Would You Spend 10% Of Your Income On Bottled Water?

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yolland

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World Water Forum Opens in Mexico

By MARK STEVENSON
The Associated Press, March 16, 2006


MEXICO CITY -- Failing public water systems have forced more and more people in poor countries to buy bottled water from private companies, a form of privatization that has created a sharp divide among activists and officials gathered in Mexico City for an international water summit. As delegates from the 121 countries gather Thursday for the 4th World Water Forum, demonstrators plan protests against privatization, dam projects, and water extraction from impoverished Indian communities. The goal of the 7-day forum is improving water access for the poor-- an effort that has failed in the past. The poor pay vastly more money to private corporations for their water today than they did when the first Forum was held in 1997.

Privatization of water systems has been a hard sell since 2000, when thousands of Bolivians protested rate increases in water contracts held by foreign companies. The protests left 7 demonstrators dead and forced the companies out of the country. Bottled water, on the other hand, has earned good profits and little attention. "It's in some ways sort of a stealth privatization," said Janet Larsen, research director for the Earth Policy Institute, a private, Washington-based environmental group.

Once a First World health indulgence or symbol of European epicures, bottled water is fast becoming a staple of the Third World, dominated in many regions by giants like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle. Mexico--where about 40% of the nation's 103 million residents live in poverty--is a poster child for the phenomenon. The country is now the second-largest consumer of bottled water in the world, just behind the US in terms of volume and Italy in per capita consumption. Sales of bottled water in China jumped by more than 250% between 1999 and 2004. They tripled in India and almost doubled in Indonesia, according to a study released by the Institute. Worldwide, the industry is now worth about $100 billion per year.

It's not because people can suddenly afford the luxury; it's because tap water in some countries is so bad people are loath to use it, sometimes even for bathing. "You can't even brush your teeth without fearing that you're going to get who-knows-what infection," said Javier Bogantes, director of the Latin American Water Tribunal, which is holding mock "trials" of water-rights violations in Mexico City during the forum. "You can't take a shower, thinking about what the stuff in the water could do to your skin."

In Mexico, bottled water is distributed by vendors in roving bicycle carts for as little as 80 cents for a 4.5-gallon jug. Usually, it's just filtered tap water. Still, it's a hot seller in Mexico City slums such as Iztapalapa, where the yellow-brown tap water is tainted by magnesium and iron. Juana Maria Bautista--like many poor around the world--said she often spends as much as 10% of her income on water sold in bottles or delivered by water-tank trucks. "We usually buy 3 or 4 jugs a week but sometimes, there isn't enough money," said the 42-year-old factory worker, who earns about $66 a week.

Mexican officials, stung by criticism that bottled water costs consumers thousands of times more than tap water would, announced a quixotic campaign in early March to persuade people to drink from the tap. Two days after the announcement, the government's Health Department conceded that, given tap water quality, people should boil it before drinking it. "The problem isn't that these companies are supplying people" with bottled water, Bogantes said. "The question is, given that governments have invested millions of dollars in water treatment and distribution systems, why aren't they supplying the population?"

One problem is that many people are accustomed to paying little or nothing for municipal water in many developing countries, said German Martinez, director of the water system in Mexico City, where only about 40% of customers pay on time. "What we really have to do is get people to pay for their water," he said. And when authorities construct dams to provide more water for the population, "people come and demonstrate" against them, added Jesus Campos, assistant director of Mexico's National Water Commission.

The World Water Forum, which meets every three years, is examining these issues. It will also address harnessing water for growth, providing water more efficiently, using it in a more environmentally conscious manner, and preventing it from causing natural disasters. But Bogantes has doubts about whether the forum will consider noncommercial solutions. "The current that is trying to solve water supply through privatization has been strong at past forums," Bogantes said. "And it appears to be the tendency here at this forum."
"People are accustomed to paying little or nothing for municipal water"...I wonder if they might be willing to pay more (seeing as how they're doing it already for the bottled stuff!) if the supply and quality of it were better. I'm not familiar with local water supply in all these countries (though the description of Mexico City's "yellow-brown tap water" doesn't suprise), but from what I've seen in India, a lot of city dwellers drink bottled water much of the time simply because the municipal supply is so unreliable. No major Indian city is able to maintain a 24-hour supply of adequately pressurized water, and 20% of Indian municipalities get piped water only every third day. And of course slum dwellers don't have their own supply at all, bottled or otherwise--they use municipal taps, the water from which from must be either filtered (forget that--too expensive) or boiled; which most do...or if they don't, then they often get dysentery or typhus. Much of this failure to deliver is caused by insufficient funding of municipal water boards--despite the fact that even by the most pessimistic estimates, it would be far, far more cost-efficient to improve these than to keep on subsidizing bottled water to the point where it could meet everyone's needs.

