International financiers unveiled a multibillion pound plan yesterday to prevent the world suffering a water crisis that they warn could be far more catastrophic than the war in Iraq.
The plan, which aims to raise world spending on water from $80-billion to $180-billion a year, aims to achieve the UN target of halving the number of people in the world without access to drinking water and sanitation by 2015.
Environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners, however, criticised the plan as a Trojan Horse, designed to allow the private sector to profit from vast construction projects.
The scheme will be formally launched today in Kyoto at the World Water Forum, the biggest environmental conference since the Johannesburg summit last year.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, has said water will also top the agenda at this year’s G8 summit in Evian.
Michel Camdessus, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who oversaw the drafting of the report, said: ”The war on the lack of water is more important than the war in Iraq.”
”It will keep going and going, and soon reach dramatic proportions.”
The plan calls for a ”global control tower” to oversee a huge growth in investment in water-related projects. It suggests the construction of more dams, the introduction of loans from international financial institutions to municipal governments, and greater protection for investors and multinational utility companies from currency risks.
Critics said it focused too much on large-scale funding and not enough on small-scale efficiency gains that could reap rewards through community initiatives such as rainwater harvesting.
”The Camdessus report is too much about big bucks,” said Richard Jolly, of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, a UN-mandated organisation which promotes provision of water to the world’s poor.
”It fails to emphasise the need for a change in priorities in the water and sanitation sector. We can’t just double the amounts [invested], we must restructure,” he said.
Anti-poverty activists said the forum, which is largely sponsored by construction and drug companies, was being used by the private sector.
”These guys have set themselves up as the global high command of water,” said Maude Barlow, the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, a Canadian campaigning group.
”The Camdessus report is dreadful. It just promotes further public risk and insulates private companies, who admit they are not in the business to help the poor.” – Guardian Unlimited Â