HUMAN RIGHT TO DRINKING WATER
Water plays the leading part in the foundational myths of almost all of the civilisations in the world. From Genesis to the Koran, from Hesiod and Homer to the Egyptians, from the Aztecs to Tao, water is at the origin of life. Water is life.
And yet water is an almost inaccessible resource for a large part of humanity. A third of the world population lives in countries suffering from water shortage, and it is calculated that this figure may rise to two-thirds by 2025. Today, over 1,100 million people throughout the world have no regular access to water for drinking, washing themselves, cooking or meeting their basic sanitary needs. Every year this causes the deaths of five million people, two million of whom are boys and girls.
It is moreover a terrible paradox that water costs more for the more underprivileged. In developing countries, a family may have to spend up to 20 or 30% of its income on water, which often doesn’t even meet the minimum health standards.
For several decades, the lack of sustainable access to water in so many regions of the world has been one of the cruellest indicators of poverty and underdevelopment. But the problem has grown more acute in recent years, to the extent that international forums are already forecasting a world crisis related to water, something which is rapidly becoming a strategic resource of equal or greater importance to petrol and, therefore, the reason behind economic and political disputes which could lead to numerous world conflicts.
Thus, the water debate is increasingly more present on the agenda of local, national and transnational institutions, meaning that, although much later than should have been the case, public opinion and the international community are starting to realise that they have to tackle the gravity and urgency of this problem with further reaching measures. The point is that the challenge doesn’t lie in the total amount of resources in themselves, these are sufficient, but in the priorities of the political leaders.
The fact is that the world water crisis is, above all, a crisis in the way water is managed. Improved water exploitation and treatment, based on technologically advanced systems, can guarantee sufficient supply for all of humanity, no matter what the rules of the market.
The economic aspect of water supply should be approached from quite another angle, considering that the investment required to achieve this objective is, in addition to an ethical undertaking, a future investment in the health and economic growth of the populations burdened by disease and scarcity.
Economic activity can also affect the universal water supply in another way: the climate change, the origin of which partly lies, according to an almost unanimous agreement by the scientific community, in greenhouse gas emissions. This polluting action can have dreadful consequences on the hydric resources in large parts of the world, among which are many places which already suffer from terrible water problems.
It is therefore difficult to exaggerate the importance of questions related to this essential resource. It’s no coincidence that the upcoming International Expo (Zaragoza 2008) is dedicated to water and sustainable development, nor that one of the current priorities of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to remedy this word water crisis, one of the greatest obstacles to human development and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These objectives include the challenge of reducing by half, by 2015, the percentage of people who have no sustainable access to drinking water, based on the simple conclusion that there is no point in going about any other kind of development initiative if their basic water needs are not met.
Precisely, the last UN Human Development Report (2006) analyses the problem of water from various angles the length and breadth of the world. Its essential conclusion is that “a supply of clean, accessible water should be a basic human right”. This approach, linking water to human rights, is the key to adopting an overall solution to the question of world water whereby this basic resource can finally be definitively subject to the directives of a globalised economy.