ENVIRONMENT: Water Policy up for Debate, Flows Past the Poor

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

KYOTO, Japan, Mar 21 2003 (IPS) - Ministers from over 100 countries will mark World Water Day Saturday by meeting here to endorse over the weekend a contentious report that lays down the road map for poor countries in solving a range of the planet’s water-related problems.

The report, ‘Financing Water For All, which was distributed on the eve of World Water Day, Mar. 22, at the international water conference underway here, has already been shot down from three different quarters.

”The report was disappointing. It is not balanced,” Agnes Van Ardenne-Van der Hoeven, the Dutch minister for development cooperation, told journalists at the Third World Water Forum (TWWF), being held here from Mar. 16-23. ”The report is not concrete. The focus is on large-scale infrastructure.”

”We need to look at small and medium scale infrastructure,” she added.

Likewise, ”I fear the report at this critical conference is a missed opportunity and misses direction of focus,” says Sir Richard Jolly, chairman of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). The council is an international group lobbying to secure safe water and adequate sanitation for the world’s poor.

”There is too little on what is needed to reach the poor and the poorest of the poor,” says Jolly. ”There is little that comes out in the report to address issues that matter to women, who make up a large number among the poor.”

Some of the government delegates already here for the weekend’s special ministerial meeting also got a taste of where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) stand on the ”Camdessus report,” so named after the man who chaired a 20-member panel that prepared the report – Michel Camdessus, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Activists staged an impromptu walkout, accompanied by chants of ”Water for life not for war” and banners held up with the message ”No profits from water,” when the Camdessus report was released during a session on the ‘World Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure’.

”These ‘solutions’ will not help the majority of the world’s people without access to water – they will only worsen the problems and prevent the adoption of real solutions such as rainwater harvesting and renewable energies,” says Joan Carling of the Philippines-based Cordillera People’s Alliance.

The NGOs call for the ”rejection of the Camdessus report,” she adds, since ”no public financing should be given for large water infrastructure projects unless they meet World Commission on Dams guidelines”.

But Camdessus is defiant about the 54-page report, which was initially launched in Paris on Mar.5. After being endorsed by the ministers and other participants at the Third World Water Forum, the report will head for approval at the Group of Eight meeting of industrialised countries in France in June.

”We believe this is the way to provide water for all, but we will not tell the ministers to take it or leave it,” Camdessus said at a press conference. ”There is no alternative to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.”

”The urgency is not to change ownership of water services but to improve the service,” he added. ”We would like this to be endorsed by governments and the international community.”

Under the Millennium Development Goals, world leaders have endorsed an ambitious programme for dramatic change in developing countries, including halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation by 2015.

Currently, some 1.1 billion people lack access to safe water and 2.4 billion people have no proper sanitation, which results in 2.2 million people in the developing world, mostly children, dying every year.

Earlier this week, a new World Bank report estimated that the world needs annual investments to rise from 75 billion dollars to 180 billion dollars over the next 20 years to lift the poor out of an environment deprived of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

According to the Camdessus report, global financial flows into the water sector ”have recently fallen to a very low point,” after a slight increase in the 1990s.

It says that developing countries need to attract the private sector to reverse this trend, but also need to produce new national strategies to strengthen the water sector.

It also calls on contracts for private sector participation to be standardised and promoted, ”whereby sun-sovereigns (like municipalities) can employ private companies under incentive-driven contracts to raise efficiency and performance.”

On building dams, the report states that ”the reaction to dams (following criticisms) appears to have been excessive and counter-productive”. It supports the funding of both small and large dams to meet the ”future needs for water storage, flood control, and irrigation development”.

To fund dam building, the report wants governments, international lending institutions like the World Bank and commercial banks to push for ”the development of local capital markets in which projects can obtain part or all of their funding”.

Camdessus admits that developing countries turning to private sector involvement in their water sector can make them vulnerable due to the volatile financial markets.

”I don’t like to expose developing countries to volatile financial markets, and we have mentioned in the report ways developing countries can be sheltered from the fluctuations in the international financial system,” he says.

Developed countries, he adds, should take the lead to help build a stable international financial market to avoid a ”calamity”.