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8-9/2005
  

[ Millennium agenda ]

Clarification needed

In spring, the United Nations proclaimed what it calls a “Water for Life” decade. The focus is on a key human need, but in many ways the UN’s position still deserves more thought. Those who defined it appear to have shied away from some inevitable controversies. So far, there is no clear UN stand on issues such as irrigation versus rain-fed agriculture, industrial resource use or the construction of big dams.


[ By Frank Kürschner-Pelkmann ]

The United Nations “Water for Life” decade was formally launched on March 22, 2005. Sadly, the event did not attract much international attention. The main reason was an inadequate publicity campaign. Even weeks after the onset of the “action decade”, the UN website devoted to the cause was still a rather rudimentary affair.

The bungled start stands in sharp contrast to the importance of the issue. The only ray of light is that several UN agencies got to form UN-Water. Furnished with a secretariat in New York, this body has in the meantime published a programmatic document in the form of a booklet entitled “Water for Life Decade 2005-2015”.


Global aspirations

At the UN Millennium Summit in New York in 2000, a target was set to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, another resolution was passed to halve the number of people without access to sanitation by 2015. There are now ten years left to achieve both goals.

In the year 2000, around 1.2 billion people worldwide were living without access to safe drinking water and twice that number had no access to any form of sanitation. Compared with the first UN water decade from 1981 to 1990, the goals of the new decade are more modest. Back then, the target was “water for all”. Now it is just to halve the number of those deprived – making it all the more important to achieve at least that. However, there are still major controversies going on internationally over a number of underlying issues.

“We are against privatisation, we view the right to water as a basic human right,” says June Zeitlin, executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, a coalition of women’s organisations from all over the world. So far, the UN has not defined the role it wants the private sector to play in water utilities. What is clear, however, is that private water companies with appropriate technology could help to solve many drinking water and sanitation problems.

One point on which opinion is still divided is the following: will privatising water services in developing countries help to achieve the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty as defined in 2000 – or will it have the opposite effect? The strongest argument on the pro-privatisation side is the desperate state of many public waterworks in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The proponent camp promises more efficient management, cost-covering operations and massive injections of money by international water groups like Suez, Veolia and RWE.

Privatisation’s critics, however, argue that this strategy will result in private-sector providers demanding high water prices and gearing supply only to those sections of society that can pay. After the spectacular failure of privatisation schemes in Manila, Buenos Aires, El Alto and most recently Dar es Salaam, the private water utilities’ interest in such projects has waned. As a result, companies like RWE and Suez are currently downscaling their operations in poor countries. By doing so, they are fuelling the argument that the private sector cannot be counted on to furnish a large share of the funds needed to achieve the Millennium Goal. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan estimates that a total sum of $ 30 billion must be invested.


Cost recovery needed

In the debate on privatisation versus state provision there are signs for a common benchmark. Ultimately the crucial point is the need for responsible management and cost-covering operations and at the same time an access of poor people to water – which in turn call for a sound legal framework and competent supervision.

In July, Sunita Narain, head of the non-governmental Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, spoke out against a notion widely held in her country. In her view, water supply should not be provided free of charge by the state. Narain believes the answer to the massive water problems of the South Asian subcontinent, where fast-growing cities compete with farming areas for scant reserves, lies in the kind of cost-conscious management and wastewater treatment systems typical of the advanced nations but adjusted to the local situation. That view is, in principle, shared by the German development agencies GTZ and KfW.

Underestimated conflicts

The UN experts seem to systematically underestimate the potential for conflict between different water users. Even today, 80 percent or more of the water consumed is used for agricultural production in many arid countries. How large quantities of additional water should be provided to farms, however, remains a total mystery. The UN water decade booklet contains only a word of warning on this point, stating that over-exploitation of water for irrigation and the intensification of agriculture pose a threat to the sustainability of agricultural practices in many regions of world.

This admonition is followed up by a call to make irrigation systems more efficient. But the booklet offers no advice on how to do so. The UN steers clear of the debate on the pros and cons of irrigated agriculture. Germany’s protestant aid charity Brot für die Welt, in contrast, suggests stepping up support for rain-fed farming, which is practised on 80 percent of the world’s agricultural land and produces 60 percent of all food. It feeds the majority of the world’s poor and would have interesting development potential if farmers went back to planting more traditional cereals.

Growing water scarcity, falling groundwater levels and different agricultural models are causing tension in many poor countries. Small-scale farmers and tenants are often driven from their land because richer agriculturalists use wells or secure control of river water. The UN booklet, however, contains no indication of this problem. It merely states that investments by individual farmers and the private sector to develop efficient agriculture should be supported by public funds.

In this context, it is similarly disappointing that the official UN document does not mention the International Commission on Dams. In the year 2000, this body had reported to the World Bank highlighting the fact that many big dams had failed to deliver the anticipated results and that the criticism, which environmentalists and other civic groups had levelled against large-scale projects, had often proven well-founded.

The fact that the dam commission was not a UN initiative cannot explain why its work is ignored. There is reason to believe that, once more, the UN is skirting a conflict. After all, many dam-building companies, governments and development banks are not happy with the commission’s work. Looking back, they feel it set its standards too high for large-scale projects to be implemented swiftly. However, the dam debate has not run its course; it still needs to be addressed in the context of the water decade.


Food production

The UN booklet mentions that it takes 3000 litres of water per day to produce the food for a single person – that is a thousand times more than that person drinks. What the UN fails to say, however, is that the water required for a vegetarian’s food production is only half that needed for a meat-eater. Moreover, any thorough study would have taken account of the fact that water goes into more than just food production. Tyre-maker Continental reckons it takes 585 litres, for example, to make a car tyre. The UN evidently wants to avoid this argument, too. Obviously, it lacks the stomach needed for a fight.

On the potential of water-related inter-state conflicts, the UN is more outspoken. Indeed, the potential is considerable – for instance, along the Nile, where 13 neighbouring countries need to agree on the use of dwindling water resources. In the light of trends like this, Annan is pinning hopes on the peacekeeping and conciliatory capacity of religion. He launched the Water for Life decade in the company of clerics of a dozen different faiths, who prayed for clean water for the whole of humanity. Annan himself said on the occasion: “Together, we can provide safe, clean water to all the world’s people. The world’s water resources are our lifeline for survival, and for sustainable development in the 21st century.”

Frank Kürschner-Pelkmann
is a freelance consultant and journalist. He lives in Hamburg and specialises in water-related issues.
frank.kuerschner-pelkmann@t-online.de

Link:
http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade