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TODAY Tuesday 24 March 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: A Fair Price for Water

One of the last nails in the coffin of collectivism was hammered this weekend in Paris, of all places. There a United Nations conference declared that the provision of potable water cannot be "free" and should therefore be regarded as an economic activity. "The gradual introduction of a system to recover the direct and indirect costs of services should be encouraged" was the oblique language of the final communique. Everything has its price, aqua vitae not excepted.

The conferees did not forget the plight of poor people with bad water or no water. Precisely because it was so important to provide them access to clean water, the official documents said, it was crucial to attract private investment to meet the need. Will the poor then have to pay? Not necessarily, said the experts, but somebody will. Establishment of "categories of users" will no doubt be required, for the sake of social equity and political tranquillity.

This commodification of water takes place in the context of a water crisis not familiar to most Americans. It is a crisis primarily of countries within thirty degrees of the Equator, many of them with populations exploding in giant cities with little infrastructure. The World Health Organization says that more than 900 million people every year suffer from severe bouts of water-borne diseases: dysentery, typhoid, cholera. An equal number are struck with diseases caused by intestinal worms. As this week's Economist points out, "In terms of the number of people it kills, dirty water is probably the world's most serious pollution problem."

This tragedy is solvable by engineering of the simplest sort: clean tap water and protected sewers. The question is how to supply them. In many parts of the South, government water monopolies have become important job suppliers for political patronage; their abilities to meet skyrocketing new demands are predictably inefficient. And yet the few privatization experiments have by no means proven themselves: most firms have had to pay enormous bribes, and then find that new government regimes take office on promises to roll back unpopular water prices. Once again -- as with Indonesian fires or Brazilian deforestation -- the necessary precondition of environmental protection is the establishment of a civil society with (more or less) transparent means of rule-setting and reliable means of rule-enforcing.

I happen to live in a giant city blessed by the foresight of the upright collectivists of an earlier era. Our splendid water, pure and delicious (I'm not kidding) flows abundantly in even the poorest neighborhoods, and our wastes are pumped far out at sea (OK, maybe not so far out). We live in a rainy part of the world, thank goodness, but still, the overall accomplishment is staggering. What today is required to help Lagos and Calcutta and Bangkok accomplish the same?

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Two excellent Lib tree resources on water questions, both found in our High Fives section. On Drinking Water look for Brian Goetz's recommendations for the five best pertinent websites. On Water-in-General check out mega-authority Peter Gleick.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

3/23: Unattractive Progress on Transportation
3/20: The Thrill of Demography
3/19: About This Global Economy Business...
3/18: Toilet Heresy
3/17: St Patrick and Your Asteroid Insurance
3/16: Rebellion in Tennessee
3/13: Good News from the Senate
3/12: Children and Cancer
3/11: Save Our Beaches!
3/10: Die Gruenen und der SDP
3/9: In Search for the Holy Grail of the Forests
3/6: My Doom, Your Gloom
3/5: The Great D. P. Moynihan
3/4: "An Earthquake in Insurance"
3/3: Salmon Farming
3/2: Our Friends the Duck Killers
2/27: Trust El Nino
2/26: That Darn Triple-A
2/25: Cutting a Deal on Endangered Species
2/24: Fire? Again?
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.