Recently President Rahmon visited Japan. It was his first official visit to this country. He was attending the first Water summit which gathered forty six countries for discussion about water problems in the Asia-Pacific region. It seems like Tajikistan was considered as a strategically important country which has huge resources of water. Most of the countries in Asia-Pacific region have a lack of clean and affordable water and Tajikistan is one of the few, which have big water resources.

I was surprised to see the figures below:

At least 700 million people among Asia-Pacific’s 3.7 billion population, don’t have access to safe and affordable water, and more than 1.9 billion don’t have adequate sanitation, according to the United Nations and other agencies.

Country representatives hope to reduce those figures by half by 2015, and then to zero by 2025, according to a closing statement released by summit organizers today.

I can hardly believe that these goals are to be achieved because the global warming has already affected the glaciers of Tajikistan and they are melting at a quick pace. I think by 2025 there will be less clean water than we have it now, but I hope this does not happen.

A lot of people in Tajikistan believe that soon Tajikistan is going to be a water exporting country and it will have such revenues as the OPEC countries have from oil. It means that we are going to live in a prosperous country. Naïve. Water is not oil and even if Tajikistan gains from the export of water, I’m sure it is going to be a small group of people who will enjoy those gains. The rest of the population will live in poverty.