Downpour or Drought - tracking the Asian Monsoon

As heavy downpours continue to flood South Asia, the waters have killed 147 people, swamped villages and caused landslides. Most of the deaths were due to house collapses triggered by incessant rains in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. As more rain is forecast in the next 48 hours, officials have already begun evacuating people to higher and safer places.

Every year the presence or absence of the monsoon rains leave a trail of death and destruction across South Asia, a region where much of the economy, largely agricultural depends on the downpours. As the monsoon unleashes her madness, this year, economists debate downpours and droughts in a region crippled by inflation and food scarcity. The pattern of chronic flooding and chronic droughts adds to the challenges Asian economies are already suffering from.

According to the International Herald Tribune in 2006 Asia had less fresh water - 3,920 cubic meters, or 138,000 cubic feet, per person - than any other continent outside of Antarctica, according to a report by the United Nations. When the capacity of lakes, rivers and groundwater are added up, Asia has marginally less water per person than Europe or Africa, one-quarter that of the North America, nearly one-tenth that of South America and 20 times less than Australia and the Pacific islands.

“We do not have a water crisis. We have a management crisis,” Witoon Permpongsacharoen, secretary general of the Foundation for Ecological Recovery, a nonprofit organization in Bangkok, told the IHT.

While some countries have addressed water management efficiently, the bigger picture in Asia, however, is that water woes are becoming a threat to economic growth: steel, computer chip and paper factories, among others, need large amounts of water; intensive farming is both draining and polluting fresh water resources; and as the 4 billion people who live in the region grow richer they are using more household machines - dishwashers, clothes-washing machines - which leads to leaps in water consumption.