Slumbering law

“A MAN will fight over three things,” the late US Sen. Barry Goldwater once mused. “Water, women and gold, usually in that order.”

Goldwater’s remark resonates in recent threats of riots over water shortages in 177 barangays of Metro Manila. Dry taps signal a hair-trigger threat. We ignore the threat at our children’s peril.

Yet, how many paid attention when the Inquirer reported that Magsaysay Awardee Antonio Oposa and concerned citizens asked the Supreme Court to issue a “writ of kalikasan”? If granted, the writ would compel respondents—government units, provinces, even the new Commission on Climate Change—to implement Republic Act 6716, which “has long languished in the sickbed of noncompliance.”

RA what? Written into our law books in 1989, RA 6716 directed that at least 100,000 rainwater collectors and catchment areas be built all over the country by 1991. Barangays, towns and cities were to build cisterns that would collect rainwater that usually seeped away.

“The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept,” Shakespeare wrote in “Measure For Measure.” The Bard aptly sums up how the rainwater law floundered. Deaths from poor sanitation rose.

In a reply to an inquiry by Oposa and the Global Legal Action on Climate Change, the Department of Public Works and Highways admitted that from January to June last year, it managed to put up a measly four demonstration rainwater collectors.

Compliance with RA 6716 has, therefore, been a mind-boggling less than one percent. You want to be precise? Okay: 0.004 percent.

“This number is minuscule, microscopic and infinitesimal,” Oposa and his group fumed. “In law, that is tantamount to gross negligence in the performance of public duty. It also presents a clear, unmistakable and palpable cause of action for a writ of mandamus.”

Indeed, “distant water won’t help put out a fire close at hand,” as a Chinese proverb says. Clean and adequate water must be at hand to ensure life and growth.

This week, 122 countries voted (none against) for a United Nations resolution that declares: “The right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right, essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life.”

About 1.5 million children under five years of age die each year from water and sanitation-related diseases, the resolution noted. Worldwide, 884 million people today have no access to safe drinking water. And more than 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation.

“The most fractured human right in this country, where 66 out of every 100 lack safe water, is that of a child to celebrate his first birthday,” Viewpoint noted four years ago. “These are preventable deaths… It is an indictment that we assume those tiny rough-hewn coffins on country roads or city alleys form part of the landscape.”

More children could have blown out a birthday candle, if only our leaders were not obsessed with more crucial issues. Like what? Pork barrel or multiple self-awarded bonuses for water agency bosses, even wang-wang (until P-Noy came along).

Yet, the solutions are doable and affordable. For example, building a rain cistern, as RA 6716 mandates. Or sealing leaks in water system pipes.

Providing clean water can save most of the 1.8 million children who die yearly from diarrhea, says the UN study, “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.” Installing a flush toilet in the home increases by 59 percent a child’s chances of surviving to the first birthday.

To ensure more kids will celebrate birthdays beyond their first requires a coherent environmental policy. Today, 58 percent of our groundwater is contaminated. Untreated domestic and industrial wastes poison our reservoirs.

Water use is increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the International Herald Tribune reports. But here, you can drink from only a third of our rivers. The rest are cesspools.

By 2025, water availability will be marginal in 8 of 19 major river basins and most of the cities. We have 137 cities today. But the Supreme Court flip-flopped on criteria for cityhood (and access to Internal Revenue Allotmments). The stampede to create cities that the Court triggered with its decision continues.

For starters, we can implement RA 6716. We have to reverse course and conserve water.

“Not having access to clean water is a euphemism for profound deprivation,” the UN says. The crisis in water and sanitation is above all a crisis for the poor. –Juan Mercado, Philippine Daily Inquirer

(juanlmercado@gmail.com )