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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Millennium Water Challenge Symposium
Houston, Texas
October 8, 2002
The last time I was in Houston was to attend a memorial service for one of my best friends in disaster relief, one of the great figures internationally, a legendary figure, Fred Cuny, who lived outside the city here. He had a glider plane. He was a national champion. I don't know if you know you that one of the most famous Texans in the world in humanitarian relief was from Houston. He was killed in Chechnya - we've actually never found his body - during the Chechnyan Civil War, doing humanitarian relief. This was about 6 or 7 years ago.
I'm going to talk today about a subject that's very important to us in AID and very important, obviously, to you or you wouldn't be here today, and that is the question of water. I'm going to speak about it from three different perspectives: from the perspective of economic development, the perspective of conflict, and the perspective of health.
Water demand worldwide has tripled during the 20th century. It is now doubling every 21 years according to international reports. While the Earth's water supply is constant, the amount of clean and unpolluted water is steadily decreasing. Despite our efforts, this trend has been continuing.
Today, about 450 million people concentrated in 31 countries face serious shortages of fresh drinking water. That is expected to grow to some 2.8 billion people in 48 countries by the year 2025. At least 1.5 billion people rely exclusively on ground water as their source of drinking water. Unfortunately, in many places aquifers are being exhausted more quickly than they can be replenished. Such over-pumping has been measured at more than 160 billion cubic meters a year, double the annual capacity of the Nile River.
I have to tell you that I was in charge of the humanitarian relief effort for President Bush in Afghanistan, and we're also in charge of the reconstruction of Afghanistan for the US Government. We sent a team in to do a survey of what the most serious challenge facing the country was just after the terrorist war was over in the spring. The two most serious problems is massive debt - people have been surviving 4 years of drought and 21 years of civil war by borrowing what's not a huge amount of money for us, but for very poor people who make $100 a year, it's a huge amount of money. The second biggest challenge in Afghanistan is 4 years of drought. The southern half of the country has not seen rain now in 5 years, and the north, in 4 years. And as a result of that, 95% of the animal herds have died, and there have been massive crop failure. Last year the food deficit was 50% of what the requirement was for survival; and water, more than we had realized, was the central crisis facing the country, and it was profoundly affecting people's ability to survive.
In terms of overall numbers of people at risk, India and China are severely at risk, as are people in the Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa. I have to tell you I have asked several friends of mine who are hydrologists who tell me that the first major region of the world that's heavily populated that will completely run out of water is northern China in the next 10 years, and the crisis will be massive. This is an industrialized area - it's a poor area, but it's industrialized - and the rivers literally are drying up - the major rivers of China - because of population pressures and industrialization.
The United Nations established the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015, a goal that I might add that the Administration strongly supports. The President has announced a new Millennium Challenge objective of supporting these international goals of poverty reduction, and the President has proposed increasing the foreign assistance budget of the US Government by 50% to go from about $10 billion to $15 billion a year - the largest increase in decades - to try to get to these goals.
Forty percent of the world's food supply comes from irrigated agriculture. However, irrigated land is actually decreasing due to salinization and water-logging. Yet to achieve global food security, the International Water Management Institute estimates that irrigation requirements will need to grow by 17 percent by the year 2025.
There are three essential points I want to make about water and its role in development. I want to just say that we can't focus on water just as what's drinkable - drinking water is very important and I'll talk about that in a minute, but it's also important in other respects, as well. Water has a profound effect on economic growth.
One of our primary missions is to stimulate economic growth to alleviate poverty. Much of the poverty in the world, 70 percent of it, is in rural areas - in India, China, and sub-Sahara Africa and Central Asia - and in those areas, water is essential to agricultural production, both for animal herds and for sedentary agriculture. Genuine development depends on achieving high rates of sustained economic growth for a very long period of time. That's how the countries that have gone from poverty to middle or upper income status. The best examples are Taiwan and South Korea. They were two of the poorest countries in the world, and they are two of the richest now. They were very poor 40 years ago, but they had high rates of economic growth over a sustained period of time, and that's how they got out of poverty.
So, we do know that in all of the countries that have graduated to first class status in terms of economic growth, they have done it first by developing agricultural surpluses, and then industrializing. All of the countries, except for Hong Kong and Singapore, which are two city states - they're really not countries in the formal sense of the word, they are the only ones that succeeded in doing it without agricultural production.
