RIYADH, 12 November 2006 — The 2006 Global Human Development Report released yesterday called for global action plans to resolve the world’s worsening water and sanitation crisis responsible annually for the deaths of nearly two million children.
Releasing the report entitled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis,” El-Mostafa Benlamlih, resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told reporters that unclean water was a greater threat to human security than violent conflict.
“More than 2.6 billion people still lack access to proper sanitation and 1.1 billion people have no regular access to clean water. As a result, 1.8 million children die from diarrhea each year, making the disease the second-largest cause of global child mortality,” Benlamih said.
He commended the efforts of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Water and praised its efforts for carrying out a public awareness campaign. “The crisis in water and sanitation is a crisis for the poor. More than 660 million people without sanitation live on $2 or less a day, and more than 385 million live on $1 or less a day,” he said.
Quoting the report, he said human-waste disposal was one of the strongest determinants of child survival around the world. Improving sanitation reduces overall child mortality by about a third.
“The toilet may seem an unlikely catalyst for human development, but the report provides abundant and powerful evidence to show its benefits. Research shows that in Peru, a flush toilet reduces the risk of infant death by 59 percent compared to an infant in a household without a flush toilet. In Egypt, data show the risk of infant death falling by 57 percent in households with toilets. It is thus imperative to develop a Global Action Plan on water and sanitation and mobilize finance, support developing-country governments use of local capital markets, and enhance capacity to act.”
Water scarcity is an acute problem throughout the Middle East. Iran and Iraq are the only countries in the region which have adequate water supplies and the report pointed out that 90 percent of the population in the Middle East and North Africa will live in water-scarce nations by 2025.
In the past 50 years, there have been 37 reported instances of violence between states concerning water; all but seven took place in the Middle East. Yet over the same period, more than 200 treaties on water have been negotiated between countries, said the report.
“The Palestinian population is half the size of Israel’s, but consumes only 10 to 15 percent of the amount of water consumed by Israelis. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers use nearly nine times as much water per person as Palestinians. In fact, Palestinians experience one of the highest levels of water scarcity in the world,” the report said.
