First collision

There are only two families in the world,” author of “Don Quixote” Miguel de Cervantes would muse. “The haves and the have-nots.”

The  Malampaya Natural Gas Project in Palawan province  earned P77.1 billion over eight years. That’s  chicken feed to oil-rich “haves” like Saudi Arabia. Oil  wealth  allows Riyadh to slam  Indonesian and Filipina housemaids who seek a couple of hundred dollars increase in wages.

“Let me tell you one thing I have against Moses,” the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir griped. “He took us forty years into the desert and brought us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil.”

Just like the Philippines?  Nonetheless, we  stood  tall among the “haves” in other equally valuable natural resources: lush forests, gushing waters and teeming seas.

That’s  past  tense now. “When God made the Philippines, it was perfect,” friends  insist. “So He made the Filipinos.”

Look at our trees. One remains out of the ten we originally  had.  Serial floods were the result, as we  saw in water-hyacinth-clogged Rio Grande de Mindanao. Torrents swept  away  between 74 million  to 81 million of topsoil.  It  takes nature a century to form an inch of topsoil, source of food for our children.

The Philippine eagle, cockatoo and 87 other birds are critically endangered. Government banned  selling abroad  of giant clams—a drastic reversal of our role as world lead exporter. That parallels the timber trade’s collapse. In the 1960s, the Philippines strutted as the  “prima donna” of  log exporters. Today, we’re  wood paupers.

Consider water. “We drink it. We generate electricity with it. We soak our crops with it. Yet we’re stretching  supplies to the breaking point,” says the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development.  Really?

Many  are  still  reeling from last  week’s floods in Cotabato to Sultan Kudarat. They were hip-high in parts of Metro Manila. Water from denuded hills overflowed plastic-clogged drains and swamped downtown Cebu City.

“Who used rain catchments to prepare for summer’s  drought?” asked Magsaysay awardee Antonio Oposa. Summers are now longer, cloudbursts more frequent as the equatorial band of rains shift, University of  Washington  scientists caution.

Our “water abundance” is a shattered myth. Each Filipino has 4,476 liters of “internal renewable resources.” Malaysians have 21,259 liters. Cebu City siphons twice what its aquifers can  recharge. Then mayor Tomas Osmeña hired  an 80-year-old “water diviner” Soledad Legaspi. Lola Choleng had her  task cut out. In  China, India and the   Philippines, total availability of water per person per year  slumped  below 1,700 cubic meters, the  Asian Development Bank notes. That’s the global threshold for water stress.

There is no substitute for water.  You can’t drink oil. Every man, woman and child needs  almost four liters of water daily.  Rice and staples  need  500 times as much water.

Look at the Middle East  where  over  two million Filipino overseas workers are deployed. Families fret about  safety as the “Arab Spring” turns bloody, notably  in Syria’s massacres. But spreading water shortages can trigger more upheavals, says Earth Policy Institute’s  Lester Brown.

Next year, Saudi Arabia will have pumped  aquifers dry. Riyadh will  harvest  it’s  last wheat crop. Some 30 million  Saudis—the equivalent of a Canada—will totally depend on imported grain.

Yemen is now  a “hydrological basket case.” Like  Cebu, it pumps  aquifers beyond the rate of recharge. In the capital Sana’a, tap water  trickles  once every four  days. The grain harvest shrunk by a third  over the last 40 years.

Populous  Syria and Iraq  depend  for irrigation water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Now these flows are drastically reduced.

Governments  failed to  mesh population and water policies. Daily, there are  10,000 more mouths  to feed and less water with which to raise food. “The world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level,”  Brown writes. “For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region. (There is)  nothing in sight to arrest the decline.”

In  Asia, births and migrants swell city populations by the size of a Seattle every three days. Will residents  be split  between water-haves and have-nots? And what can be done?

Leaders must face the fact that the era of abundant  resources is over. Deepening scarcities are here to stay. “The time when you torched a hectare of  trees to harvest 600 kilos of palay is gone,” forester Sudhakhar Rao wrote.

Policies must address underlying causes, not  symptoms. Polluter-pay-rules, for example, must be adopted. Strip away subsidies.  Price scarce  resources like water at their real cost. This  shifts policy away from top-down edicts to incentives for conservation management.

“Singapore and Israel do a great job of conserving water,” ADB’s Arjun Thapan  says. They set realistic tariffs and ensure  wastewater is treated and  reused.

Reforms don’t come cheap. Curbing ecological plunder affects wallets of the “haves”—the politically connected, like loggers in Congress. Reforms postponed cost more over the long haul.

The “have-nots” are victims. Most  can’t afford illness from dirty water or thin harvests. They  inflict  havoc. They poach, overfish or raze trees to secure the next meal. They have few options.

Attention is shifting away from physical limits to growth,” World Bank notes. It  focuses on “incentives for human behavior.” The divide between the “haves” and  “have-nots” can be bridged.