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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Harriet C. Babbitt,
at the Transboundary Donor Water Meeting
USAID Deputy Administrator
June 15, 2000
It is a great pleasure to welcome you here to discuss how best to work together on transboundary water management around the world.
I am honored to co-chair this conference with Under Secretary of State Frank Loy.
As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has said, water "is certain to be among the principal global environmental challenges of the 21st Century."
When she issued a call to action on the global water challenge this spring, Secretary Albright immediately suggested this meeting of donors to discuss ways we can better cooperate on transboundary water management.
That says a lot about her commitment to an integrated, cooperative approach.
USAID is part of a much larger Working Group of dedicated federal agencies that provides significant technical support for our government's water resources management, particularly regarding transboundary basins.
The Working Group includes our colleagues from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Joint Commission [U.S.-Canada border].
I thank them all for their expertise and long-term commitment to this work. None of us can address transboundary water management alone. We must utilize our respective strengths to address the complexities surrounding water scarcity and poor water quality around the world.
The development community in particular has recognized that access to clean water is key to economic growth and to alleviating world poverty.
USAID has invested significant resources over the past 40 years to make water available to poor urban and rural households, to develop irrigation systems that increase food production and to provide water for industrial development.
The Agency has also worked diligently to protect water quality from domestic and industrial pollution and to preserve the natural systems that both provide and renew precious freshwater resources.
We have learned from mistakes as well as successes and matured in our approach. Our earliest efforts took a strictly sectoral approach to managing water resources. Individual projects were placed in separate "categories" such as irrigation, sanitation, health, drinking water, biodiversity, or policy development.
In those early years, we devoted considerably more of our resources to building physical infrastructure and emphasizing engineering and technical solutions to water resources problems. Such solutions often failed to fully appreciate the natural, social and human aspects of the equation.
As a result, water supply and sanitation construction did not always result in the desired improvements in child survival or an overall reduction in disease.
Early USAID-supported construction of extensive irrigation works did not take into account the long-term water needs of growing urban areas or industrial users. We have all learned to consider, as well, nature's own requirements to sustain critical ecosystems.
Our more integrated approach today also incorporates elements of hygiene education, empowerment of women and community-centered planning to complement physical infrastructure.
Integrated, multi-sectoral approaches have been much more effective in achieving human health goals and dealing with the dual crises of global water scarcity and deteriorating water quality. Such approaches are especially important in transboundary water management.
We are encouraging both greater diplomatic cooperation and a higher standard of technical resource management. Fortunately, we are finding that many countries are increasingly willing to negotiate collaborative solutions about shared water resources critical to the survival and well-being of all.
I understand that you talked about one such example this morning, in which many U.S. government agencies have been involved -- the Middle East Peace Process.
USAID assistance plays an important role in helping implement the water resources articles of the Palestinian-Israeli agreements.
Among many other things, our programs have helped the Palestinian Water Authority develop a long-term planning framework. That framework estimates demand, potential sources of supply and options to get more water to residents through the year 2040.
Water distribution systems for 27 West Bank villages and Hebron have also been upgraded, benefiting some 260,000 people.
An integrated water resources management approach is especially suited to difficult transboundary issues. It encourages riparian nations to view their basin as a single natural system.
This provides unique opportunities for cooperative data and information exchange, joint analysis of water balances, and long-term strategic planning.
Integrated water resource management provides a framework in which the competing needs of multiple users and stakeholders (including those across borders) can be explicitly analyzed and addressed. Such an approach serves as an effective vehicle for dispute resolution at the technical or development level, as well as the diplomatic level.
Two of every five people in the world rely on the more than 300 transboundary river basins and aquifers. Integrated, multi-sectoral water management could bring us much closer to the day when all of the earth's people have the water, food and economic opportunity they need.
At the World Water Forum in the Hague last March, 130 nations and non-governmental organizations agreed that water security means "every person has access to enough safe water at an affordable price."
But we know that one billion of the world's six billion people still lack access to safe drinking water. Almost three billion -- half the world's people -- lack access to adequate sanitation.
At least five million people die every year from water-related illness.
Water runs through almost every aspect of our Agency's mission of development and humanitarian relief.
Water -- or the lack of it -- is a major factor in what we usually call "natural" disasters. We know that human actions often bring on or exacerbate droughts and floods, and determine the extent of the devastation they cause.
Much of the death and destruction in floods and mudslides results from the stripping of forests and vegetation, human-caused erosion, building houses on denuded hillsides.
Over-grazing, over-pumping, planting the wrong crops in the wrong places contribute to desertification and deadly droughts. We can turn fertile cropland to salt flats in a matter of years by misusing water.
But water is not just an environmental and food security issue. It is also a gender issue.
As Dutch Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Employment told the "Beijing Plus Five" Conference at the United Nations this week, nothing exemplifies gender inequality more than water and women.
Millions of women and girls in developing countries spend large portions of every day getting water for their families. As she said, water and equal rights "are inextricably connected with each other."
Many women and girls become ill from polluted water sources. In areas of conflict, they may risk sniper fire or rape to make the trek to wells or streams.
We in the international development community have a special responsibility not to limit our efforts to the demands of food security, health and economic growth. We must not ignore the rights of indigenous people, of women, of people downstream as well as upstream, of the poor as well as those with power and privilege.
