Lack of funds hinders initiatives on water, sanitation

Johan Fernandez The Star Asia News Network/Selangor

It was with great fanfare that the summits on sustainable development were held. First it was in Rio, Brazil, in 1992 and then in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002. Much had been promised at the Rio Earth Summit but little was delivered.

Ten years later at the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) summit in Johannesburg, there was a more cautious approach, and the CSD was given a new role to assess progress in implementation of the goals and targets.

Two years later the CSD is meeting in New York to take a hard look at whether things are on track, what had been achieved and where to go from here.

The focus is on three main issues: Water, sanitation and human settlements.

Norway's Minister of Environment and CSD chairman Borge Brende admitted that the broad picture was not reassuring.

"It is clear that we are not where we should be when it comes to meeting the globally agreed goals and targets," she said, adding that the next two years were crucial.

It has been estimated that 50 percent of developing countries were not on track to meet the water target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.

To meet this target would mean providing access to safe water to an additional 1.6 billion by 2015.

As the years go by, the water situation has gone from bad to worse. Between three and four million people die from waterborne diseases each year, with the social and economic loss amounting to US$16 billion a year globally.

Globally, 70 percent of water is used for agriculture. In developing countries, this share is around 90 percent on average, with irrigation using almost all of it but only paying a fraction of the cost.

Total investment in water and sanitation in the developing world today amounts to US$15 billion annually -- $5 billion coming from official development assistance (ODA) and $10 billion from national resources.

Over the years, the amount of ODA has gone down.

"This clearly shows that poor people can end up paying dearly for drinking water, often more than higher income groups who have access to subsidized water," said Brende.

Malaysia's Alternate Ambassador to the United Nations Radzi Abdul Rahman, while agreeing that two years was too short a time to see results, said enough time had passed to discern some trends.

"Using progress in the Means of Implementation as our litmus test, we see average ODA still hovering at 0.23 percent of GNP (instead of 0.7 percent), we see protectionist markets, and we also see continued difficulties for developing countries, in particular in accessing environmentally sound techniques," he said.

The lack of progress in the Means of Implementation is compounded by the failure so far of the partnership arrangement to bring the much-needed additional resources.

Radzi said Malaysia believed that the commission had to evaluate the reasons and constraints for the lack of progress in the Means of Implementation as this would enable it to craft appropriate policy measures at the next meeting to ensure real progress in implementing the Johannesburg Plan.

Ireland, the 2004 presidency of the European Union, said the Johannesburg Plan was developing in the right direction but there were marked regional differences.

It said the main constraints and obstacles to implementation should receive priority attention, in particular finance, good governance, capacity building and technology transfer.

The European Union said the attraction and more efficient use of financial resources remained the most significant key to making progress.

However, additional finance, particularly foreign direct investment, often remained difficult to unlock due to commercial and political risks, good governance issues, a lack of good projects and poor national capacity.

China's Deputy Permanent Representative Zhang Yishan said the developing countries posed the weakest link in the chain of global sustainable development.

Old and new problems such as poverty, hunger, deteriorating biology and outbreaks of infectious diseases weighed heavily on developing countries.

"Though the international community has reached consensus on providing developing countries with assistance, the progress is slow in taking specific actions. The ODA has seen some increase, but it is far from the agreed objective," said Zhang.

He pointed out that trade protectionism had seriously harmed efforts by developing countries to mobilize domestic resources.

"Commercial interests have placed obstacles for technical transfer. All these elements have formed a vicious circle in efforts to eliminate poverty and protect the environment," said Zhang.

According to Egypt, the main obstacles are the lack of finance, technical expertise, the need for sustainable capacity building and the need for increased coordination both at local and international levels.

Officials attending the commission said the meetings were not on implementation of projects but rather to assess progress and look at ways to see how targets could be met.

"We are assessing what has been done so far and preparing the groundwork for policy discussions next year," said one official.

He said water and sanitation, two key prerequisites to survival and a healthy lifestyle, had reached crisis levels in some countries and, despite the many plans more than a decade ago, the situation had deteriorated.

Lack of funding was one of the reasons for the failure in meeting the Rio initiatives and it appears that the present plans may reach the same fate for the same reasons.

Already the UN has admitted that the ODA has been declining since the 1990s and something drastic must be done to address the issue.

The writer is Editor, North America Bureau, based in New York.