A forerunner of worldwide "water wars" ?

Most people anticipate that within our children's lifetimes wars will be fought over access to water for drinking and agriculture.  A story at the Washington Post focuses on one current dispute, between Egypt and Ethiopia.

[T]race the Nile about 1,400 miles upstream and there’s a rising colossus that threatens to upset a millennia-old balance. There, in the Ethiopian highlands, one of the world’s largest dams is taking shape.

For Ethiopia, the dam promises abundant energy and an escape from a seemingly permanent spot in the lowest rungs of the world’s human development index. But for Egypt, the consequences could be dire: a nationwide water shortage in as little as two years that causes crop failures, power cuts and instability resonating far beyond even the extraordinary tumult of the recent past.

For a country facing daily domestic crises in the aftermath of its 2011 revolution, the dam is a foreign threat that Egypt can ill afford. And that may be the point. Analysts say Ethiopia is seizing on Egypt’s distraction and relative fragility to plunge ahead with plans that have long been on the drawing board but have always been thwarted by Egyptian resistance...

The country, [Morsi] told a crowd of cheering supporters, is ready to sacrifice blood to ensure that “not one drop” of the Nile is lost...

Egypt and Ethiopia each have more than 80 million people, double the population that existed just 30 years ago. By 2050, the combined population of the two countries is expected to rise by 100 million, even as climate change could reduce the supply of water...

Ethiopian officials say the dam will be used to generate electricity, not to irrigate fields, meaning that all the water will eventually make its way downstream to Egypt...

Egypt may be the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus once remarked, but the Nile is not Egypt’s alone. Eleven countries share the basin of the world’s longest river... Ethiopia has won the majority of those countries to its side with the promise of electricity exports for a region that desperately needs new sources of energy...

More at the link.