UN again asserts water targets for poor

For the third time in five years, the United Nations is trying to wake 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.

For the third time in five years, the United Nations is trying to wake 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.

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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 (2 billion euros) 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.