Not that bottled water is working out beautifully as a solution anyway. For one thing, it doesn't seem to be much "healthier." A recent government study of 100 different brands sold in Delhi, from (Indian-sourced) Coca-Cola's to the local pushcart vendor's, found that all but one brand (imported!) had levels of pesticide contamination far exceeding the government's already high allowances--and I'm talking 20, 30 times the allowed levels. It's also a hell of a lot more expensive than tap water (in fact, more expensive than gasoline in many places). And then there's the staggering packaging waste--we could fuel 100,000 cars a year with the oil used to make plastic water bottles here in the US alone...and 90% of those bottles wing up getting tossed. And they ain't too biodegradable.

Also, regarding the dams comment...while I've certainly seen some ill-advised anti-dam campaigns, and the hard reality *is* that mushrooming populations means more dams will be needed...what they're not telling you here is that not only do the rural villagers who usually comprise these protesters not benefit from the resulting water supply, but worse, it often comes at their local water supply's expense. The same thing happens with larger bottled water companies, who pump or collect their own water (hey, at least it's not glorified tap!)--Coca-Cola alone, for instance, has been hit with lawsuits from over 50 Indian villages which suffered water shortages as a result of their water being effectively siphoned off for middle-and-upper-class urbanites.

:der: Anyone want to make the case for why it's not a problem that so many poor people in developing countries are spending 10% of their income on water? Or drinking yellow-brown stuff that comes on tap twice a week because they can't afford 10%? For that matter, why do so many of us drink bottled water?
 
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This is a long-time interest of mine. People shouldn't have to pay at all for clean water. Period. Why should they have to run the risk of a terrible infection if they can't afford bottled water? People who live in poverty can ill afford to spend 10% of their income on bottled water, but they have no choice if the tap water is full of horrific diseases. This is an intolerable state of affairs.
 
I think bottled water is a rort. It doesn't have fluoride, which has made an immense difference to childrens teeth in my area. But we've got big dam issues from the drought. So it's rather localised. All of Australia has it's own issues, but I'd imagine that this is a localised issue to everyone the world over due to things like poverty, dams, drought, all depending on what effects any or all have on your location.
 
verte76 said:
This is a long-time interest of mine. People shouldn't have to pay at all for clean water. Period. Why should they have to run the risk of a terrible infection if they can't afford bottled water? People who live in poverty can ill afford to spend 10% of their income on bottled water, but they have no choice if the tap water is full of horrific diseases. This is an intolerable state of affairs.

How do you make clean water appear?
 
Clean water and bottled water are two different issues.

Bottled water, in addition to the specious health claims, also creates a mountain of trash.

Clean water, a common place thing in the US, is a luxury for many - especially in places like India.
 
nbcrusader said:


How do you make clean water appear?

We're not making clean water appear. We're building wells that provide a village with clean water. I'm not an engineer, but they are providing people with clean water.
 
nbcrusader said:
Clean water and bottled water are two different issues.

Bottled water, in addition to the specious health claims, also creates a mountain of trash.

Clean water, a common place thing in the US, is a luxury for many - especially in places like India.

True. I've been told to stick to bottled water in Turkey.
 
verte76 said:
We're not making clean water appear. We're building wells that provide a village with clean water.
While this is *part* of the solution on a national level, bringing up wells is--somewhat--to mix unrelated issues here. My impression is that both you and nb (me, too) are involved in supporting projects to build wells in undersupplied rural areas--while this is definitely an important and praiseworthy goal, it is also, in the big picture, too piecemeal to fully constitute an adequate solution to the full sweep of water-supply problems faced by villagers in developing countries. Dam politics, other land-use politics, bottled-water-pumping politics, traditional social hierarchies, and much more are also involved in the problem. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that bottled water might have *some* supporting role to play in relieving certain kinds of rural water shortages--for example, in already water-starved regions of India, a temporary failure of the monsoon can have devastating consequences which might in some cases be more cost-effectively addressed by delivering bottled water (plus temporary financial breaks for farmers, etc.) than by just sitting back and watching as yet more villagers flee to the already saturated, resource-strapped cities.

