The Developing World’s Water Crisis
A conference is underway in Ghana looking at Africa’s water management problems. This follows a United Nations report that highlights the intense problems faced by those in the developing world in obtaining adequate water supplies.
The report, No Water No Future, notes that today an estimated one billion people lack sufficient access to safe drinking water. Half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation.
One of the interesting things in that report is how private sector, for-profit initiatives have arisen where government policies have failed to provide clean water.
For example, the report notes the “astronomic growth” in bottled water sales in the developing world,
Firstly, where piped municipal water supply is unavailable or of inadequate quality, the provision of bottled drinking water is a very significant economic activity that has seen astronomic growth rates in countries ranging from Mexico to India to Thailand. In fact, the success of this domestic private sector has in recent years motivated multinational companies to develop near-global brands of drinking water that compete with local brands. For consumers in developed countries ‘bottled water’ refers to high-priced mineral water. For consumers in developing countries bottled water often refers to reliable, filtered water in 20-litre reusable containers, used for drinking, cooking or other uses that really require drinking water quality. Provision of affordable drinking-quality water in bottles or containers also relieves the piped-water system of the need to produce drinking water quality that is largely used for lower-grade purposes such as toilet flushing. Innovative public-private partnerships that devise alternative ways of providing water supply and sanitation services at various scales deserve more attention.
Similarly, in agricultural use, it has been private farmers — not governments — who have largely made investments in improving groundwater development. According to the report,
Secondly, in agriculture, private farmers have been largely responsible for the major investments in groundwater development in recent decades. This groundwater use has contributed significantly to food production and the creation of wealth in rural areas. But governments have largely failed to elaborate rules and mechanisms that ensure that groundwater is used in a way that minimises the risks of over-use and protects groundwater quality.
Perhaps one of the best things that developing countries could do to promote access to water is set basic, transparent rules and then get the heck out of the way.
Source:
No Water No Future. Report to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002.
The The Developing World’s Water Crisis by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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