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DAM-L Price of Safe Water for All: $10 Billion/LS (fwd)
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Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 15:16:38 -0800
To: irn-safrica@netvista.net
From: Lori Pottinger <lori@irn.org>
Subject: Price of Safe Water for All: $10 Billion/LS
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Right to Water (right-to-water@iatp.org) Posted: 01/30/2001 By
mritchie@iatp.org
============================================================
New York Times
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\Mark's Email Attachments\Attach11744.htm
November 23, 2000, Thursday
Foreign Desk
Price of Safe Water for All: $10 Billion and the Will to Provide It
Forty percent of the world's six billion people still lack sanitation
though it could easily be provided, according to a United Nations report
issued today.
More than a billion people lack the most basic water supply, said the
study, backed by the World Health Organization and the United Nations
Children's Fund.
''It is not a question of cost but of priority,'' said Richard Jolly,
chairman of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council,
sponsored by the W.H.O.
Bringing water and sanitation to all would cost $10 billion a year, Mr.
Jolly said. That, he added, is ''one-tenth of what Europe spends on
alcoholic drinks each year, about the same as Europe spends on ice cream
and half of what the United States spends each year on pet food.''
Governments have made some improvements over the past decade, but they have
scarcely kept up with population growth in the developing world, the Global
Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment said.
Moving faster would pay big dividends in lives saved, the study said. Safe
water and sanitation could cut one-third of the number of diarrhea cases
every year -- currently 4 billion worldwide resulting in 2.2 million deaths.
The report follows the start in March of the council's campaign, Vision 21,
that urges a move away from high-tech, high-cost projects. It holds that
responsibility should be given to individual householders and local
community organizations.
Some 500 public health, water and sanitation experts will meet on Friday in
Foz do Iguacu, Brazil, for a conference on the program, which aims to halve
the number of people without access to hygienic sanitation and safe water
by 2015.
That ''is within the world's grasp and the grasp of any country that
chooses to make the modest resources required available,'' Mr. Jolly said.
In all, 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to basic sanitation, the
report said. They account for 40 percent of the world's population.
Asia had the worst sanitation, with 1.77 billion people short of adequate
facilities. The figures came from nationally representative household
surveys rather than from governments, the study said.
Africa performed by far the worst in terms of drinking water, the report
said. It estimated that 300 million people on the continent, more than a
third of the population, have no fixed supply.
Even for those who do, ''we are not talking about safe water supply because
we have no means to actually measure the safety of the water,'' said an
official of the World Health Organization, Jose Hueb.
Only 35 percent of waste water is treated in Asia, a figure that dwindles
to 14 percent in Latin America and a ''negligible'' proportion in Africa,
the report said.
--
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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