Asit K. Biswas, 2006 winner of the Stockholm Water Prize (the closest thing we have to a water Nobel Prize), is interviewed in Forbes (the picture is from the article) about the global water crisis. A similar story published last month in Wend Magazine can be found here.
Thanks to David Zetland at Aguanomics for alerting me to this story.
Biswas, who has had a long, distinguished career in water, now runs his own water think tank, the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico City.
No water crisis? There is, but it is not one of scarcity - just mismanagement. There is a lot of truth in what he says.
Here's how Megha Bahree's story begins:
Asit Biswas loves to tell the story of the Phnom Penh Water Authority. It was 1993 and a new manager, Ek Sonn Chan, had been appointed to the then bankrupt utility. Of the water that it piped from its reservoirs, 72% disappeared without ever being paid for. Chan decided to chase down errant customers, among them all of Cambodia's government agencies and the Army. When asked to pay up, the officer in charge pulled out a gun. Chan retreated but went back the next day with a handful of journalists in tow. The general once again pulled out his gun. Chan cut off the water supply. The next day the Army paid its dues, and all the other agencies followed. Today the utility is flush with cash, and there is clean drinking water--the kind that can be had straight from the tap--available through the city, around the clock.
As governments across the world, and especially the developing world, worry about a looming water crisis, Biswas dismisses it as a self-inflicted wound. The problem we have, he says, is not scarcity but mismanagement. The solution to shortages is simple: "Water must have a price. Anything that is free won't be used prudently."
The last sentence is the key element of his argument, and it closes this post. But in some cases it is too simplistic. Shortages can be caused by other things: hegemony or conflict, for example. I suspect we will see such cases as climate change affects water supplies. And what if the price becomes too high because of diminishing supplies caused by hydrologic factors?
And water should be declared a human right, but that does not mean it has to be provided free.
"Water must have a price. Anything that is free won't be used prudently." -- Asit Biswas
Pricing is critical even here in the US. Drivers for water shortages are different here than elsewhere. Here, we are water short many times because of the constant pull of growth on a finite fresh water supply. Since the cost of incremental capacity and water supplies is huge, the cost to the customer is under constant pressure as well. Pricing for incremental capacity can be (should be) captured in things like development fees/impact fees charged to new connections to the utility. If the full cost of new supplies and new treatment and delivery infrastructure is properly captured, then a pricing mechanism exists to signal that additional growth can only occur at a (presumably, high) price. Growth can't be free either - anything that is free won't be used prudently.
Posted by: Jason Mumm | Wednesday, 16 December 2009 at 06:37 AM
I rise to note the sentence ... "The problem we have is not scarcity but mismanagement. The solution to shortages is simple. Water must have a price. Anything that is free won't be used prudently." ... has real meaning for me and one implication for me in the USA we currently value wealth creation above all else and to that end we will use water in all its forms as a means to expand our wealth.
Mismanagement was always been the culprit masquerading in various forms especially when water became a COMMODITY and stopped being part of the COMMONS. There is, I believe, a commonly held belief that PRICE must necessarily refer to $$$$, but is that really true…? Might PRICE also refer to the health of mankind as well as the biodiversity of the single biosphere we share…?
It strikes me that as long as effective and efficient and PRUDENT management of WATER is defined solely in terms of $$$, I personally do not see any significant change in the manner in which water is manipulated, save to extract the last dollar for one’s bottom line.
Respectfully,
Paul F. Miller
Posted by: PAUL F MILLER | Sunday, 13 December 2009 at 10:01 AM