- silence

- This risk of water shortage is not exclusive to the African countries, or Saharan countries.

- Very close to us, Catalonia and the town of Barcelona in particular are already worried.

- And they are thinking of building an underground aqueduct between France and Spain

- to conduct the water of the Rhone River to the second Spanish city.

- Korine Comazzi and Pascal Pons.

- Barcelona: by the end of this millennium, the tentacular capital and its region, Catalonia, amounts to 6 million inhabitants.

- In 2025, one more million is planned.

- The water supplies are already shrinking. In 2002, the city will undergo a water shortage.

- There are no problems yet, but we are almost reaching the limit of our water resources.

- So we must plan in the future what the solution for our water resources is, to avoid the problem.

- 3 solutions appear to the Catalan leaders. To desalinate sea water, a very costly solution,

- or to take the water from the Ebro River, a river with a low flow.

- Here is the last solution: to take the water of the Rhone through an aqueduct to Barcelona.

- This immense project plans to extend the old canal of the Lower Rhone that joins the river to Montpellier.

- From here a 20 kilometers-long underground pipe would depart that would run under the Pyrenees to come out on the other side of the border.

- The ending century was the century of energy trade, I think that the coming century will see large water transfers.

- The States now exchange gas, uranium, weapons, hostages sometimes,

- but they don’t exchange water and I think that will come.

- The cost of the project: 8 million Francs, without any contributions from the French authorities.

- The idea of water sharing is seductive, from Brussels to Barcelona. But it arouses old fears into border farmers.

- If by any chance this water were driven to the regions of fruit and vegetable production,

- those regions would compete even more with our French productions.

- I believe that now our relations are quite tense. As a fact Europe should maybe fix it all.

- So for the time being the Spanish burn the French flag in Spain,

- I think that it would be unwelcome to talk about us sending water to them.

- Today, 98 % of the annual volumes of the Rhone River go to the sea,

- as many arguments for the defenders of water sharing.

- So, maybe in 2005 European students will tell that the Rhone River runs in Barcelona.