Window on Eurasia

Russians Near World’s Largest Lake May Soon Be Drinking Bottled Water

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, September 5, 2006 – In a story which echoes the Soviet-era joke that Saudi Arabia, were it ever to go communist, would then be forced to import sand, an Irkutsk newspaper reports this week that residents in the area around Lake Baikal, the world’s largest lake (by volume), may soon have to buy bottled water to drink.

The reasons for that, according to an article in “Oblastnaya
gazeta,” are the region’s past good fortune in this area,
increasing population pressure and security concerns, and post-Soviet changes that have reduced the ability of the government to address this issue
[http://babr.ru/index.php?pt=news&event=v1&IDE-32391].

In the past, Lake Baikal and the Angara River basin contained some of
the purest water in the world. Indeed, it was the threat of their
pollution by industrial development that helped to power the rise of
the Soviet Union’s environmental protection movement a generation ago.

But precisely because the water was so pure and so apparently
inexhaustible, neither Soviet officials nor their Russian successors
have felt compelled to address two of the major problems that afflict
this water supply. On the one hand, the water in this region lacks many
vital minerals that people need for good health.

On the other, because potable water has been widely available, few
people focused on two critical issues until the last few years. Both
industrial development and population growth in some areas have put
extraordinary pressure on the fragile ecology of the water system
there.

Moreover, because this region of Russia relies far more heavily on
surface water than almost any other, the water supplies around Baikal
are at risk of terrorist attack, something against which underground
water supplies elsewhere in the Russian Federation are far better protected.

But even these trends would not necessarily be enough to force Russians
living in the Baikal region to turn to bottled water were it not for
three developments in the country’s political and economic sphere,
developments that reflect some serious unintended consequences of
post-1991 reforms.

First, both the need to provide employment to people in a region hit
hard by the economic declines of the 1990s and the collapse of many of
the regulatory bodies that tied up industrial and housing development
in the past mean that more factories and houses are being built in places
that harm the water supply than ever before.

The Irkutsk paper describes a number of instances of this, pointing out
that specialists in water management are frequently called attention to
the dangers of building housing near particular lake shores but have
been ignored by those who now respond more often to monetary concerns
than government orders.

Second, in some places in this region, there is enough government money
to tap underground supplies and build the necessary pipeline systems,
but the recent municipal reforms mean that many decisions that had been
made at the regional or national level are now being made locally,
something that inevitably delays construction.

According to the paper, the Irkutsk oblast not only had enough money
for such work but had even developed a rather thoughtful plan. Now,
however, as this region along with the rest of Russia goes through President
Vladimir Putin’s municipal reform, all of that is at best on hold and
at worst stopped completely.

And third, in much of the Transbaikal, the only institutions left that
can move quickly and develop underground water supplies are private
companies. Such companies, the Irkutsk newspaper suggests, are far more
likely -- just as is the case in Western Europe -- to sell their
product in bottles rather than via pipelines.

That would not be all bad, of course, the paper notes, because bottled
water could be processed to contain some of the minerals missing in the
natural watershed. But it is clear that the Irkutsk newspaper views
this as less than full compensation for the loss of Lake Baikal and its
related hydrosystem as sources of naturally available potable water.

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