BY IKE SEÑERES
I HAVE ambivalent thoughts about the issue of water as a public utility. Generally speaking, I would always say that government has no business being in business.
What I mean is that the government should not provide whatever it is that the private sector could already provide, and that stems from my belief that government should not compete with the private sector.
In using the term government, I am referring to both the national government and the local government units (LGUs), because the general rules that would apply to the former would not necessarily apply to the latter.
There are, of course, exceptions to the general rules, and there is a legal basis for LGUs to provide certain services on their own if and when necessary.
For so many years in the past, the national government operated a water utility company in Metro Manila as a public service. Consequently, the water service in Metro Manila was privatized, and so we now have a private company that is providing the public service.
The government would always say that it is better to privatize because the private sector is more efficient, an argument that is clearly self-devastating (the opposite of self-serving), because it is actually an admission of its own inefficiency. It is actually a big puzzle how the private sector could make money from something that caused the government to lose money, but never mind that.
In the news recently is the story that the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) gave a loan of over a million pesos to the San Francisco (Agusan Del Sur) Water District, for them to improve their water supply. This is yet another puzzle for me, because this is a case of one government agency lending to another.
While it may be good for one government bank to earn interests by lending to another government agency, why not just ask Congress to appropriate funds for local water districts so that they need not borrow money to fund their operations? It seems, however, that water districts are hybrid entities that are created by the LGUs, but are partly privately managed.
Water districts are under the supervision of the Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA), a government agency that has jurisdiction over water outside Metro Manila (that’s the rest of the country). It is the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) that has jurisdiction over Metro Manila, even if the actual delivery of water services has been privatized, having been awarded to two concessionaires.
By comparison, it would seem that the water districts are in effect the private concessionaires of water services outside of Metro Manila, but that is not exactly the case, because of the hybrid nature of these entities. The comparison may not be exact also, because the water districts are producing their own water, while the concessionaires are only distributing.
Definitely, it could not be denied that the demand for water by the agricultural and the industrial sector are competing with the demand for water by the commercial sector and the residential sector.
As it is now, the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) is the government agency that caters to the demand for water by the agricultural sector. Obviously, there is no government agency that caters to the industrial sector. As I understand it, industrial users of water are simply competing with the commercial users and the residential users, a situation that is not entirely fair, because it is easy for industrial users to be favoured by the water providers.
Pardon my saying so, but I think that production is the weakest link in the overall supply chain of water.
To begin with, the water concessionaires in Metro Manila are not producing water, and not all water districts have stable production sources. Some might argue that we are still a long time away from a real water shortage, but we should not even wait for that time to happen and better still, we should not allow it to happen.
As I see it, water is just one generic commodity that is subject to the laws of supply and demand, and therefore we should do everything to ensure that there is always more than enough supply to meet the demand.
As one generic commodity, it is about time that we just have one central water authority that shall have complete jurisdiction over the entire supply chain of water, considering all the four sectors that are using this commodity.
The most important function of this new authority should be policy making, followed by program planning. As I see it, program planning is the logical consequence of policy making. With good policy making and program planning coming from the top, it would be very easy to do project management down below. As a matter of fact, LGUs could actually do the project management, for as long as they could get the funding from the national government.
As it is now, we only have one source of water, and that is fresh water from deep wells, lakes and rivers. In order to have more sources, we should already tap rainwater, waste water and seawater.
For the benefit of some wise guys who might have some other ideas, rainwater could actually be collected before it would go down the drain and be wasted when it is mixed with polluted sources.
Moreover, we have the advantage of not having acid rain in our country yet, and therefore we should already collect it while we still could. Waste water could be a major source if only we could recycle it, and it does not take rocket science to do it.
The last but not the least, we should start tapping seawater through desalination technologies that does not require rocket science either.
All told, I think that it is about time that we allow the formation of water cooperatives, similar to the electric cooperatives that we now have, subject to the condition that these will have to be real cooperatives, not the hybrid electric cooperatives that are partly under the control of the government. (Email bantaygobyerno- subscribe@yahoogroups.com or text +639083159262)/PN
