, in terms of both quantity and quality of drinking water as well as sanitation facilities.

In some ESCWA countries - including Iraq and Syria - less than 50 percent of the rural population has safe drinking water and less than 20 percent have adequate sanitation.

''Countries that control water are likely to be the big winners of the future,'' former US Senator Paul Simon wrote in a new book entitled 'Tapped Out', which examines global water problems. ''The world's population will double in the next 40 to 90 years, Simon said, ''our water supply, however, is constant''.

ESCWA reiterating the UN Secretary-General's Millennium Report urged member states Thursday to renew their commitments to reduce by half, between now and 2015, the proportion of people who lack sustainable access to adequate sources of affordable and safe water.

''Safe, clean water for drinking and sanitation is simply the fundamental condition for bettering the human lot,'' Koichiro Matsuura, Director General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation pointed out.

Copyright 2001 IPS

###