Give us this day our daily water

Abstract

The lines of the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘‘Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.’’ so often mis-quoted as ‘‘. . . and not a drop to drink’’ exemplify the concern that although water is abundant on this planet, a resource that will never disappear, it is most often unusable, unavailable, or in the wrong place. All that, of course, from our anthropocentric viewpoint. The human race wants water that is potable, readily available and present in an adequate amount. The human race wants too much. It may, in the end, prove not possible to supply enough good water to everyone but it is a worthy aim to try and do so. At the present time billions, rather than millions, of people have water problems of varying severity. Perhaps no more than half of the world’s population has adequate access to safe water. Year by year improvements are made and more of the population gets access to water and sanitation. There is a long way to go but around the world improvements are being made. Not every attempt to help goes smoothly. Provision of pipe wells in Bangladesh gave plenty of water but it turned out it was contaminated with dangerous levels of arsenic. The scale was alarming, between 28 and 35 million people have had to rely on drinking-water with elevated levels of arsenic. In consequence the number of cases of skin lesions, including cancer related to drinking-water in that country is estimated at 1.5 million. Unfortunately, Bangladesh is not the only country with arsenic contamination of ground water. The element pollutes water in many other countries, including Argentina, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. Similar health problems have been found in several of these countries. As is the way of legislators, special days and even years are set aside to try and focus people’s minds on the problems they are trying to solve. 2008 is the UN International Year of Sanitation. The World Water Day is the 22nd of March. This day is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment andDevelopment (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. It is flagged as a day for international observance but for most people that means that the ‘‘media’’ may run stories theymay read. In countries where water problems are life threatening, such a day may raise hopes. This does not matter so long so the governments who should be doing something do it and do not, as is the way of governments, talk about doing it. In the jargon of the United Nations General Assembly: they must set up and implement concrete activities as deemed appropriate in the national context. History records that the UN, let alone national governments, could do better. With provision of water comes something that is really even more important: sanitation, something unavailable to most of the world’s population. No lavatories and a large population gives an inevitable result – you have to be very careful when walking around where you put your feet. The problem here is that it is difficult to inspire people and get their help with such a mundane thing. Possibly a compulsory period of life in a sanitation-free environment would concentrate hearts and minds of the politicians who could help. New schools or large agricultural projects are