Philippines Has Enough Water Supply, NGO Says

An environment network says government’s program to solve the country’s water crisis – privatization – is flawed. Kalikasan-PNE, which believes we have enough water supply, says it is resorting to costly rehabilitation projects when what it needs to do is plug water leaks and exercise political will to stop forest denudation.

By Dennis Espada
Bulatlat.com

Part of government efforts to solve the water crisis in the country is a multi-billion peso water filtration project in Laguna Lake now underway. But a grassroots environment group – the Kalikasan-People's Network for Environment (K-PNE) - wants the project stopped, saying it will lead to another "water privatization fiasco" similar to what happened to the bail-out by government of the bankrupt Maynilad Water Services. Inc. owned by the Lopez family.

The water filtration project in Laguna Lake, which has been approved by the Cabinet-level Investment Coordination Committee early this April, aims to solve water shortage in Metro Manila by supplying 400 million liters of water per day (MLD).

Newspapers last week quoted Finance Undersecretary Nieves Osorio as saying that the project will cost P3.86 billion under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme. It will be constructed and operated by a winning private firm for 28 years, Osorio also said.

Laguna Lake south of Metro Manila used to be a favorite fishing ground in Laguna province until factories surrounding it made it practically biologically dead.

A recent World Bank study revealed that the Philippines has the second lowest water per person ratio in Asia, next to Thailand. To address this problem, the government claims to have taken steps to develop new water sources such as the Laguna Lake and the Wawa River in Rizal province, which is also being rehabilitated.

Other sources said to be under rehabilitation are the Laiban Dam, Agus Dam, Angat Water Utilization and the Aqueduct Improvement Project.

Sufficient water

But officials of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage Systems (MWSS) and private water concessionaires Maynilad and Manila Water Services Inc. said Angat Dam in Bulacan province, which supplies water all over the metropolis, produces 4,000 MLD. With an average daily consumption of 40 liters per person, urban dwellers and those in nearby provinces only need about 640 MLD of water supply.

This shows, K-PNE’s national coordinator Clemente Bautista, Jr. said last week, there is sufficient water supply to provide for the domestic needs of some 16 million people in Metro Manila and nearby provinces. “The government wants us to believe that we need another privatized project to produce water," he said.

Bautista told Bulatlat.com that more than 60 percent of Angat’s water is wasted due to "non-water revenue of the private water concessionaires, Maynilad and Manila Water." Non-water revenue pertains to water loss due to leakages and illegal connections.

"What the government must do is address the problem of wastefulness and inefficiency of the private water concessionaires,” Bautista said. “By reducing from 60 percent to 30 percent the non-water revenue of the water utilities, we could already meet the projected demand-supply gap of 900 MLD water shortage by MWSS. This is cheaper and more viable option for us instead of putting up new expensive water projects."

Summer nightmare

From a little over 190 meters by the end of March, Angat Dam’s water level dropped to a critical mark at 180 meters, prompting government to stop using its water reserves for irrigation. If the water level further goes down by 160 meters, the MWSS said it would no longer be able to supply water to private concessionaires.

Government is claiming that the limited rainfall in Luzon during the last quarter of 2003 has aggravated the problem even more.

These signs clearly indicate a consumer’s nightmare, but the Center for Environmental Concerns-Philippines’ (CEC) executive director Frances Quimpo said this may only be the "tip of the iceberg."

Quimpo asserts that the receding water level in Angat is "symptomatic of a cauldron of environmental crises happening all at once because of the government’s lack of regard for the environment and its adherence to globalization policies that further perpetuate such crises."

Degraded

In a lecture at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City last March 4, Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Elisea Gozun said that the country’s forest cover declined from 65 percent of total land area of 30 million hectares in 1900s to only about 18 percent by 2000, of which only 800,000 hectares are old growth forest. Of the remaining forests, 154 areas comprising 12.43 million hectares are considered priority watersheds. One-hundred twenty-five of these priority areas have been proclaimed as watershed forest reserves although many of them are considered degraded.

The significant loss in forest cover, Gozun said, "has transformed the Philippines from being a major tropical timber exporter in the 1970s to a net importer of forest products (importing as much as 65 percent-70 percent of wood requirements over the past ten years)." This, Gozun said, is due to illegal logging, high population growth and unsustainable forest management methods.

The Macapagal-Arroyo government has been reluctant to admit that it has backslid its reforestation program in favor of "quick fixes" like costly water projects and dams that could, environmentalists warned, devastate the environment in the long run. From 2001 to 2003, the DENR was able to plant only 70,172 hectares of open and denuded land with indigenous forest tree varieties. This is nothing compared to the average 100,000 hectares being lost every year.

Bautista said "forest denudation is the main reason why there is an increasing rate of groundwater depletion because of the decreasing water holding capacity of our watershed and the siltation of our rivers and reservoirs."

Quimpo, concluded, "unless we stop the environmentally destructive policy of water privatization, no end can be in sight for the water crisis that victimizes our people." Bulatlat.com

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