And so, it's very important that we take agriculture into consideration when we think through the issue of water. Seventy percent of all fresh water consumed in the world is devoted to agriculture - 70 percent. And so we have to factor in both human consumption and agricultural consumption, because agricultural growth is the basis for longer term sustained economic growth and improvements in food security and health.
Much of the developing world is undergoing rapid rates of urbanization, which is putting even more stress on clean water storage, on infrastructure, on delivery, on sanitation systems, on pricing policies, and on ownership.
So the first point here is there's a direct connection between water, agriculture and economic development. And rationalizing your use of water is very important. We've been spending a very large amount of money in one of the most severe deficit areas for water in the world, which is the Middle East, in three countries: One is in the West Bank and Gaza -- in the Palestinian areas. Second is in Egypt, and the third is in Jordan. Why is that? Because they're running out of water. The population growth rates are high in those areas, and the water is being depleted.
What we're doing is not producing more water - we're producing water in a more rational way. What used to be the case, believe it or not, is the purest water was not being used for human consumption - it was being used for irrigation. And the dirtiest water, people were drinking, in many areas there. And so we've shifted the system now, and we've constructed very large-scale water for purification systems for human consumption that meet international standards. And then what we would call gray water -- water that has a lower level of requirement -- is being used for irrigation and for cleaning and industrial facilities, because you just don't need high levels of clean water for that purpose. So it's called rationalizing the system, and what that will mean is there'll be a lot more water available for drinking that was before available only for irrigation.
Some 2 billion people are affected by water-borne diseases and parasites each year. Diarrhea, typhoid, hepatitis, cholera, trachoma, guinea worm, malaria, river blindness, dengue fever are all transmitted by water-borne means. The vectors are water. And so water profoundly affects people's health. There are 3-4 million people who die of water-borne diseases each year: 2 million children from treatable diarrhea, which is directly related to the cleanliness of the water. About half of the people in the developing world lack access to sanitation, and that percentage is actually increasing, despite everything that's been done.
The second point I want to make is that there is a connection between water and health. This is a very important point. Frequently people will talk in their development plans about digging more wells and producing more drinking water. And we did this many years ago in the international community, and it was a disaster. It did not improve health at all, and the reason is this: We didn't connect the water to improved sanitation. You cannot do water projects and not do sanitation at the same time. They are two sides of the same coin, and if you do one and you don't do the other, you will not have a reduction in the number of people who get sick from water. I don't have to tell you why, but if there's no sanitation systems in these villages and human waste gets into the water system, you can dig all the wells you want and people are still going to get sick from it. And so now the standard principle in the international health community and public health is you must always combine pure drinking water programs with programs that also deal with sanitation in the same communities in the same areas.
Frequently in the wells that we have worked with the NGO community worldwide to dig --worked through UNICEF and other international organizations to dig - we always make allowances to keep the animals away from the human consumptionm, and we have run-offs that allow the animals to take some of the water. But in the old days they used to dig the wells, the animals would get up to the wells where the people were and they would, of course, defecate around it, and then the animal manure would get into the wells, and you'd have the same kind of problem of sanitation.
Clearly, a healthy workforce is essential to a country's economic growth and development. So, if you don't clean the water up and your people are sick all the time and you are a growing economy and you need healthy labor, you have a problem. So water and sanitation also affect economic development in the sense they affect the public health system in a profound way.
The President has made a commitment to the Millennium Challenge Account, a $5 billion investment. I'm sure some of that money will be programmed, but we're not going to take any of that money, per the President's good development policy, and decide how to spend it in Washington. It will be allocated among the poorest countries that are the best performers in the world, and then the money will be decided in a democratic fashion working with the US Embassies and the AID missions in the field. They will make the decisions about which sectors to invest in, depending on what the needs are of the country. But more money will be available for development generally in the Third World as a result of this initiative.
The third point I want to make is that there is a connection between water and conflict. I've told both sides in the conflict in Israel that we all pray that there will be a peaceful and just settlement to the war, the second intifata, and there's a lot of work being done right now behind the scenes that no one sees to do that. But the reality is, once that conflict is settled, there'll be another conflict. And the conflict is going to be much more serious because it's life-threatening for a very large number of people and it affects the economic development of the countries in the area. And it will not be based on religion or ethnicity, it will be based on water, because the Middle East is running out of water as fast as Northern China is. If any of you have been to the Middle East and you look at the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, you'll see what I'm talking about. The mining of that water, much of which is not replenishable, has now reached such a point that there is a crisis facing us in the near future.