The physician's credo, "First, do no harm" applies doubly to water, because the potential for inadvertent harm is so great.
We in the United States have learned -- often the hard way -- how difficult it is to try to rebuild a wetland, restore a damaged ecological system, take out the poison or the salt, or replace the lost vegetation that kept the mountain from washing over the villages and farmland below.
Unwise water management and transboundary water problems are certainly not confined to developing nations, or to any continent or region.
I've told you about the commitment of my government and my Agency to solving the transboundary problems of water supply and the degradation of lakes and river basins. Now I want to talk just a moment about my personal experience and commitment.
Great rivers run through memories of my childhood, but I understand better now the threats to those rivers and the way of life each supported.
When I was in grade school, I lived in Niagara Falls, New York, where the United States and Canada share one of the world's great scenic wonders.
Yet, the beauty -- even the very existence of Niagara Falls -- was at risk in the exciting early days of electric power at the beginning of the 20th century.
Fortunately, wise water management prevailed over those who, a century ago, wanted to divert all of the water from the falls for hydroelectric power.
Ordinary people rallied in opposition, alerted to the danger by Teddy Roosevelt and a small band of early environmentalists. It was one of the first grassroots movements to preserve one of the world's great natural resources.
The people who saved Niagara Falls understood that they did not have to choose between sacrificing the environment to development or forgoing development altogether. Instead, they found a way to provide abundant electric power while maintaining an irreplaceable natural resource.
We have not always been as successful in achieving that balance, either within this country, or with our neighbors.
The 20th Century was noted for its mammoth water projects. It brought important technological advances in our understanding of the fragility and replenishment capabilities of watersheds, as well as in water management itself.
But our capacity to poison our water and to waste and misuse it, has grown even faster than the demands of growing urban populations, agricultural and industrial needs.
I spent my teenage years in Brownsville, Texas, where the Rio Grande forms our border with Mexico.
Just yesterday, an international coalition of conservation organizations called on the United States and Mexico to undertake a major bilateral effort to conserve the threatened wildlife and habitats of the river separating our two great nations, Rio Grande called Rio Bravo in Mexico.
The call came as officials of our two countries were meeting in Juarez to discuss the depleted flows and poor water quality of the basin. As one of the participants noted, that basin has a richness and diversity of wildlife and plants likely unmatched by any desert river system in the world.
The coalition declared the ecological health of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo "critically injured and in imminent danger of collapse." We are committed to working hard with Mexico to prevent that collapse.
The Niagara and Rio Grande are the rivers of my youth.
I spent much of my adulthood in Arizona, a state in the middle of the Colorado River Basin.
Aldo Leopold loved the Colorado River Delta. In his 1949 much celebrated The Sand County Almanac, he wrote that we abuse land because we think of it as a commodity and we think we can own it. We fight over land because we place such a high value on it.
Our abuse of water is different. We often abuse water not only because we think it belongs to us, but because we think of it as free. We fail to value it at all until we are desperate for it.
Leopold described "the Green Lagoon" Colorado River Delta when he and his brother visited it in 1922. He wrote of the lush wild melons and nuts and grasses that nourished a wealth of animal and marine life. That description has haunted me since I first read it.
That delta no longer exists. Leopold never went back because he knew the Green Lagoon was gone even in 1949.
He wrote:
Few blank spots on our maps today designate the kind of unexplored country Aldo Leopold referred to. But we are in danger of creating more and more blank spots of a different kind -- blank spots where nothing is on the map because nothing can live there -- where everything that once was there is dead or dying."Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"The economic development of the Colorado Basin has relied on the Colorado River. The river was dammed and diverted during the past century to provide flood control and water and power needed for farms and cities of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. The environmental price was very high.
In recent years, scientists, environmental organizations and government agencies on both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico began discussing what could be done to restore the once dynamic ecological system in the Colorado River Delta.
As scientists have documented the ecological and economic importance of the Delta in recent years, citizens and non-governmental organizations from both countries advocated a restoration agenda that would include a "water entitlement for the Delta."
On May 18, the governments of Mexico and the United States responded with a strong bi-national signal. Representatives of both countries signed a joint declaration expressing their intent to strengthen cooperative action and mechanisms to improve and conserve the natural and cultural resources of the Delta, including the river and associated wetlands.
They agreed, among other things, to undertake research on biological conditions and endangered species and develop strategies of environmental sustainability. It is an extremely significant first step toward a truly bi-national effort to protect and restore this area critical to both nations.
The agreement recognizes water resources as part of a system that links upstream and downstream users, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and surface and groundwater sources. In short, it recognizes hydrologic resources at the watershed level, both within individual countries and across national boundaries.
It is a historic commitment to the broad range of stakeholders in the Basin.
As donors, we cannot and should not try to dictate the terms of cooperation between and among developing nations. But we have a duty NOT to finance activities that ignore or override the rights and needs of the various economic and social sectors. We have a duty to support and assist efforts that respect the rights not only of riparian nations, but of all within the Basin who depend on that shared water.
Many of you have been working on these issues for a long time. Others, far more expert than I, will provide overviews of issues and opportunities in different developing regions.
I am here to thank you for your concern and to assure you of my government's and my Agency's desire to explore these with you and cooperate in finding solutions.
Thank you.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 12, 2001 |
