DEVELOPMENT: Turning the Tide on Human Suffering

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 9 2006 (IPS) - If the world’s growing water crisis remains unresolved – depriving clean water to more than one billion of the world’s six billion people – it will jeopardise the U.N.’s longstanding battle to reduce global poverty, hunger and disease by its targeted date of 2015, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) warned Thursday.

If the world’s growing water crisis remains unresolved – depriving clean water to more than one billion of the world’s six billion people – it will jeopardise the U.N.’s longstanding battle to reduce global poverty, hunger and disease by its targeted date of 2015, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) warned Thursday.

“For some, the global water crisis is about absolute shortages of physical supply,” says UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis, a former vice president of the World Bank. But he points out that the UNDP’s 2006 Human Development Report (HDR) rejects this view.

Dervis argues that “the roots of the crisis in water can be traced to poverty, inequality and unequal power relationships, as well as flawed water management policies that exacerbate scarcity.”

The word “crisis” is sometimes overused in development. But when it comes to water, says Dervis, there is a growing recognition that the world faces a crisis that, if left unchecked, will derail progress towards the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and hold back human development.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

The study calls for about 10 billion dollars in annual investments to achieve the MDGs on access to clean water and sanitation – one or both of which are foreign to an estimated 2.6 billion people.

“The 10 billion dollar price-tag for the MDGs seems a large sum, but it has to be put in context. It represents less than five days worth of global military spending and less than half what rich countries spend each year on mineral water,” says the report..

Titled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis”, the 422-page UNDP study released Thursday says the global crisis in water – unlike wars and natural disasters – does not make media headlines, nor does it galvanise concerted international action.

Yet this is a crisis that is holding back human progress, consigning large segments of humanity to lives of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity.

Among its many proposals, the study calls for a Global Action Plan under the leadership of the G-8 countries – the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia – which is “urgently needed to resolve a growing water and sanitation crisis that causes nearly two million child deaths every year.”

“When it comes to water and sanitation, the world suffers from a surplus of conference activity, and a deficit of credible action,” says Kevin Watkins, lead author of the HDR.

Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, lauded the UNDP for explicitly linking water and sanitation with improvement of the human condition.

“Poor people’s lack of access to safe water and basic sanitation is not due to the quantity of water available on the planet but rather because governments and institutions are not up to the challenge,” he said.

Compounding this is the limited political interest of the rich world to prioritise water and sanitation in development cooperation, an issue that seldom makes headlines, Berntell told IPS.

He agreed with the conclusions of the report that if governments fail to address the water crisis, developing countries will not reach the MDGs.

Governments should develop national strategies for improving the water and sanitation situation. The five percent of official development assistance the donor community provides is insufficient and should be increased, so that the silent deaths of 1.8 million children each year can stop, he added.

Asked for his comments on the UNDP study, Prof. Asit K. Biswas, an academician and currently president of the Mexico-based Third World Centre for Water Management, said: “What else is new?.”

The conclusions of the UNDP study are pretty obvious, he remarked.

“It is my considerate view that the world is not facing a water crisis because of physical scarcities,” he said. However, it is facing a crisis because of continued mismanagement of water.

“We thus have a management crisis and not a water crisis per se in our hands. Up to now, my view has been a minority opinion. Nearly all the U.N. agencies and the World Bank in the past have talked extensively of water crisis due to water scarcities: some of them have even talked about water wars!”

While these make good media stories, he said, on a scientific basis, however, “They are pure rubbish.” It has also created a bad side effect.

He said he recently met the prime minister of a very major developing country who quoted the United Nations as saying that the world is facing a major water crisis and thus his country can achieve only marginal improvements in water availability.

“I told him to throw all these scare-mongering reports into his wastepaper basket, get some knowledgeable advisors and start solving the water problems of his country, which are solvable with the technology, resources and expertise his country possesses.”

“I am thus delighted that HDR is joining my minority camp. For the record, the only two institutions that have talked of a management crisis is the Asian development Bank and InWEnt of Germany,” he added.

Asked about the proposed Global Action Plan under the aegis of the G-8 countries, Biswas said: “It is highly unlikely that G8 will ever do anything serious, on a long-term basis, on water and sanitation. Remember the fanfare on the Africa Plan and what has the G8 actually delivered so far?”

Biswas said instead of the G8, the UNDP study should have focused on the “powerhouses of the future”, like Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are facing these problems and thus have a vested interest to solve them.

They also have, by far, better understanding of the problems of developing counties and their solutions, he said.

“This familiar refrain of dumping such problems into the G-8’s lap has not worked in the past and will not work in the future: all we can get at best is rhetoric, but neither actions nor much funds.”

“Instead, we need to look at countries like Singapore and Cambodia, and how they are solving these problems,” Biswas said.

For example, how is it that Singapore now has one of the best, if not the best, water supply and wastewater management in the world, including all of the G8 countries?

Similarly Phnom Penh has also been a remarkable success story, he said. In 1993, losses from the Phnom Penh water supply system were 70 percent. Now, with good management, it is less than 10 percent.

“Sadly, very few people in the water and development fields know of the remarkable success stories of Phnom Penh or Singapore. I only hope HDR has made an attempt to change this sad state of affairs.”