However, an equally important issue at hand is how best to supply clean water to the developing world's mushrooming urban population. Wells are not what's needed here--better funding of municipal (piped) water supplies is. In many urban areas of India, inadequate reservoirs are not so much the problem--it's more inadequate financial support of the pumping, pressurizing, filtering, and treatment equipment needed to ensure a reasonable supply of clean tap water. Building more dams to supply these areas won't fulfill the goals it's meant to if the resulting water supplies aren't treated properly.
 
foray said:

http://www.anu.edu.au/andc/res/aewords/aewords_hr.php

rort
A fraudulent or dishonest act or practice (a tax rort). Also used as a verb (to rort the system). Rort comes from standard English rorty meaning ‘boisterous, jolly’, and, in the late nineteenth century, ‘coarse, of dubious propriety’. The second sense of rorty disappeared, but has been retained in the Australian rort. First recorded 1919.

I must say I wasn't aware this was an uniquely Australian word :D
 
Yolland, I'm not suggesting that our well charity is going to solve the problems of clean water in underdeveloped countries. This would involve a massive effort that's beyond our means and scope. Rather, it is to give clean water to a few thousand people who don't have it. It's not the same thing.
 
OK, I see that now--sorry, I probably came across more lecturing than I intended. I was looking at your post in light of what I took to be nb's far more general question, but looking at your other posts in this thread, I can see that wasn't really what you were getting at. :)
 
Yolland highlights an interesting dilema. Do you devote resources to (1) lobbying a government (such as India) to improve infrastructure so everyone has access to clean water, or (2) smaller projects that actually bring clean water to small groups who otherwise go without?

India's water problem is not new, and it appears they have the resources to work to a solution. But, even if they did, approximately a quarter of the population would go without.
 
I honestly don't know which I'd want to do. Either way you end up with people who don't have clean water, and that's a tragedy.
 
yolland said:
However, an equally important issue at hand is how best to supply clean water to the developing world's mushrooming urban population. Wells are not what's needed here--better funding of municipal (piped) water supplies is. In many urban areas of India, inadequate reservoirs are not so much the problem--it's more inadequate financial support of the pumping, pressurizing, filtering, and treatment equipment needed to ensure a reasonable supply of clean tap water. Building more dams to supply these areas won't fulfill the goals it's meant to if the resulting water supplies aren't treated properly.
In India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times, Sept. 29


NEW DELHI — Every day, Rita Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water. It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives. “Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,” a weary Mrs. Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready to press redial for the water tanker. “You become so edgy all the time.”

Mrs. Prasher has the misfortune of living in a neighborhood on New Delhi’s poorly served southern fringe. As the city’s water supply runs through a 5,600-mile network of battered public pipes, 25 to 40% leaks out. By the time it reaches her, there is hardly enough. On average, she gets no more than 13 gallons a month from the tap and a water bill from the water board that fluctuates from $6 to $20, at its whimsy, she complains, since there is never a meter reading anyway. That means she has to look for other sources, scrimp and scavenge to meet her family’s water needs. She buys an additional 265 gallons from private tankers, for roughly $20 a month. On top of that, she pays $2.50 toward the worker who pipes water from a private tube-well she and other residents of her apartment block have installed in the courtyard.

Nearly a fourth of New Delhi households, according to the government commissioned Delhi Human Development Report, rely at least in some part on such wells. It is one of the principal reasons groundwater in New Delhi is drying up faster than virtually anywhere in the country: 78% of it is considered overexploited. Still, the new posh apartment buildings sprouting across New Delhi and its suburbs sell themselves by ensuring a 24-hour water supply — usually by drilling wells deep underground. “Imagine never being thirsty for water,” boasts a newspaper advertisement for one new development.

In the richest city in India, with the nation’s economy marching ahead at an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the government’s astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power.