The first time I met the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr. Perez, I think it was the day after I got sworn in last year - May 2nd of last year - he was visiting the United States and I was invited to meet with him, and I met him at a reception. Before I could even introduce myself, he said, "I know who you are, Mr. Natsios." I said, "It's nice to meet you, sir." And he said, "Do not, do not stop the water projects in the Palestinian area." And I said, "Oh, well, that's nice to hear that you support these projects we're doing." And I said, "Why do you …" (I knew why, but I wanted him to say it to me.) He said, "Well, it's obvious you know, the aquifers aren't Palestinian or Israeli. The aquifers are below the ground, and if you don't improve the management of the water that we do have available, all of us are going to suffer because the resources are declining." So that's one project we've been allowed to continue unimpeded because it's so important to both the Palestinians and the Israelis that the system be much more efficient.
So we do know that where watersheds are controlled by more than one country -- in other words, watersheds go through 2 or 3 different countries -- that the risk in the future of conflict over water will be very substantial, because of that's the difference between life and death. While cooperation over water resources between regions and among states has been generally good for years, there are examples to the contrary, and tensions are increasing as water supplies diminish. The Shatt-al-Arab River, which is the demarcation point between Iran and Iraq, is the overt stated reason why there was the war between Iraq and Iran that killed 2 million young men during the period of the 1980's. They went to war in 1980, and the war, I think, ended in somewhere around 1990. But 2 million young men died over that, and it was primarily over the control of that river.
Other examples are the Wazzani River which is a tributary of the Jordan River, and things are now heating up along the Israel-Lebanon border over this issue. The Nile River has a profound effect in Egypt. If there's no Nile River, the Egyptians will tell you, there is no Egypt. The rest of Egypt is just a giant desert and very few people live in it. The Nile River is the lifeblood of the country. An Egyptian diplomat once said, "We send our three most important diplomats to …" Guess which countries? United States is one; second is Sudan; and third is Ethiopia. It should be apparent why. Where's the watershed of the Nile River? Sudan and Ethiopia. If we do not have the Nile River protected, we are in trouble; the country will cease to exist. And so, the Egyptian government is deeply involved -- I won't tell you in what way, in the conflict - I don't mean in terms of supplying either side - but they want a role in the peace settlement in Sudan. The United States Government is intimately involved in trying to deal with that terrible conflict which has killed 2.25 million people in the last 20 years. AID has been deeply involved in humanitarian relief work, and Walter Kansteiner and the State Department, Colin Powell, at the instructions of the President, are trying to negotiate a settlement, along with our friends from the foreign ministry in Britain and in Norway - our two allies on this issue.
But the Egyptians have to be consulted. Why? Because a settlement that does not secure water from the Nile for them could threaten the existence of Egypt.
I was twice, last November, in the middle of the terror war, and then in January, in Afghanistan, and I flew over in a helicopter, the Amu Darya River. I have to tell you - I don't know if you've read any of the biographies of Alexander the Great, but he went across the Amu Darya River. It's an extraordinary river that divides Afghanistan from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the three countries north of Afghanistan. That river is extremely important to the survival of both the countries to the north and to Afghanistan to the south because it provides water for irrigation and for the cotton crops in Uzbekistan.
Almost half of the world's population lives within the 300 or so river basins that are shared by at least two countries. In the Middle East, for example, more than 90 percent of the water crosses national borders. And so one of our watershed management efforts in AID worldwide is to manage those watersheds under the most severe stress to avoid conflict.
Now let me talk about what our strategies have been over the last few years. We devote about $400 million a year to water programs worldwide out of our $9 billion budget. The last 30 years we've sent about $11 billion on these water resources. And if the population of the world were stable and there was economic growth, that would be fine: we wouldn't have a lot of water problems now. But we've got growth going on and population pressures, which are enormous in some areas where there is a limited amount of water.
As water is vital to so many different aspects of human development and well-being, AID has adopted an integrated approach to water resource management. We don't just fund PVOs and NGOs to go into a country to dig bore wells, though we do that, too. But we also have to balance our efforts in water use for agricultural purposes, domestic, industrial and ecological reasons. This is best achieved by focusing on sound science and strong participative processes at the local village level.
