It is much more interested in seeing that irrigation projects are efficiently managed and that cheap water does not just become another subsidy to relatively rich farmers.Ultimately, you achieve efficient use of water by pricing it properly. If farmers have to pay the economic price, they will grow crops which require relatively light irrigation and they will make sure their irrigation water is not wasted.Countries, too, need to think about the economics of drawing water from sources which they share with their neighbours. Rivers flow across national boundaries, so up-river states can draw off the water that would otherwise have flowed to other countries Aquifers under one country can be drawn down by a neighbour. It is easy to identify a series of potential flash- points where conflict might begin. These include the diversion of water from the Sea of Galilee into Israel and drawing from the water table under the West Bank, the Gabcikovo dam on the Danube in Slovakia, threats to dam the upper Blue and White Niles, and the damming of the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates by Turkey and the Euphrates by Syria. The World Bank is particularly concerned about the combination of scarcity, rapid population growth and political geography of the Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates basins.If nations priced their water properly, everyone would see the financial implications of one country grabbing water which would otherwise have flowed downstream to its neighbour. It wouldn’t solve the political conflict, but at least there would be a commercial basis for negotiation.It is like oil.

Indeed, Ismail Serageldin, a World Bank expert, made the link explicit this week: “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.”Applying the market to water resources may seem brutal. In fact, for the environment, the greater brutalities have come from ignoring the market. The worst water-related environmental catastrophe on the planet has perhaps been the destruction of the Aral Sea, to fulfil the national plan for cotton production of the former Soviet Union. But if that can be explained (if not excused) by the ghastly planning mechanisms of communism, the US record on the depletion of the Rio Grande to provide cheap water for farmers (or simply golf courses) shows that even decent countries can do dreadful things when they think of water as free.Seen in this context, our own water troubles become a sideshow Nobody dies because of a hosepipe ban. There is no real cross-border political conflict here – though the Welsh have some reason to feel sore that their water is stolen by England. But our collective hand-wringing about the inadequacies of our water industry is a manifestation of a global woolly- mindedness: the belief that water is, or should be, free.. Every time I think of the medieval majesty of Mont Saint Michel I don’t hear polyphonic choirs or Debussy’s La Mer, I hear “Hop, Skip & Jump!” played on a synthesizer and sung by a middle-aged woman who ought to have known better.

And the reason is that memories of our last holiday in Brittany were ruined forever by one of those awful kiddy tapes You know the kind I mean. Gullible parents buy them by the handful in the naive hope that a car resounding to “We All Live in a Yellow Submaree-een!” will blind our children to the fact that it’s a nine-hour drive to the gite in question.
Children’s tapes are a growth market, but a growth market in the unfortunate way that condoms are a growth market. We don’t actually like them per se, but until something that does the job better comes along we are stuck with them. Make no mistake, this diet of relentless jollity does do the trick. Five minutes of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm!” and the average infant appears drugged up to the eardrums.But the awful question remains: what these tunes are doing to you, the adult? Your holiday memories are poisoned by nauseous nursery rhymes and emasculated pop tunes. Remember, you are sitting in the front, dangerously exposed to the speakers with their radioactive thumpa-ding, thumpa-ding.

You are not allowed to talk in case a single synthetic note of jollity is missed in the back. And you are slowly having your brain turned to jelly by track after track of saccharine syncopation This is music that makes Mary Poppins sound like Mahler. What is its effect on the average sentient being?In our house we have labelled the children’s tapes Brain Death I, Brain Death II etc and try very hard to ration them. But the problem is that on a long journey the choice is simple. You can have fights in the back, endless threats of wees or vomit and ineffectual games of I- Spy, or you can plump for a silence broken only by “Hop, Skip & Jump!” Yet all technology exacts a grim price.