Access to Water a Basic Human Right by Associated Press / AFP / UNHCR 8:50pm 23rd Mar, 2005   22 March 2005    Marking World Water Day, UN to launch Water for Life Decade. (UN News)    To spur efforts by governments and civil society to meet agreed targets on halving the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015, the United Nations is launching the international Water for Life Decade tomorrow on World Water Day.    With agriculture being the main consumer of water and women in developing countries often being the main carriers of water, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a message, "We need to increase water efficiency, especially in agriculture. We need to free women and girls from the daily chore of hauling water, often over great distances. We must involve them in decision-making on water management."    The least progress was being made in providing basic sanitation and many millions of children were dying each year from water-borne diseases, he said, urging the world "to respond better" on an urgent matter of human development and human dignity. "And we must show that water resources need not be a source of conflict," but can be a catalyst for cooperation, Mr. Annan said.    The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), noting that it now takes a ton of water to produce 2.2 pounds of wheat, said, "Appropriate polices and good governance are needed to encourage and guide farmers to make better use of water."    A continuing rise in farm productivity of 67 per cent is needed to meet food requirements between 2000 and 2030, but the increase in water use could be kept down to 14 per cent, FAO's Land and Water Division Director Kenji Yoshinaga said.    The agency's water management expert, Jean-Marc Faurès said, "Agriculture is now coming under much more scrutiny as water resources are shrinking, populations are growing and competition between sectors is increasing. Substantial adaptations of agricultural policies are necessary."    On the question of health and sanitation, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Lee Jong-Wook said the collective failure to tackle diarrhoeal disease, which was killing 30,000 people per week, was "a silent humanitarian crisis" that impeded the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a list of targets for reducing many socio-economic ills by 2015.    "It has been estimated that an additional investment of $11.3 billion per year over and above current spending could result in a total economic benefit of $84 billion annually," Dr. Lee said. "The economic benefits would range from $3 to $34 per $1 invested, depending on the region."    The actual debates and policy recommendations will take place next month at the 13th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-13), which will focus on the three themes of water, sanitation and human settlements. This will be the first policy-setting session since the World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and government delegates will decide on concrete policy options and actions to be taken to achieve the internationally agreed development goals and targets in these three areas.    Among the goals CSD-13 will consider will be ensuring that no one is excluded from essential water supplies.    "Examples of possible actions include the provision of targeted means-tested direct subsidies to the poor, as in Chile, applying increasing block rate tariff structures to water pricing, as in Côte d'Ivoire, and the provision of a basic daily quantity of water free of charge to households, as in South Africa," the Commission said in a release.    Countries could also make basic sanitation access affordable to poor people, by subsidizing household hook-ups to sewerage services, as in Jamaica and in Trinidad and Tobago, and providing cross-subsidies to meet the sanitation needs of the poor, as in Egypt, it said.    March 22, 2005    "United Nations Marks World Water Day", by Erica Bulman. (Associated Press )    GENEVA (AP) - The lack of any major outbreak of disease in areas hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami is largely due to the rapid deployment of clean water and sanitation teams, the international Red Cross said Tuesday.    In a statement marking World Water Day, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the response provided a dramatic demonstration of the need for clean water.    But the resource is also essential for longer-term chronic shortages in the developing world, the federation and other international organizations said.    The United Nations says more than 1.1 billion people around the world lack safe water and 2.4 billion have no access to sanitation, leading to over 3 million deaths every year.    `People who can turn on a tap and have safe and clean water to drink, to cook with and to bathe in often take it for granted, and yet more than 1 billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water,'' said Dr. Lee Jong-Wook, head of the World Health Organization.    The Red Cross federation said it had deployed seven emergency response units in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, providing clean water to nearly 500,000 people.    It was its largest deployment of water and sanitation teams since it set up the emergency response system of its national societies 10 years ago, the federation said.    `After a major catastrophe, populations are particularly vulnerable to waterborne diseases, and our ability to produce large quantities of safe water and provide adequate sanitation quickly has been crucial in ensuring that these communities were not subjected to a second disaster,'' said Markku Niskala, secretary-general of the federation.    This year's World Water Day marks the launching of the ``Water for Life'' decade, during which the United Nations and governments are seeking to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.    Ministers and government representatives are scheduled to meet next month at the Commission for Sustainable Development's 13th session in New York to take policy decisions on practical measures to ensure access to water for people worldwide.    `We need to increase water efficiency, especially in agriculture. We need to free women and girls from the daily chore of hauling water, often over great distances,'' U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan said.    The plan also aims to safeguard water for the future of the Earth's ecosystems, crucial for protecting and preserving biodiversity in freshwater lakes and rivers, mountain landscapes, wetlands, estuaries, coastal zones and oceans.    Paris, March 21    UN again asserts water targets for poor. (AFP)    For the third time in five years, the United Nations is trying to wake up the world to one of its most scandalous problems: 2.4 billion people have no toilets or sewers, and 1.1 billion do not even have drinkable water.    Yet investments to deal with the problem are inadequate. The lack of santitation and clean water is the leading cause of death in the world, ahead of malnutrition. Every day, an estimated 22,000 people, half of them children, die of diseases borne by polluted water, such as typhoid, cholera, malaria and diarrhea.    For World Water Day on Tuesday, under the slogan "water for life, water for all," the UN was again stressing the target to halve the number of people without access to sanitation or drinking water by 2015.    