HOVE TOWN HALL, THURSDAY 20 APRIL 2006.
Speech by Rt Hon Michael Meacher MP “Water shortage and lack of clean water – the biggest international threat for developing countries”
Hands up those who started the day with a two-mile hike to collect the family’s daily water supply from a stream. Nobody – none of us suffer the indignity of using a plastic bag for a toilet. And our children don’t die for want of a glass of clean water.
Perhaps that’s why we have such a narrow view of what constitutes a “water crisis”. Dwindling reservoirs and a few ministerial exhortations to flush the toilet less often, and we’ve got a national emergency on our hands. Hold the front page, there’s a hosepipe ban in the home counties imposed by Thames Water a fortnight ago.
Just to put it in a worldwide perspective, in the next 24 hours diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation will claim the lives of 4,000 children. This happens every day. The annual death toll from this relentless catastrophe is larger than the population of Birmingham. Dirty water poses a greater threat to human life than war or terrorism. Yet it barely registers on the radar of public debate in rich countries.
At any one time, close to half the population of the developing world is suffering from water-related diseases. These rob people of their health, destroy their livelihoods, and undermine education potential. The statistics behind the crisis make for grim reading. In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 2.5 billion people still have no access to even the most rudimentary latrine. Over one billion have no source of drinking water.
In Britain, the average person uses 160 litres of clean water each day. In rural Mozambique or Ethiopia, people use only what women and young girls can carry back from rivers and lakes: around 5-10 litres a day for each person. The iconic image of a woman carrying water belies a more brutal reality. You try carrying a 20-litre bucket of water for four miles in the baking sun.
The global sanitation gap is even more overwhelming. Those who have seen The Constant Gardener will recall the Kenyan slum visited by Rachel Weisz’s character. The slum was Kibera. With a population of 750,000 it is one of the largest informal settlements in Africa and accounts for one-quarter of people living in Nairobi. Over 90% lack access to a latrine, giving rise to a phenomenon that didn’t figure in the movie: the “flying toilet”. Lacking any alternative, people defecate into plastic bags that are thrown into the street, with terrifying consequences for public health.
Kibera is a microcosm of what happens across the developing world. Rapid urbanisation and a crumbling water and sanitation infrastructure in cities like Jakarta, Manila and Lagos have left millions of poor people in overcrowded slums facing a constant threat from water infected with human excrement.
To add insult, the poor pay more for their water than the rich. In Kibera, you pay three times more than in Manhattan or London, and 10 times more than in high-income suburbs of Nairobi. Similar patterns are repeated across the cities of the developing world. The reason: water utilities pump subsidised water to well-off customers, but pipes seldom reach the poor. Most slum dwellers face a choice between buying water from high-cost private traders, or taking a long trip to the nearest stream.
Meeting the UN’s millennium development goal of halving the proportion of the world without access to clean water would cost $4 billion a year for 10 years. That might seem a lot, but that amount represents just a month’s spending on bottled mineral water in Europe and the US. For less than people in rich countries now spend on a designer product that produces no tangible health gains, we would roll back on of the main causes of preventable childhood death. And for every $1 invested, another $3-$4 would be generated through savings on health spending and increased productivity. So why have rich countries been cutting aid to water and sanitation for the last five years? Because of the drive to worldwide privatisation of water supplies, pressured by 2,350 private water companies and accepted, even egged on, by Governments.
So what is the global situation? We all know that ours is a blue planet, 71% covered by oceans, mostly made up of water, so it can be difficult to believe that this most precious of natural resources could ever become so scarce as to endanger future food production and general planetary health. Let’s put that in perspective too. 97.5% of water is salt water, unfit for human use. Only 2.5% of the earth’s water is fresh, and most of this is inaccessible – some two-thirds being captured in glaciers and permanent snow. The remaining fresh water is almost entirely made up of groundwater.
According to the Global Water Policy Project, the world overdraws 200 km3 of its global groundwater ‘bank account’ every year. This over-exploitation has serious consequences for future food production and global health. In fact, the WorldWatch Institute rates aquifer depletion, alongside HIV and shrinking cropland area per person, as one of the three most potentially devastating problems facing our species.
Water pollution serves to compound the problem, with global wastewater estimated to be in the region of 1,500 km3. the UN suggest that 1 litre of wastewater pollutes, on average, 8 litres of freshwater, which would result in a freshwater pollution burden of around 12,000 km3 worldwide. And then there’s something else – estimates suggest that climate change could cause a 20% increase in global water scarcity.
As a result of all these factors, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that at present 1.1 billion people have no access to safe water supplies. 2.4 billion people have no access to any form of proper sanitation.
How does this come about? It’s the result of massive maldistribution of water supplies across the world. The recommended basic water requirement per person per day is 50 litres. But people can get by with about 30 litres: 5 litres for food and drink and another 25 for hygiene. The average US citizen uses 500 litres per day and the British average is 200. In the West, it takes about 8 litres to brush our teeth, 10 to 35 litres to flush a lavatory, and 100 to 200 litres to take a shower. Some countries use less than 10 litres per person per day. Gambia uses 4.5, Mali 8, Somalia 8.9 and Mozambique 9.3.
As a consequence, 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
The situation is predicted to worsen as population expands and consumption per capita increases as more and more people adopt resource-intensive Western-style lifestyles. Already half a billion people live in water-stressed areas of the world, i.e. not enough for drinking, cleaning and hygiene, but the UN’s Water Development Report predicts that “by the middle of this century, at worst 7 billion people in 60 countries will be water-scarce, at best 2 billion people in 48 countries.” Why? Firstly, a very rapid rise in world population, secondly, gradual but steady increase in water consumption per capita, and thirdly, climate change. In fact, the problem is so serious that many environmental land political commentators predict that the resource wars of the future will be fought over water rather than oil.
So, how is available water used? Worldwide, agriculture uses up 70% of fresh water resources. This is largely because a lot of cropland has to be irrigated to make it agriculturally viable and to increase and improve crop yields.
Much of this land is entirely waster by being used to grow feed crops for livestock rather than food for people. The water used on this land – as well as that consumed directly by livestock – represents yet another wasted resource.
It has been calculated that whilst it takes 500 litres of water to produce 1kg of potatoes, 900 litres per kg of wheat, it takes as much as 3,500 litres per kg of digestible chicken flesh and a massive 100,000 litres for 1kg of beef.
As a result, there are implications for diet worldwide which are not yet understood. Governments may have to persuade people to eat less meat because of increasing demands on water supplies, according to agricultural scientists investigating how the world can best feed itself.
They say countries with little water may choose not to grow crops but trade in “virtual water”, importing food from countries which have large amounts of water to save their supplies for domestic or high-value uses.
With about 840 million people in the world undernourished, and a further 2 billion expected to be born within 20 years, finding water to grow food will be one of the greatest challenges facing governments.
Western diets, which depend largely on meat, are already putting great pressures on the environment. Meat-eaters consume the equivalent of about 1,100 gallons of water a day compared to the 200-400 gallons used by people on vegetarian diets in developing countries. All that water has to come from somewhere.
The consensus emerging among scientists is that it will be almost impossible to feed future generations the typical diet eaten in western Europe and North America without destroying the environment.
The trouble is, it is unlikely people will change their eating habits because of concerns about water supplies. And in many sub-Saharan countries, where the pressure on water will increase most rapidly in the next 20 years, people actually need to be eating more, not less.
The problems can be summarised as:
• Fast rising population
• Increasing water use per had of population
• Severe maldistribution in availability of water supplies worldwide
• Too much of the limited water supplies devoted to livestock and meat production.
Welcome to climate change and world poverty in our prosperous 21st century.
