International Development: Sanitation and Water

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, my intervention is slightly tangential to the main thrust of the right reverend Prelate’s Question, but I thank him very much for giving me the opportunity to make it. I want to talk about water as the source of food and possible conflict in the developing world. I realise that lack of access to proper sanitation and safe water kills about 1.5 million children every year, but I want to talk about the nearly 1 billion people who go to bed hungry every night and the other 1 billion who suffer from such a single staple diet that they lack the necessary vitamins and proteins to live properly active lives. It is worth noting that the worst effects of such chronic malnutrition are on children. Not having a proper diet in early years affects brain development. For instance, it is believed that during the food price hike in 2008, some 40 million kids in the developing world suffered permanent cognitive damage from food deprivation.

The connection between this and today’s debate on water is that irrigated agriculture provides 40 per cent of the world’s food from only 20 per cent of the world’s agricultural land. It is twice as productive as non-irrigated land, so in terms of feeding the world it is very important. For instance, 90 per cent of rice grown uses irrigation. By 2030, agriculture will need 45 per cent more water, and even by 2025 the UN reckons that 40 per cent of the world’s population will live in water scarce regions, which will include all of China and India. Indian farmers are already taking 100 cubic kilometres per annum more from their aquifers than are being replaced by rains, and the aquifer under the Hebei province of China, where most of its wheat is grown, is falling at the rate of three metres per annum.

There are two simple points I want to make. First, we have to help the developing world manage its water better and, secondly, we have to help nations get together and equitably share their transboundary water before more people die in conflicts caused by water, a commodity more valuable than all the precious metals in the world.

In terms of helping countries manage their water better, I want to focus on sub-Saharan Africa. It uses very little of its renewable water resources—less than 3 per cent, of which 2 per cent is used for agriculture, compared to many parts of Asia where it is over 40 per cent. So it is in Africa where the potential for improvement is greatest. Here, the problem is based more on economics and lack of knowledge than actual physical scarcity because the greatest poverty in Africa is a poverty of information, closely followed by a lack of responsible investment.

Here are a few ideas, whereby the UK and other donors can make a difference. We can help provide more cheap farm-based and community-based reservoirs for both agricultural and domestic use. Very often, that just involves a couple of days with a bulldozer. Smallholder farmers need the knowledge to manage their soils to make them receptive to rain, they need the knowledge and funding to have drip irrigation which does not waste the water and they need the funding for small, shared abstractions from aquifers. We in the UK can help with that seed-corn funding and the dissemination of knowledge.

Ground water provides reliable water to more than 100 million people in Africa, and is a resource of choice for developing rural water supplies. But these underground resources need to be defined by their location, quality, quantity and, above all, recharge rate, so that they can be managed sustainably for future generations. We need to avoid the problems of the overused aquifers in India and China. Again, I believe this is an area where we can help.

To endorse a point already made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, if a poor African smallholder buys modern seeds to produce three or four times the yield of her normal seeds, she is often risking all the family’s wealth to do so. Indeed, her family’s ability to survive could be on the line, because if she plants and there is no rain, she will get no crop and will be unable to feed her family. This terrifying risk, which can get only worse with climate change, is not helped by the fact that African farmers rarely get weather forecasts to allow them to make informed decisions about their farming practices. Again, we can help here, both in the production and communication of forecasts.

Turning to my second point, water can and almost certainly will cause conflicts over the next few decades. The trouble is that waters and rivers do not recognise political boundaries. The 10 nations now using the waters of the Nile are a good example of where things could go wrong. Turkey’s dams on the Tigris and Euphrates, rivers that are the lifeblood of Iraq and Syria, are another. The excessive abstraction by Israel from the River Jordan before it reaches the country of its name could inflame an already sensitive situation. There are some 250 other shared waterways throughout the world. The Indus, for example, is another sensitive spot.

There is a UN convention on the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, which sets out how nations should resolve their differences over shared waterways. It is only in this way that the management of transboundary fresh water will be equitably shared between the conflicting needs of the poor, the rich, the farmers, the towns, and the environment in both upstream and downstream countries. This convention, which was devised with the help of UK lawyers, needs 35 countries to accede to it before it comes into operation. It currently has about 25, so anything we can do to encourage further signatories, the less danger there will be from wars breaking out over water. In spite of the fact that no one in the UK, including Defra, DfID and the Foreign Office, is able to put forward a single remaining argument against signing, our Government have not acceded to this convention. Frankly, it is a disgrace. I will end there.