That pledge was made for drinking water at the millennium summit in 2000 and for basic sanitation at the world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg in 2002.    The promises have so far proved empty, because UN member countries made no provision for the hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments that would be needed on top of the money needed to maintain and repair the crumbling infrastructure of many existing water systems.    To meet the UN targets would mean providing sanitation for more than 300,000 additional people every day and clean water for nearly 150,000 a day.    But public aid for water projects declined from 2.7 billion dollars in 1997 to only 1.4 billion dollars in 2002, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and has stagnated at that level since. In fact, less than five percent of multilateral development aid goes to water projects.    Neither the public aid nor private investments go to the poorest countries that most need of it, including 60 countries listed by the UN Development Programme in which at least one fifth of the population has no access even to a public tap or a safe well.    Because public assistance falls so far short of promises, the development mantra since the 1990s has been "public-private partnerships," an idea pushed in his book "Water" by Michel Camdessus, special adviser on water to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.    But many oppose the commercialization of water supplies, which is an issue in France, home to three of the biggest private water companies.    "Public-private partnerships are not the solution for building the infrastructure of poor countries -- it demands too much of them," said Laurence Tubiana, director of the Institute of International Relations and Sustainable Development in Paris. She said water development had to come from development aid, an idea supported by the alternative development movement.    One non-governmental organization, Attac, has called for a global tax to finance development. A small step in this direction has been made in France, where local administrations and water companies are now legally permitted to dedicate one percent of their receipts to development aid.    A small tax on water bills in the Seine-Normandy region of France, for example, has provided enough money over the past 15 years to provide clean drinking water for a million people in developing countries.    © AFP Agence France-Presse    22 Mar 2005    "Access to water a basic right for refugees, says UN High Commissioner for Refugees    GENEVA, March 22 (UNHCR) – On the occasion of World Water Day, Acting High Commissioner Wendy Chamberlin called on UNHCR staff to "redouble efforts" to improve services to provide clean water to refugees and others of concern to UNHCR.    "Our protection goals are to ensure that refugees' fundamental rights are respected, including their access to water," Chamberlin said in a message to all UNHCR staff. "Fulfilling that basic right is essential for the life, health and dignity of the people of concern to UNHCR, as well as a benchmark for every relief operation."    World Water Day is celebrated internationally on March 22. This year, World Water Day is also the launching point for the International Decade for Action on "Water for Life", declared by the United Nations General Assembly.    UNHCR is marking the day through awareness-raising activities in the field and at its Geneva headquarters. In Nepal's seven Bhutanese refugee camps, for example, UNHCR and its partners are highlighting the value of water and the need to protect and optimize use of this important natural resource, through speeches, drawing and essay competitions, and poster displays. A water clean-up campaign is also being organized to clean water containers and water taps throughout the camps.    Providing adequate water for refugees goes beyond assuring the quantity and quality of water supplies – the way in which water is provided is also crucial. Chamberlin noted that refugees often have to spend hours every day collecting water. School children skip classes to help, and families are more likely to use water from unsafe sources to save time. The shortfalls lead to "terrible social costs", including increased risk of sexual assault when women seek out water at unguarded locations, and higher rates of disease due to consumption of dirty water.    "UNHCR must provide refugees with adequate safe water – and we must do so without putting women and children at risk," stressed Chamberlin in her World Water Day message.    UNHCR is making important progress in several of the most challenging operations around the world. Water is one of the key areas identified by the agency for rehabilitation in south Sudan, a region emerging from decades of conflict and where some 500,000 refugees and an estimated 4 million displaced people could return home beginning this year. UNHCR deployed water and sanitation experts as part of the emergency team sent to south Sudan in late February to begin laying the groundwork for refugee return to a region where infrastructure and basic services are practically non-existent. Improvements to water availability in south Sudan have already gotten underway, with a project to rehabilitate 85 boreholes in Greater Yei and Kajo Keji counties in Equatoria province, one of the main areas where refugees are expected to return.    In Tindouf, Algeria, a project is underway to improve water supply to Smara camp, located in the middle of the Sahara desert and home to tens of thousands of refugees from Western Sahara. Water pipelines are replacing the previous method of trucking water more than 35 km to the camp. The risk of mechanical problems and engines overheating in the 50-degrees Celsius heat left the refugees vulnerable to breaks in the crucial water supply. Similar pipeline connections had already been set up in the three other Tindouf camps in recent years, and this project, funded by ECHO (European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office), is extending the same improved service to the refugees at Smara camp.    In another desert refugee camp setting – this time in eastern Chad where more than 200,000 refugees from Sudan's Darfur region have sought safety – UNHCR continues to struggle to provide sufficient water to meet the daily needs of the refugees. The agency and its partners have trucked water to camps, drilled boreholes, dug wells, conducted geological surveys and even resorted to high-tech satellite images and remote sensing technology to try to identify additional sources of water in the arid region.    Recently, these efforts have borne fruit, allowing the agency to identify a new site for an additional refugee camp. The camp – called Gaga – is now being built to receive refugees who are still at the border as well as some who are currently living in the more crowded of the existing camps. But the water supply throughout this region remains precarious and it is an uphill battle to continue to meet the needs, particularly over the longer term.    In light of such challenges, much more work needs to be done on World Water Day itself and over the course of the International Decade for Action on "Water for Life".    "I urge us all to reaffirm our commitment to provide, in an effective and holistic manner, safe water to all persons of concern to UNHCR," Chamberlin concluded. Visit the related web page
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