We are also finding new ways to combine our efforts with like-minded organizations, whether in the public or the private sectors, to support the larger objectives, improving health for example.
I want to talk about one of these initiatives called the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI). Colin Powell announced this when I was with him at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the end of August. The West Africa Water Initiative is a new partnership made up of USAID and nine other major partners that have together put up more than $41 million to help three poor African countries: Ghana, Mali, and Niger. I might add that a couple of those countries are the best governed countries in Africa - they have a strong level of development and organization at the community level. And when you have strong community level organization and democratic governance, it's much easier to do water projects. I think Secretary O'Neill mentioned there's a direct connection between good governance, the rule of law, and good water management - they are all intimately connected.
Let me give you an example of why they're connected. When I was at World Vision -- I'm not giving you an advertisement here, I was with them for 5 years as vice president - we dug wells in southern Sudan in the middle of the civil war. In some areas water is very plentiful, and in other areas, particularly in the dry season, it is a scarce commodity. The Arab merchants own the wells, and they charge people to use the water in the wells. When we built the other wells, we were interfering with their business, and they went in, they destroyed the pumps, and they poured cement down the boreholes because they said, "You're diminishing the value of the water in the wells that we have." And so we learned a lesson that water is also sold in markets and can have a profound effect on wealthy people's livelihoods, and so to do it without looking at the economics of water, usually will mean you will fail in your effort in the long term.
By 2008 the WAWI partnership expects to give more than half a million people new water sources and latrines. Because these are not effective unless people learn more about safeguarding water purity and improving overall sanitation, we will train thousands of teachers, children and adults in hygiene and sanitation practices. When I say we, I mean this coalition of groups. The West Africa Water Initiative will also support income generation activities, stronger environmental policies and sound hydraulic management. In fact, the World Vision director in Ghana (because World Vision dug 1,000 wells in Ghana in the 1990's, as I recall, through a Hilton grant), and they made the national director, a guy named Bismark, who is a hydrologist. They wanted a water engineer. He's a Ghanaian who is the head of the World Vision office there, because of his expertise in that discipline.
I would like to thank the Hilton Foundation that spearheaded this whole initiative. They are putting in $18 million over the next seven years. World Vision will provide $16 million. Both are to be commended for their vision on this. AID is putting in $4.4 million, and a number of other groups like Lions Club International, UNICEF (which is, I think, a sponsor of today's event), Desert Research Institute, Winrock International, Cornell University's International Institute for Food Agriculture & Development, and the World Chlorine Council - all are participating in this major initiative which I think will have a profound effect on these three countries.
There are other very important areas that we deal with in terms of water management. We're doing a water rationalization program in Central Asia now in Uzbekistan. One of the worst environmental disasters in the world is the Aral Sea, which is two-thirds gone. If you go there you can walk right up into the middle of the lake, and it's all desert. Why? Because during the Soviet period, there was no good water management in many of these areas. They wanted to grow more cotton, and they did not look at the depletion of the aquifers that fed the Amu Darya, so the Amu Darya actually has stopped flowing into the Aral Sea because so much of it is used for cotton irrigation. The northern part of Uzbekistan near the Aral Sea is a disaster area, an ecological disaster area, but it's also a human disaster area because the people literally don't have enough water to drink, and they're having to try to move people out of that region because of this disaster. So what we're doing is going back, because a huge amount of water is wasted through very antiquated irrigation systems where the dikes are leaking, the water simply doesn't even go for cotton production, and in areas where it is used for cotton production, it is used extremely inefficiently. So we're working now with Uzbekistan and some of the NGOs in that area to try to rationalize the water system, repair the irrigation system so that at least we can recreate some of the flow of the Amu Darya River. I don't know if we can restore the damage done to the Aral Sea, but it would be nice if we could.
Fresh water is a precious commodity that is in short supply, especially in the developing world. As I've argued today, it affects conflict; it affects economic development, particularly in agriculture, but also industrial development; and it affects health, and we can't separate health, water -- improvements in water -- from the issue of sanitation. So thinking through these three principles, I think we can work together to improve the water situation in many countries in the developing world.
Thank you, and I'd be glad to answer some questions if any of you have any.
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Last Updated on: January 02, 2009 |