The slums built higgledy-piggledy behind Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood have no public pipes at all. The Jal Board sends tankers instead. The women here waste their days waiting for water, and its arrival sets off desperate wrestling in the streets. Kamal Krishnan quit her job for the sake of securing her share. Five days a week, she would clean offices in the next neighborhood. Five nights a week, she would go home to find no water at home. The buckets would stand empty. Finally, her husband ordered her to quit. And wait. “I want to work, but I can’t,” she said glumly. “I go mad waiting for water.”

Elsewhere, in the central city, where the nation’s top politicians have their official homes, the average daily water supply is three times what finally arrives even in Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood. Mrs. Prasher rations her water day to day as if New Delhi were a desert. She uses the leftover water from the dog bowl to water the plants. She recycles soapy water from the laundry to mop the balcony. And even when she gets it, the quality is another question altogether. Her well water has turned salty as it has receded over the years. The water from the private tanker is mucky-brown. Still, Mrs. Prasher says, she can hardly afford to reject it. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. “It’s water.”

The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network. The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contaminated in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year. Today the problems threaten India’s ability to fortify its sagging farms, sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and habitable. At stake is not only India’s economic ambition but its very image as the world’s largest democracy. “If we become rich or poor as a nation, it’s because of water,” said Sunita Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.

Conflicts over water mirror the most vexing changes facing India: the competing demands of urban and rural areas, the stubborn divide between rich and poor, and the balance between the needs of a thriving economy and a fragile environment. New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day. Warning of “an unparalleled water crisis,” a study released in August found that 25% of New Delhi households had no access to piped water, and that 27% got water for less than 3 hours a day. Nearly 2 million households, the report also found, had no toilet.

The daily New Delhi hustle for water only adds to the strains on the public system. A few years ago, for instance, to compensate for the low water pressure in the public pipeline, Mrs. Prasher and her neighbors began tapping directly into the public water main with so-called booster pumps, each one sucking out as much water as possible. It was a me-first approach to a limited and unreliable public resource, and it proliferated across this me-first city, each booster pump further draining the water supply.

An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45% of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system. Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.

The government says that 9 out of 10 Indians have access to the public water supply, but that may include sources that are going dry or are contaminated. The World Bank, in rare agreement with Ms. Narain, warned in a report published last October that India stood on the edge of “an era of severe water scarcity...Unless dramatic changes are made — and made soon — in the way in which government manages water, India will have neither the cash to maintain and build new infrastructure, nor the water required for the economy and for people.”

The window to address the crisis is closing. Climate change is expected only to exacerbate the problems by causing extreme bouts of weather — heat, deluge or drought.

The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India. In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastructure — and yet, still worshiped. From the bridges that soar across the river, the faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter the ashes of their dead.

In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead. As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water. As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day. Coursing through the capital, the river becomes a noxious black thread. Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface. It is hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. A government audit found last year that the level of fecal coliform, one measure of filth, in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.

In 1992, a retired Indian Navy officer who once sailed regattas on the Yamuna took his government to the Supreme Court. The retired officer, Sureshwar D. Sinha, charged that the state had killed the Yamuna and violated his constitutional right, as a practicing Hindu, to perform ritual baths in the river. Since then, the Supreme Court ordered the city’s water authority to treat all sewage flowing into the river and improve water quality. In 14 years, that command is still unmet. New Delhi’s population, now 16 million, has expanded by roughly 41% in the last 15 years, officials estimate. As the number of people living — and defecating — in the city soars, on average more than half of the sewage they pour into the river goes untreated.

A government audit last year indicted the Jal Board for having spent $200 million and yielding “very little value.” The construction of more sewage treatment plants has done little to stanch the flow, in part because sewage lines are badly clogged and because power failures leave them inoperable for hours at a time. “It has not improved at all because the quantity of sewage is constantly increasing,” said R. C. Trivedi, a director of the Central Pollution Control Board, which monitors the quality of the Yamuna River. “The gap is continually widening.” Making matters worse, many New Delhi neighborhoods, like Janata Colony, are not even connected to sewage pipes. Open sewers hem the narrow lanes of the slum. Every alley carries their stench. Some canals are so clogged with trash and sludge that they are no more than green-black ribbons of muck. It is a mosquitoes’ paradise. Malaria and dengue fever are regular visitors.

