Not a drop to drink?

NOT A DROP TO DRINK

By Henrylito D. Tacio

ONE morning, nine-year-old Junjun woke up very early
because he didn’t want to be late in going to school.
He went straight to the kitchen and drank water from
the faucet. He then took a bath, wore his uniform,
and went straight to the table to eat the food which
his mother had prepared for him.

It was already at nine o’clock in the morning at
school when Junjun complained of having a stomachache.
His teacher noticed it, so she told him to go home.
Just a few blocks away, the boy did. His mother was
surprised to see his son coming home very early.
“What happened?” she asked.

The boy told her the reason and before completing his
story, he ran directly to the comfort room. Junjun
did it several times. The mother was worried, so she
decided to bring her son to the nearby hospital.
“Diarrhea, that’s what hit your boy,” the doctor told
her.

Water-borne diseases like diarrhea are bound to stay
in the Philippines, where water is becoming a scarce
commodity. In 24 provinces, one of every five
residents quaffs water from dubious sources, the
Philippine Human Development Report says.

These provinces are : Sulu, Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi,
Basilan, Masbate, Zamboanga del Norte and Sur, Negros
Oriental and Occidental, Sultan Kudarat, Palawan,
Camarines Norte, Leyte, Misamis Occidental, Apayao,
Quezon, North Cotabato, Bukidnon, Iloilo, Guimaras,
Agusan del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, Ilocos Norte and
Benguet.

Today’s “crisis in water and sanitation is – above all
– a crisis of the poor,” says the new United Nations
Development Program study: ‘Beyond Scarcity: Power,
Poverty and the Water Crisis.’ “People living in the
slums of Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai and Nairobi face
shortages of clean water,” the UNDP study claims.
“(But) their neighbors in high income suburbs… keep
their lawns green and swimming pools topped up. (The
poor) pay five to ten times more for water per unit
than those in high-income areas of their own cities.”
Patchy research indicates that the poorest “spend more
than 10% of their household income on water.”

Dr. Klaus Toepfer, during his term as executive
director of the Nairobi-based United Nations
Environment Program, said: “Unlike the energy crisis,
the water crisis is life threatening. The level of
suffering and misery represented by these statistics
is almost beyond comprehension. And it is the
children and women who suffer most.”

“As many as 76 million people - mainly children - will
die from preventable, water-related diseases by 2020
even if current United Nations goals are reached,”
said Dr. Peter H. Gleick, director of the Pacific
Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and
Security.

The UN has set a goal of 2015 for cutting in half the
number of people who can’t reach or afford safe
drinking water. “It is a grave moral shortcoming that
1.2 billion people cannot drink water without courting
disease or death,” asserts ‘The Last Oasis.’

Providing clean water can save most of the 1.8 million
children who die yearly from diarrhea, the study
claims. Installing a flush toilet in the home
increases a child’s chance by 59 percent of
celebrating his or her birthday. In the Philippines,
out of every 1,000 kids, 27 never make it to their
first birthday.

In industrialized countries like Sweden or Japan,
water-borne disease is a subject for history books.
But in the Philippines and other countries in Asia, it
involves hospital wards and morgues. “All of these
diseases are associated with our failure to provide
clean water,” deplored Dr. Peter Gleick, director of
the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development,
Environment and Security. “I think it’s terribly
bleak, especially because we know what needs to be
done to prevent these deaths. We’re doing some of it,
but the efforts that are being made are not aggressive
enough.”

“Whiskey’s for drinkin’,” Mark Twain once wrote. “But
water is for fightin’ over.” There are many
examples, France’s Jacques Chirac told the
International Conference on Water and Sustainable
Development a couple of years back. “The UN,” he
said, “has identified 70 trouble spots linked with
water, from the Middle East to the Sahel, from the
arid zones of Latin America to the Indian
sub-continent.”

“The world has got a very big water problem,” says Sir
Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the
United Nations and one of the organizers of the 1992
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “It will be the
progenitor of more wars than oil.”

“A growing number of countries are expected to face
water shortages in the near future,” said Don
Hinrichsen, a former consultant for the New York-based
United Nations Population Fund. “Behind the coming
shortages are problems both on the demand side –
notably rapid population growth – and on the supply
side – mainly inadequate water supplies and poor
policies.”

“One of the clearest sign of water scarcity is the
increasing number of countries in which population has
surpassed the level that can be sustained comfortably
with the water available,” commented Sandra Postel,
director of the Global Water Policy Project in
Amherst, Massachusetts.

As a rule of thumb, hydrologists designate
water-stressed countries as those with annual supplies
of 1,000 to 2,000 cubic meters per person. When the
figure drops below 1,000 cubic meters (about 725
gallons per person a day), nations are considered
water-scarce - that is, lack of water becomes a severe
constraint on food production, economic development,
and protection of natural systems.

Projections show that by 2025, 50 countries – home to
more than 3.3 billion people – will face water stress
or scarcity. By 2050, the number of countries
afflicted with water stress or scarcity will rise to
54, and their populations to 4 billion people – 40
percent of the projected global population of 9.4
billion.

In the Philippines, the water crisis is more
transparent in Metro Manila, home to more than 10
million people. “For many residents in Metro Manila,
coping with a ‘water supply crisis’ has been part of
their daily woes for years,” says the databank and
research center of the IBON Foundation Inc.

Metro Manila was one of the nine major cities listed
as “water-critical areas” in a study by the Japan
International Cooperation Agency in 1991. The other
eight cities were Metro Cebu, Davao, Baguio, Angeles,
Bacolod, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga.

“Water isn’t just a commodity. It is a source of
life,” Ms. Postel wrote. In fact, several
declarations have confirmed this: “All people have a
right to have access to drinking water” (Mar del
Plata, 1977); “Some for all rather than more for some”
(New Delhi Declaration, 1990). Agenda 21, the final
declaration approved by the Earth Summit held in Rio
de Janeiro in 1992, recognizes that all human beings
have the basic right of access to clean water and
sanitation at an affordable price.

Although water is a renewable resource, it is also a
finite one. Less than three percent of the world's
water is fresh, and more than 75 percent of this is
frozen - mainly at the North and South Poles. Of the
remaining freshwater, 98 percent lies underground.
People and land-dwelling animals can only access about
0.01 percent of the entire world’s water.

Water is drawn in two fundamental ways: from wells,
tapping underground sources of water called aquifers;
or from surface flows - that is, from lakes, rivers,
and man-made reservoirs. About 2,000 cubic kilometers
of freshwater are flowing through the world’s rivers
at any one time; nearly one half the total is in South
America and another one fourth is in Asia.

“As water is an absolutely vital resource, at the
center of life itself, it is a key integrating factor
in the environment. Without sustainable water
management to ensure that there are sufficient
supplies of clean, safe water, the health of
ecosystems and those who depend on them, especially
people, suffer,” said Dr. Toepfer. -- ***