Clean Water Should Be a Human Right - Radiocápsula CPR/RCP
Submitted on 29 June 2009 - 9:41pm
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Eurekalert - There is considerable evidence that
access to clean water, which is essential
for health, is under threat. According to
the World Health Organization, 1.2
billion people worldwide do not have
access to clean drinking water, and a
further 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation
services. These numbers are expected to
rise. The UN has estimated that 2.8 billion
people in 48 countries will be living in
conditions of water stress or scarcity by
2025 [2].
Access to water should be framed as a
human right for at least three reasons.
First, ensuring access to clean water could
substantially reduce the global burden of
disease. Millions of people are affected
each year by a range of water-borne
diseases including cholera, hepatitis A,
typhoid, and arsenic poisoning [3]. Diar-
rhea—a result of unsafe water and inad-
equate sanitation—is responsible for 1.8
million potentially preventable deaths per
year, mostly among children under the age
of five. Lack of water also results in poor
hygiene: 6 million people worldwide are
blind because of trachoma, the transmis-
sion of which can be dramatically reduced
by simple hand washing [3]. The World
Health Organization recently predicted
that better access to safe drinking water
and improvements in sanitation and
hygiene could prevent 9.1% of the total
burden of disease worldwide, or 6.3% of
all deaths [4].
Second, the privatization of water—
which exploits the view that water is a
commodity rather than a public good—
does not result in equitable access. For
decades the World Bank, the World Trade
Organization, and regional development
banks have promoted private sector re-
sponsibility for water delivery [5]. This has
led to the extensive privatization of water
supply systems, especially in the develop-
ing world. The private model of water
delivery now entails a US$400–US$500
billion global water industry that is
dominated by three multinational compa-
nies who have, according to critics, neither
proved their ability to provide sufficient or
affordable water sources, nor effectively
served the poor who suffer most from a
lack of clean water [5,6].
As Maude Barlow, senior advisor on
water issues to the president of the General
Assembly of the UN, has argued, ‘‘high
water rates, cut-offs to the poor, reduced
services, broken promises and pollution
have been the legacy of privatization’’ [7].
And it’s not just that delivery is in the
hands of corporations; political control has
shifted too: ‘‘The fact that water is not an
acknowledged human right has allowed
decision-making over water policy to shift
from the UN and governments toward
institutions and organizations that favour
the private water companies and the
commodification of water,’’ she says.
Governments who have experimented
with national privatization schemes, such
as those in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru, and
Trinidad and Tobago, have faced fervent
protests from citizens opposed to the
privatization of their water supply systems
[8]. Documented failures across the Unit-
ed States, Africa, Indonesia, and Latin
America are contained in two recent
collections of case studies by Food &
Water Watch, a US-based nonprofit
consumer organization [6,9].
But even those most critical of private
sector involvement in water admit that
there is a potential role for corporations,
perhaps limited to delivering water or
supplying infrastructure, under a human
rights framework that views water as a
public good. Under such a model, gov-
ernments must maintain their responsibil-
ities to ensure sufficient, safe, affordable,
and accessible water [10].
Third, the world is changing in ways
that will both exacerbate water scarcity
and threaten the quality of the current
water supply. The problems of climate
change, population growth, agricultural
development, and industrial pollution are
increasing and put enormous pressure on
existing water sources. No nation, rich or
poor, appears to be immune from a water
crisis. The US is facing the greatest water
shortages of its history. In 2003 its
Government Accountability Office pro-
jected that at least 36 states would face
water shortages because of a combination
of rising temperatures, drought, popula-
tion growth, urban sprawl, waste, and
excess [11]. In Australia, severe drought in
2007 caused such dangerous water short-
ages in the Murray-Darling river basin,
which contains 40% of the nation’s farms
and provides the bulk of its food supply,
that the entire river system has now come
under federal management requiring a
AU$10 billion reinvestment [12]. In the
developing world, as Professor Jonna
Mazet, director of the wildlife health
center at the University of California,
Davis emphasizes, water scarcity has
implications for emergent infectious dis-
ease ‘‘because when people and animals
use the same water sources for drinking,
bathing, and defecating, we can get serious
contamination of drinking water and an
increased risk of zoonotic disease’’ (per-
sonal communication).
Like many health and environmental
problems, water scarcity will hit the poor
first. Less water for poor families and their
agriculture will exacerbate poverty and
malnutrition; longer distances to fetch
water will increasingly take people, mostly
women, away from other daily tasks and
schooling; and traveling for water will pose
greater risks to the safety of both women
and children in conflict areas. That most
developing nations will lack the proper
resources and infrastructure to deliver
clean water and monitor water quality
limits their ability to respond to the water
crisis. A human rights approach to water
recognizes the potential for inequity and
ensures that the most vulnerable are not
ignored [10].
Notwithstanding the differences in the
causes and effects of water shortages across
the world, establishing access to water as a
human right affirms the need for global
collective action. The goals of the first
international ‘‘decade for water’’ were not
met, and the prospects of the Millennium
Development Goal (number seven) to
‘‘halve the proportion of people without
secure access to safe drinking water and
adequate sanitation by 2015’’ appear dire.
Critics have called inadequate access to
water and sanitation a ‘‘silent emergency’’
that has yet to command sufficient atten-
tion from the international community or
from health professionals [13,14]. Clearly
we need a more radical approach.
A human rights framework offers what
the water situation needs—international
recognition from which concerted action
and targeted funding could flow; guaran-
teed standards against which the protected
legal right to water could be monitored;
and accountability mechanisms that could
empower communities to advocate and
lobby their governments to ensure that
water is safe, affordable, and accessible to
everyone.
References
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2009.
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