Billion people face water shortages, warns UN

The world was put on notice yesterday to expect a higher incidence of catastrophic flooding and droughts as global warming affects rainfall patterns while, at the same time, more than a billion people in developing countries are facing dramatic shortages of clean water for drinking and bathing.

The warnings came as the United Nations marked this year's Water Day by launching a ten-year campaign to combat shortages of clean water around the globe, dubbed the 'Water for Life Decade'.

The organisation said that 1.1 billion people still lack sufficient water with dire results for health and food supplies.

"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," commented Dr Lee Jong-Wook, head of the UN's World Health Organisation.

"And yet more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water."

In a vivid demonstration of the dangers of drought, the King of Thailand, Bhumipol Adulyadej, attended a cloud-seeding operation, which involves shooting chemicals into the sky to spur rainfall, as 71 out of the country's 76 provinces contend with the effects of a protracted dearth of rain.

Chinese authorities meanwhile said water prices were likely to rise 20 per cent, after a 25 per cent hike last year, because of a continuing national shortage. President Jacques Chirac of France warned a UNESCO conference in Paris that unequal sharing of water resources among African countries risked exacerbating conflicts on the continent.

"Water is abundant in Africa, but unequally shared," the President said, urging a fresh mobilisation by governments to address the issue.

In London, Hillary Benn, the Secretary for International Development, said the Government would double funding for water and sanitation projects in Africa over three years.

British funding in 11 key countries, including Ghana, Malawi and Zambia, would increase from pounds 47.5 million this year to pounds 95 million, he said.

Ravi Narayanan, director of the British-based charity, WaterAid, said Mr Benn's move was welcome and "not a day too soon. His intention to work closely with partner countries in Africa is another step in the right direction.

"One size does not fit all and we need country-level action plans addressing actual priority needs rather than international policy prescriptions."

The UN will use the decade-long campaign to try to hold governments to pledges made as part of the UN's Millennium Goals on water.

At the Millennium Summit in 2000, leaders promised to halve the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

"We need to increase water efficiency, especially in agriculture," UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said in a Water Day message. "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."

Like President Chirac, the Secretary General also warned of the dangers that water shortages would turn governments and countries against each other.

But so far the progress on finding international aid for water-related projects has been discouraging.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that public aid for water improvements in developing countries declined from US$2.7 billion in 1997 to only US$1.4 billion in 2002 and has remained at that level ever since.

According to latest UN statistics, while 1.1 billion people around the world lack safe water to drink, as many as 2.4 billion have no access to water for decent sanitation.

Moreover, about 3 million deaths a year are attributable to poor water supplies. Meeting the targets by the Millennium Goals would require an extraordinary effort.

It would mean giving proper sanitation facilities to an additional 300,000 people every day and clean drinking water to nearly 150,000 more people each day also.

The most impassioned plea for greater action came yesterday from Carol Bellamy, the director of UNICEF, who underlined that 400 million children in the world - almost one in five of all children - lack even the bare minimum of safe water they need to survive.

"Our failure to provide a mere two buckets of safe water a day to every child is an affront to human conscience," Ms Bellamy said. "Far too many are dying as a result of our inertia, and their deaths are being met with a resounding silence."

Mr Jong-Wook of the WHO pointed in particular to deaths from diarrhoeal disease. Calling it a "silent humanitarian crisis," he said that diarrhoea is killing as many as 30,000 people a week.

Announcing Britain's increased funding for Africa, Mr Benn told attendees at a conference organised by the Royal Geographic Society that the Government was in part responding to the recent decline in funding for water projects.

Identifying the 11 countries earmarked for increased action in Africa, he said, "We will make sure that each of these countries has a core donor group on water and sanitation. We will quickly map what donors and governments are currently doing, what more needs to be done and make water and sanitation a central focus of discussion with governments in each of these countries."

- INDEPENDENT