“Rain as grace”

By JUAN L. MERCADO, juanlmercado@gmail.com
September 1, 2011

“A man will fight over three things,” the late Senator Barry Goldwater mused.  “Water, women and gold – usually in that order.” That sequence resonates in House of Representatives’ Resolution No. 1573.

Filed by party-list legislator Rep. Arnel Ty, it urges government: Revisit its massive failure to implement the 22-year old law titled: “Rainwater Collection and Springs Development Act” approved in March 1989, RA 6715 requires rainwater be saved.

All administrations flopped in implementing this law.  “The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept,” Shakespeare wrote in “Measure for Measure.”

Unsaved rain often turns into rampaging floods.  And people will murder for wells, during droughts. ”Where there is no water, guns are everywhere,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote. Few remember that prolonged dry spells sparked the Darfur massacre where 200,000 died in South Sudan, he said.

Intense rainfall, half of the year, now alternates with searing droughts in the other half. Floods trigger landslide that morph by into fields baked by dry spells. Between 68 to 90% of land, in 19 provinces are “susceptible to landslides”.  So is 73% of Metro Manila, warns a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) study.

Deforestation expands threatened areas. Here are some (figures rounded) current estimates: Misamis Occidental (90%); Quirino and Bulacan (87%); Basilan and Bukidnon (85%) percent); Surigao del Norte (83%); Quezon (82%).

Include Camarines Sur (79%); Lanao del Norte (78%); Camarines Norte and Zamboanga del Norte (77%); Northern Samar and, Pampanga (74%); Pangasinan (71%t); Davao Oriental and Southern Leyte (70%); Aurora (69%) followed by North Cotabato and Sulu (67%percent).

“Issue a ‘writ of kalikasan’,” Magsaysay Awardee Antonio Oposa and concerned citizens earlier asked the Supreme Court.  If granted, the writ would compel respondents – government units, provinces, even the new Commission on Climate Change – to implement RA 6716.  “When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.”

Clean adequate water ensures life and growth. In the Philippines, 66 out of every 100, lack safe water. Many die from tainted water.  “The most fractured human right is that of a child to celebrate his first birthday”. These preventable deaths are an obscenity.

People consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it,” writes Marq de Villiers. “(They) restlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.”

Yet, solutions are doable. Take building a rain cistern. Or sealing leaks in water system pipes. Capiz province, in 1989, used a Canadian International Development Research Centre grant, to build 500 rainwater storage tanks. Made of were wire-framed ferro-cement, tank capacities ranged from 2 to 10 cubic meters. This was no free lunch. Loans of US$200, repayable over a three-year period, covered not only the cost of the tank but also one or more income generation initiatives, like rearing of pigs.  “This mechanism for financing rural water supplies avoided costly water resources development subsidies.

Water-strapped Cebu and Davao City have such ordinances.  Iloilo has drafted a similar measure. “Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out”, an Italian proverb says. Implementation has been flabby. And there is a little recognized hurdle: Water districts which do not think beyond their backyards.

Take Bulacan’s Water District. Like Cebu, it is bugged by more deep wells that spew brackish water, as the “saline edge contaminates underground aquifers. Both are over-dependent on aquifers ground water – which is not sustainable. An increase in rainwater use would result in savings for family budgets – but a drop in water district revenue,”

“At first, Bulacan was excited about harvesting rainwater,” recalls a water speciatist. What about income to pay off loans?, finance people asked. “And that was the end of the planning.  Mayor Ed Hagedorn wanted rainwater harvesting for Puerto Princesa. He, too, ran into a similar roadblock.”

Today, water use is increasing at twice the rate of population growth, International Herald Tribune reports.  But, 58% of our groundwater is contaminated, Asian Development Bank finds. Untreated domestic and industrial wastes poison reservoirs.  Here, you can drink from only a third of our rivers. The rest are cesspools. By 2025, water availability will be marginal in 8 of 19 major river basins and most of the cities.

Providing clean water can save most of 1.8 million children who die yearly from diarrhea, says the UN study: “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.” Installing a flush toilet in the home, increases by 59 percent a child’s chances of surviving.  “Not having access to clean water is a euphemism for profound deprivation,” UN says. “The crisis in water and sanitation is above all a crisis for the poor.”