DEVELOPMENT: Activists say World Bank Water Plan a Backwards Step

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Jun 4 2002 (IPS) - Policies suggested for the World Bank’s lending programme for water could aggravate pollution, poverty and displacement of local people as well as cost more money, says a critique by international advocacy groups.

The proposals betray the mission of the Bank’s water resources sector strategy (WRSS) – to help lessen world poverty and introduce clean water to millions of people, says the critique authored by the U.S.-based advocacy group International Rivers Networks (IRN).

They “comprehensively fail at these tasks”, says the IRN. The policies, included in a Bank review of the programme, “do not translate earlier principles into suggested actions”, it adds.

The Bank, a major player in foreign-funded water projects, says the new policies would be adopted in Mid-2003 to replace current guidelines, in operation since 1993.

The draft strategy calls for “public-private partnerships”, with funds from private investors managed within a public policy framework.

Big hydraulic projects, like dams and water desalination plants, would be given priority because “easy and cheap” options, such as groundwater extraction, have mostly been exploited, says the review.

The Bank argues that major water projects spur regional development, both directly and indirectly benefiting the poor living near such projects, through permanent jobs and higher incomes, for example.

Of an estimated 60 billion dollars invested in water projects in developing countries each year, 90 percent comes from domestic sources. The World Bank accounts for one-half of the foreign investments or three billion dollars annually, it says.

Its projects include the controversial Bujagali dam in Uganda, the rural water supply and sanitation operations in Tanzania, and the Bukhara and Samarkand water supply projects in Uzbekistan.

According to the IRN analysis, endorsed by 19 international groups from countries including Sweden, Thailand and Senegal, the new directives fail to improve on current practices.

“The latest policy is a like a big leap backwards 10 years from the previous one,” says Patrick McCully of IRN.

“The 1993 (policy) had problems but it also had a lot more language about the need for participation, the importance of dealing with problems in rural areas, and it recognises that the main way to get water to rural areas is small scale, decentralised, community based projects,” McCully says.

On the other hand, the negative effects of large projects include “polluted and degraded rivers and watersheds” and “large-scale displacement and impoverishment” of riverside people, the IRN says. As well, such schemes are often “a huge waste of financial resources”.

The World Bank shrugs off the criticism as outdated.

“The views of the International Rivers Network are at one end of the spectrum of views held on issues of water management and development,” says John Briscoe, the Bank’s senior water advisor.

“The critique is consistent with the IRN’s long-held and much-publicised views opposing all large water infrastructure, even for countries which have very little of such infrastructure,” he told IPS.

Briscoe says the Washington-based development bank does not favour one option for supplying water but often reviews all possibilities before loaning money to its clients.

“The Bank does not ‘push big projects’, nor does the paper argue for this,” he says. “What it does argue is that countries will need a range of small and large, hard and soft, interventions and that none of these should be off the table ‘a priori’.”

But the IRN says the Bank should focus more on low-cost, community-led projects, such as rainwater harvesting and low and no-water sanitation technologies.

“These are very cheap and easy things to do,” says McCully. “But they haven’t been done because the big water bureaucracies with all their engineers want to build big projects with all the money and the prestige involved.”

The Bank says those alternatives proposals are too restrictive.

“The governments, mostly democratically elected, who borrow from the World Bank do not agree and want to be able to consider all options (not just small projects) for meeting the needs of their people,” Briscoe says.

Bank critics say a small-is-beautiful approach could provide water and sanitation to the world’s poor for nine billion dollars between now and 2025, while the capital-intensive plan outlined in the Bank’s review carries an estimated price tag of 180 billion dollars.

Civil society groups also accuse the Bank of disregarding opinions from concerned groups. Their numbers were purposely limited at the Bank’s consultations in 1999 and 2000, and they say the proposed WRSS policies do not reflect their ideas.

Briscoe denies the accusation, saying that 23 percent of participants in consultations this year in five countries represented NGOs. Twenty-nine percent were government officials, nine percent from the private sector and 20 percent defined themselves as ‘other’.

As civil society and the Bank disagree on how best to achieve better water access, millions of poor people still suffer from lack of clean water and sanitation.

The Bank estimates that some 3.4 million people die annually for lack of clean water or because of disease-carrying organisms, such as mosquitoes, that breed in contaminated water.