These canals empty into a wide storm drain. It, in turn, runs through the eastern edges of the city, raking in more sewage and cascades of trash, before it merges with effluent from two sewage treatment plants, and finally, enters the Yamuna. Carrying the capital’s waste on its back, the Yamuna meanders south to cities like Mathura and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. It is their principal source of drinking water, too. New Delhi’s downstream neighbors are forced to treat the water heavily, hiking up the cost.

With New Delhi slated to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the government proposes to remake this riverfront with a sports and recreation complex. In the meantime, the Yamuna, vital and befouled as it is, bears the weight of New Delhi’s ambitions. At dawn each morning, men sink into the still, black waters to retrieve whatever can be bartered or sold: rings from a dead man’s finger, coins dropped by the faithful, the remnants of rubber sandals, plastic water bottles. The dhobis, who launder clothes, line up on one stretch of riverbank, pounding saris and bedsheets on stone tablets. A man shovels sand from the river bottom: every bullock cart he fills for a cement maker will fetch him a coveted $5.50. Men and boys bathe.

The situation for New Delhi, and all of India, is only expected to worsen. India now uses an estimated 829 billion cubic yards of water every year — that is more than guzzling an entire Lake Erie. But its water needs are growing by leaps. By 2050, official projections indicate, demand will more than double, and exceed the 1.4 trillion cubic yards that India has at its disposal.

Yet the most telling paradox of the city’s water crisis is that New Delhi is not entirely lacking in water. The problem is distribution, hampered by a feeble infrastructure and a lack of resources, concedes Arun Mathur, chief executive of the Jal Board. The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40% of the actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr. Mathur well knows. “It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we can make water abundantly available,” he said.
A proposal to privatize water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and was dropped. So the city’s pipe network remains a punctured mess. That means, like most everything else in this country, some people have more than enough, and others too little.
 
It's mind boggling that some countries can afford nuclear weapons development programs, can buy state of the art warplanes, keep huge armies, etc but cannot supply water to it's people.
 
Here in Honduras, it's quite a wonder that you guys drink from tap water. EVerybody is like "So, did you know that in the states they drink straight from the faucer?" and people see that as amazing.

The truth is we're all pretty used to drinking from bottled water and the price is pretty accesible. Those big gallons, that I'm not quite sure how much water they carry, that you put on top of water coolers cost somewhere around $1.15. :shrug:
 
clean tap water ( from very good quality where i life ) is about $2 a 1000 liter.

Still i have installed a water effecient toilet, use rainwater to wash my car and water my garden because i think it is a crime against humanity to use good drinking water for useless things like that.
 
BrownEyedBoy said:
Here in Honduras, it's quite a wonder that you guys drink from tap water. EVerybody is like "So, did you know that in the states they drink straight from the faucer?" and people see that as amazing.

we can do the same here in Bogotá. Unfortunately a lot people still have the idea that Colombia has infinite sources of potable water, but many of us are making an effort to save it and use it in a reasonable way, as Rono does :). Besides " el niño" is aproaching and hard times are coming for the crops and the electric system.
 
I'm in the U.S., but I know a little about what a problem it is to have an inadequate water supply. My parent's home had a well, but over the years the water table had dropped. In the winter and spring, it was pretty okay and generally we had enough water, if we didn't go crazy.

But in the summer when the weather got dryer, it sometimes got to the point where we had to drag every stitch of clothing to the laundromat, could only take two minute showers (if that), and sometimes had to buy bottled water to make sure we had enough drinking and cooking. They put off drilling a new well because of the expense and their attitudes; they were born and raised country folks and it didn't worry them silly if life wasn't a bowl of cherries, so they were in no hurry.

But it was still a great day when they finally extended the city water lines into the country far enough for my folks to hook up. Suddenly we could take a shower without worrying that we'd be left standing covered with soap and nothing to rinse it off with; my mother was saving $20 or more a month doing laundry at home; and you didn't have to "go easy on that water, I've got to cook breakfast in the morning."

Of course, it's even worse where the tap water is non-existent or unusable.

It's ridiculous, I think, that a large city anywhere in the world can't get their act together well enough to provide one of the necessities of life to its people, for a reasonable fee. It makes it look as though it is simply not a priority for the government, local or national, to take care of its own people.

(Though I do think that programs that endeavor to provide wells in rural areas are a good thing, too.)
 
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