Water Wars Loom in Water-Rich Philippines
By MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN
Baguio City, Philippines –
(December
8, 2017) An eerie calm exists over the villages of Fedelisan, Sagada, Dalican
of Bontoc, and Saclit of Sadanga of Mountain Province, Philippines. It is
because, there is no telling how many killings will again turn the pristine
waters red.
Not too long ago, ten people
died and scores injured in prolonged tribal war over water.
Water has become a major bone of contention not only in villages
but also nationwide. Water-related conflicts
have been increasing lately. The Philippine National Police (PNP) in the
four regions covering 56 provinces, identified
34 areas last year where shooting and killing erupted due to conflicts on water
rights, boundaries, use and sharing.
In urban areas, it may not be long before the problem of diminishing water
resource goes uncontrolled towards social unrest.
Per capita demands are increasing and per
capita water availability is declining due to population growth and trends in
economic development.
The country’s capital Manila is the most vulnerable to water scarcity, so
are the major cities Baguio, Cebu,
Bacolod, Iloilo, Olongapo,
Angeles. Cagayan de Oro, Pagadian and Davao
city;
the Philippine Center for Water
and Sanitation (PCWS) said. These cities are currently experiencing severe
water shortages.
Enough Water But Unavailable For All
It may be unthinkable because according to Dr. Peter H. Glieck of the
Pacific Institute for Environment (PIE), the country happens to have 323 km^3
per year of total renewable fresh water supply, third most bountiful in
Southeast Asia after Indonesia and Malaysia. But think again. Of that amount,
the country can only withdraw a total of 29.5 per cent yearly of water.
Dr. Glieck reported in the 2012 edition of the “World Water” says, the
Philippines will need some 393 per cent of total withdrawal starting year 2000
until the next ten years. Of the total withdrawable amount, 18 per cent is
consumed for domestic use, 21 per cent for industrial purposes and 61 per cent
for agricultural irrigation.
Luzon itself is a paradoxical case. Even with the Gran Cordillera, Caraballo
and Sierra Madre ranges which cradle three giant river basins; Agno, Angat and
Cagayan, water scarcity has not only become a problem in the country’s biggest
island. It is also causing sanitation constraints and increasing incidences of
water-related diseases and amount of land irrigated is falling as competition
for agricultural water is being strained to the limit.
Deforestation and Water Mismanagement Are Culprits
Not surprisingly, massive deforestation
is behind the problem. Deforestation is rampant nationwide. If the
country’s deforestation rate pegged at 1,500 hectares a day as of 1995 by the
World Resources Institute (WRI) is not scary enough, deforestation rates in
several provinces
are more alarming with
many provinces falling below the
ideal 60:40
forest-settlement ratio to maintain ecological balance.
The Cordillera Ecological Center, an
environmental NGO at least six provinces in the Cordillera region have only between
20 – 30 forest cover, based from LANDSAT estimates, with the province Benguet
having the least forest cover.
The country itself has only a little more than 4 million hectares of forests
left, 700,000 hectares of which are virgin forests as bared by former Senate
committee on environment Sen. Loren Legarda. But it may not be long before
these are wiped out, what with the deforestation rate far outstripping reforestation
efforts.
According to former director of PCWS Director Rory Villaluna, deforestation
is not the only cause for worsening water inadequacy. Rather, water resources
like river basins, rivers, creeks, brooks and underground water are
inadequately protected, conserved and rehabilitated. She said water levels have
not only gone down. These are being polluted at an alarming rate such that it
is not fit for domestic or agricultural use.
Such statements only prove Sen. Legarda’s lamentable revelation that only
one forester guards and protects every 3,000 hectares of forests in the
country.
“We often equate water with forests but actually ill water management and
use has only aggravated the sad state of our watersheds—our main sources of
water. Much water, if not only polluted and poisoned can be used back for the
burgeoning population”, Villaluna says. “We ask what forests can give us, but
we don’t do enough to give back to conserve our forests and water”, she added
with finality, albeit hinting that water should really be managed..
Dying Rivers
The Agno River of the Philippines is a very good example. While it feeds three
dams—San Roque, Ambuklao
and Binga which
generate 1,200
megawatts of electricity,
is dying.
From its headwaters in Mount Data and Loo, Buguias, Benguet, now the
country’s center of highland vegetable production, toxic pesticides find their
way to the river. All along its stretch, vegetable gardens using dangerous
broad spectrum pesticides exist. The deadly chemicals eventually find their way
to the river through soil and water surface as well as underground run-off.
As the river reaches Itogon municipality, cyanide and mercury from the
various mines and hundreds of pocket miners seep to the river. A Japan
Integrated Cooperative Agency (JICA) study in 1990 showed that at Lingayen
Gulf, Pangasinan, the delta of Agno, shellfishes have trace deposits of cyanide
and mercury.
Mercurial and cyanide poisoning cause weakening of the human body,
and these are characterized by symptoms coughing,
vomiting, reddening of eyes, nausea and difficulty of breathing, Dr. Charles
Cheng, a noted medical researcher and director of the Baguio-based
Chinese-Filipino General Hospital said.
Because both have cumulative effects, they may not kill instantly in small
deposits in the human body. But when accumulation defeats the tolerable level
of the human body, instant death occurs, Dr. Cheng said.
Aside from the two deadly chemicals, an independent assessment team
commissioned by the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the International Rivers
Network (IRN) found several more harmful chemicals in Agno’s river. Dr. Sergio
Feld of the team identified these as lead, selenium, molybdenum, iron, manganese,
zinc, arsenic, copper, nickel and even radioactive compounds like uranium.
