GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

Water wars

There are more than a few countries -industrialized or underdeveloped-, where the lack of good water is becoming a confrontation with companies or governments, and is one of the great global problems.

Experts foresee a great water crisis after 2007. By mid 21st Century, Water will become a most precious commodity and, like oil, the manipulation of water could become a form of geostrategic weapon, a resource to achieve geopolitical gains.

To begin with, the Bush Administration is criticized by environmentalists of blocking legislation towards correcting the widespread contamination of potable water by some privileged industries in several states where rivers, streams or reservoirs are contaminated by industrial waste. Some of the largest cities like New York, are facing costly and difficult repairs of aqueduct systems that are obsolete due to the great water consumption of growing populations.

For the third time in five years, the United Nations is trying to alert the world to one of its most scandalous problems: 2.4 billion people have no toilets or sewers, and 1.1 billion do not even have drinkable water.

World Water Day was celebrated on Tuesday, March 22 under the slogan "water for life, water for all." Something that, currently, is no more than a wishful thinking The UN is again stressing the Millennium Development Goal target to halve the number of people without access to sanitation or drinking water by 2015.

TFurthermore, an estimated five million people die in developing countries every year prematurely from water borne diseases and exposure to pollution caused by stove smoke inside their homes, according to data released by the United Nations, reports Press Trust of India.

About 2.85 billion people, or 46 percent of the world's population in 2002, lacked access to basic sanitation with almost one billion without basic sanitation in East Asia and South Asia and almost half a billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa, it added. The data released by the world body April 21 in its "Little Green Data Book (LGDB)" showed very little progress in last 10 years and experts said if the current trends continued the developing world would not be able to achieve the UN Millennium Development goal of reducing by half the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

More than 50 countries in the developing world are off track and urgent action was needed to reverse this trend, the UN said, and estimated that meeting the water supply and sanitation target would require doubling annual investment from $15 to $30 billion a year. Most of the increase was required for sanitation. However, increasing efficiency, quality and sustainability would require significant policy and institutional reform as well.

Yet investments to deal with the problem of water providing are inadequate. UN member countries made no provision for the hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments that would be needed to maintain and repair the crumbling infrastructure of many existing water systems.

To meet the UN targets would mean providing sanitation for more than 300,000 additional people every day and clean water for nearly 150,000 a day. But public aid for water projects declined from $2.7 billion in 1997 to only $1.4 billion in 2002, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and has stagnated at that level since. Less than five percent of multilateral development aid goes to water projects.

Neither public aid nor private investments go to the poorest countries that most need of it. Because public assistance falls so far short of promises, the development mantra since the 1990s has been "public-private partnerships.”

But Laurence Tubiana, director of the Institute of International Relations and Sustainable Development in Paris, says: "Public-private partnerships are not the solution for building the infrastructure of poor countries, it demands too much of them.” Adding that water development had to come from development aid.

One example of the failure of private involvement in the seeking of drinking water services is Bolivia, where in the last two years, two “water companies”, the French Suez and the American Bechtel have been virtually expelled by the government of La Paz under strong popular pressure. Bechtel raised water tariffs to a triple of the original price with great negative effect in the city of Cochabamba.

In the city of El Alto, Suez was not complying to demands stipulated for the provision of potable water to all 750.000 inhabitants of this poor but otherwise dynamic city, neighboring the range of Snowy Andes mountains with many fountains of fresh water.

In general in the war against poverty will not assure victory, but choosing the wrong one surely increases the chances of failure." Greenpeace, ActionAid, and Oxfam were among other critics. But World Bank critic Allan Meltzer, who chaired a US congressional committee on the bank in 2000, said Paul Wolfowitz was well qualified for the job. "We don't need adevelopment person, there are plenty of people at the bank who do that, "Meltzer told the BBC. " What the bank needs is focus: how many children are inoculated against measles every year? What have we done to bring water to the villages?" Given the hawkish antecedents of Wolfowitz, it is very unlikely that the World Bank will be of great help with the global problem of water.

BIP