Working in and around water, especially water politics is a messy affair. People, rightly so, have a lot tied up in water. It is essential for life, obviously. We need to consume a couple liters a day in one form or another to stay living. It needn’t be said that if a society has any civility and humanity at all, water should be a right regarded to everyone, .............Right? It seems pretty straight forward, but the longer I’m around water talk the more complicated it gets.
The determination that water is a right has many complications. If water is a right, it should be free, or at least very cheap, seems to be a common mindset around the world (why are we so adamant about cheap water in the US?). While in Honduras, I dealt with this issue on a daily basis. The Honduran Constitution clearly states that the water in a river or stream is owned by no one and so can’t be charged for, though the landowner can raise a stink about water conveyance infrastructure crossing his land. As a part of the water projects I was implementing, there was a finance component. Connected households were to be charged a minimal fee, about $1 to $1.50, so as to fund system maintenance and minor repairs. But the local people, due to the Honduran Constitution and local beliefs about water being a right, felt that their water should be free. I commonly had to use the counter argument that the water is free, so feel free to walk to the water source fill a bucket with water and carry it back to your home. The point being that the water is free, but it is the infrastructure that brings it clean and conveniently to your home that costs money and should be financed by the local community. This is where the problem lies; to provide free water is expensive.
Interesting, the very notion that water is a right and should be free makes the poorest pay more than the rich for clean water in much of the developing world. Having good water access is generally confined to well established, wealthy areas of developing world cities. Reasons for this are that having access to an amenity such as a high quality water system raises land prices making it unaffordable to the poor and the systems were generally built by the old colonial power to serve the colonizers’ homes in the city center, exclusive of the poor masses. The poor masses live in the surrounding slums and low income housing areas. A policy of cheap or free water means that by providing water infrastructure to the poor areas does not payback the costs of implementation. More so, if existing water sources are limited, new areas added to the network are usually not provided water at the same service level as the old, but politically influential, colonial center; any reduction in the quality of the center’s service delivery to provide more homes water is vehemently opposed. But new water sources are progressively more expensive to develop as the cheapest sources are developed first meaning that new water for the poorer outlying areas has a higher marginal cost than the water currently provided to the central city. This may mean that the new areas are charged more, subsidized so the cost is the same as the central city’s, or a rise on average between the cost of providing water to the center and to the new area ,raising the center’s price slightly. The poor slums that don’t receive piped water are many times supplied by private services which spring up in a piped system’s absence. These sources may be a truck that comes around, a neighbor who sells water from a local well, or any assortment of other means. What is certain is that this water is usually many times the cost of the highly subsidized water in the piped system. The point I’m trying to get across from this is that, in developing countries government subsidized piped water systems encouraged by the idea that water is a right, disproportionately serves the wealthier citizens, while the poor pay a significantly higher price to obtain water by other means.
A second major problem with water as a right is that, how much water should be rightfully delivered to each person. A person may only need a few dozen liters of water to maintain proper hygiene and living standards in day to day life, but this discounts the many other ways that water ensures economic livelihood. For example, a poor Indian farmer may depend on water to irrigate his crops, providing him with much needed food. If the water needed for him to economically maintain his limited lifestyle is not allowed him or goes up substantially in price, he will economically falter. Thus, he needs many more than a few dozen liters daily. Agriculture around the world is by far the largest consumer of water. In California, something like 85% of all water in the state is used to grow our fresh produce. Farmers rightfully argue that if you take away their water you are also taking away their economic livelihood, though it should be noted that they could use the water much more efficiently. If the farmers’ economic livelihood depends on the water, then do they have a right to it?
I’m not arguing that water is not a human right, as it is clearly a human necessity and I feel that as people, we should at least try to assure that water is fairly distributed. The problem is, what is fair? Currently, the very terminology of water as a right is not very well defined in the societal consciousness. The idea that water is a right often prevents many of the neediest from getting it. The day a consensus is reached on how we should manage our water resources will be an important day.
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