The Manila-based Upland NGO Committee (UNAC) say 27 rivers which used to
provide household water, irrigation, fishing haven, and washing and swimming
grounds are “crying in silence” as they go to die in dams or either run dry.
UNAC Committee member and secretary general of the NGO Bantay Mina Nestor Caoli
says six of the 27 rivers – Balili, Agno, Baroro, Balincaquin, Bued and
Dagupan—are biologically dead due to mining.
Six more rivers are heavily polluted and silted by mining activities. These
are Naguillan, Upper Magat, Caraballo, Santa Fe, Amburayan and Pasil. Expanding
agricultural operations are pouring pesticide elements into the river, Caoli
said. The dead and dying rivers are adversely affecting economic and social
activities of people living within and along the rivers’ headwaters and
tributaries, UNAC said.
CEC added one river that feeds the country’s vegetable bowl, Balili River is
being killed mainly by solid waste pollution including human excrement from
Baguio City, a known highland tourism city. An estimated 3,000 tons monthly of
human excreta is treated by the Baguio Sewage Plant but still find their way to
Balili river.
The Cordillera, it appears, is fast turning out to be the region of not only
the “dammed, damned, but also of dying rivers”,CEC said.
The government’s Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the DENR came out
with a different view but still complements the above-said findings of the
NGOs. It says Amburayan and Baroro rivers of La Union are dead, so are Agno and
Dagupan of Pangasinan.
Even rivers in Bulacan and Batangas are dying; Balagtas, Bocaue, Guiguinto,
Marilao and Meycauayan in Bulacan and Dumaca-a in
the
province of Batangas.
In Luzon’s heart, Metro Manila, nine river sub-basins are may soon have only
poisoned water. These are Obando-Malabon-Navotas estuary in Balut and Malabon,
Marikina in Payatas, Tullahan in Valenzuela, the three Taguig-Napindan river
basins in Taguig and Taguig-Napindan in Fort Bonifacio. These are in the most
critical situations among the country’s 18 river basins whose areas total to
more than 110,000 square kilometers.
No Water Means Death Of Communities
The dead and silent rivers are now the subject of fierce rhetoric from
environmentalists hell-bent on protecting what is left of the country’s water
sources. NGOs in Luzon look squarely at logging companies, mines, dams and
insensitive farmers as culprits. Forester George Facsoy of the Cordillera
Ecological Center,
for instance, sees
the death of rivers as the decapitation of communities from the ecosystem that
once supported them.
In the Cordillera, “water is looked upon as life itself”, as the Igorot hero
Macli-ing Dulag once said. Death of a river means people will suffer deep
economic recession. There will be no farms and fishing areas, and people will
be marginalized, making them dependent on outside culture difficult for them to
adapt to, he said.
The precious water from rivers replenishes the paddies and deposits fertile
silt onto thousands of hectares of farms which foster populations along rivers.
If and when the rivers run dry, the imprint of many centuries of human
civilizations’ cumulative toiling, ethnic culture and identity will be forever
lost, he said.
Groundwater Will Be Affected
The extinction of rivers will directly affect underground water resources,
the National Water Resources Center (NWRC) warned. Of all the nation’s
provinces, only 12 have groundwater resources that are expected to provide
water in the near future. Not one of these has a groundwater area of more than
30,000 hectares—meaning—population density will definitely bear hard on water
that these sources can provide.
Groundwater, often looked upon as an unreliable resource, is possible of
being lost . It is very vulnerable and with the water and sanitation sectors’
poor management of it, like surface water, it may soon be lost to oblivion
If so, biodiversity will be lost too, and economic and social activities
will altogether be disrupted, especially in the lower regions.
Waters wars Will be Fought This Millenium
The specter of water crisis will cause communities to fight tooth and nail
for possession and use. The politics of water is as difficult as preventing a
war. It makes rivers no longer “deep and wide” as the song goes, but the rift
between communities.
Sandra Postel of the influential Worldwatch Institute says “in efforts to
seek and prevent water as flashpoints of conflict, there is a must for
mediators to allocate strategies where communities or nations can agree to
equal sharing.” Easier said than done, especially so when no law exists where
pressure is put on lower communities to either pay for the water that flows or
die without. Moreso, putting water scarcity to the already crowded policy
agenda of the government has not yet been done with genuine interest by
Philippine law-makers. Even though the challenge to recognize water scarcity as
an increasingly powerful cause of political and social instability is so great.
In fact, politicians have yet to pass a Code of Conduct for the water and
sanitation sector.
“Communities and even counties will go to war”, warned
Facsoy and the government may find it too late
to act.” The villages in Mountain Province are not the only volatile places. This
year’s drought, the impending long, hot summer and El Nino next year, need not
spell these out./MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN
(About the Author: MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN wrote for Panos News and Features, GEMINI
News Service, Brunei Times, OnIslam and Vera Files. He was once staff of
DEPTHNews of the Press Foundation of Asia, Today and the PHILIPPINE POST. A
practicing environmentalist, he holds postgraduate degrees in environment
resource management, agriculture and development studies as a Ford Fellow,
European Union (EU), ASEAN and British Council Fellow from Rutgers University
of New Jersey, the University of Leuven, Belgium, University College, Dublin,
Ireland and Kalmar university of Sweden..
http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/michael-bengwayan
