The elixir of life

It is certainly regrettable that World Water Day passed practically unnoticed last Saturday, March 22, 2003. The world, it seems, was too shocked and angered by the more immediate U.S.- led war on Iraq to pay much attention to the proceedings in Kyoto. The lopsided attack -- 40 cruise missiles worth more than US$50 million fired against "opportunity targets" in and around Baghdad during the first hour alone -- made a mockery of the supposedly much more substantial 3rd World Water Forum, which concluded in Kyoto over the weekend.

The world is facing an unprecedented water crisis. It is to bring home this grim fact that this year has been aptly named the UN International Year of Freshwater. Decision-makers around the world, including ministers and heads of delegations from the more than 180 countries who assembled in Kyoto, Japan, on Narch 22 and 23, 2003, must ensure that it does make a difference.

The following figures should speak for themselves: More than 1.2 billion people on this planet lack access to safe (clean) water. More than 2 billion lack adequate sanitation. Between 5 million and 7 million die every year from water-related diseases, including 2.2 million children under the age of five. These numbers are only going to get worse as the global population is expected to rise dramatically during the first half of the 21st century.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in South Africa last year, gave a commitment to cut the proportion of people without access to water and sanitation by half by 2015. To meet that goal, countries should right now begin efforts to make water services accessible to nearly 300,000 new people per day, and new sanitation services to nearly 400,000 people per day. Far fewer are currently actually being connected to such services.

Experts say that 20 percent of the world's population living in 30 countries faced water shortages in 2000. That figure will rise to 30 percent of the world's population in 50 countries by 2025. They have warned that unless action is stepped up, the number of people living under threat of water scarcity will increase to 2.3 billion by 2025. In many countries, water shortages stem from inefficient use, the effective loss of available water because it is too polluted for use by humans or nature, or by the unsustainable use of underground water in aquifers, which can take thousands of years to replace.

As in all human problems and tragedies, the poor suffer most. At any given moment almost half of the world's poor are suffering illnesses because of unsafe water and bad sanitation. The sheer frequency of diseases in early childhood is the main cause of malnutrition, poor physical and mental growth, and early death. Lack of water supply and sanitation robs thousands of millions of women of their dignity, energy and time. A third of the world's population lives in a daily environment of squalor, with smells and disease on the doorstep. Hygiene-related illness saps economic growth and costs billions of working days every year.

These facts describe only part of the global water crisis. It is essential to food production and agriculture, which sustain human beings on this earth. There are currently 815 million undernourished people in the world, and as the global population grows, the United Nations says the world faces a disaster. Strategies on how to grow enough food to feed an estimated 9.3 billion people by 2050 were the subject of heated discussion at the opening session of the Forum early last week. The productivity of irrigation -- that is, the amount of food produced per unit of water -- has more than tripled over the last decades, but this, even combined with increasing areas of irrigated land, has not kept pace with the growing demand for food. Further increasing the amount of agricultural land is not an option as it will only aggravate the acuteness of the global water crisis without providing a real solution.

What is even more disturbing in the current debate on the serious danger of imbalances between freshwater supply and rising demand, is the misleadingly righteous concept that is based on the techno-economic argument increasingly solicited since the 1st World Water Forum six years ago, and still being touted at this 3rd World Water Forum. It argues that unless water is treated as an increasingly precious commodity and priced accordingly, particularly for heavy users like farmers and industries, much of it will be wasted. The techno-economic conclusion is: water is a commodity that should be managed in accordance with market mechanisms.

And it goes further: existing public sector water undertakings are generically incapable of increasing people's access to water. Consequently, the answer is privatization, conveniently dubbed "public-private partnerships". Michael Camdessus, of the IMF, last week ingeniously proposed to the Forum a financial package, dubiously titled "Financing water for all". The message, though, is clear: open the door to the privatization of water or multinational organizations like the IMF and the World Bank will stay away.

What this argument does not say is that private corporations work for profit, and by nature they entertain only the highest bidders, who certainly do not include the poor of the world. Moreover, the one institution it blatantly ignores is the United Nations, which declared that access to clean water is a basic human right -- not a commodity. Indonesia should strongly oppose this kind of coercion, just as it opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq.