The Struggle for Clean Drinking Water in Latin America

ENGLISH

For the last few years I’ve been taking students from the University of Miami to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. We study the environment and the culture. We record the squeaky, hissy conversations of giant land tortoises and the volcanic-black marine iguanas that are found nowhere else. We swim with sea lions and penguins.

One thing we do not do is drink the water.

The people on the island of Isabela, which serves as our headquarters, live in a kind of environmental paradise. Bluefooted boobies and pink flamingos soar over the main village of Puerto Villamil, and little stubby, brown finches dart through the mangroves and shrubs.

But all too often the people in Puerto Villamil and the hamlets in the highlands wake up with a serious stomach ache. It is because of the water. As far as I know, there’s been no conclusive analysis of precisely what parasites, bacteria and viruses are in the water. It runs nicely through pipes into many homes and businesses. But it needs to be boiled to be safe to drink.

The unsafe drinking water there is part of a global problem. Throughout Latin America and the world, nearly 800 million people live without safe, clean drinking water, according to United Nations agencies. More than three times more people—2.5 billion—manage to survive without a decent toilet, day in and day out. People suffering from water-borne diseases take up about half of all the hospital beds in the world. And each year the diseases carried in water kill nearly two million people, mostly children under five years of age.

Economies suffer. Women and girls spend hours each day lugging water from streams and lakes. People miss days at work. Children don’t go to school.

In Latin America and elsewhere in the world, climate change and increasing population are going to make access to clean drinking water even more difficult. More people will have to share the earth’s finite water. The higher temperatures of climate change are expected to bring longer dry stretches and more evaporation, alternating with heavy rains and floods. Most places have not developed ways to capture and store the rains and the flooding churns all sorts of harmful things into drinking water.

To deal with climate change, water experts say everyone needs to use less water, especially the farmers in Latin America and elsewhere. Experts estimate that at least 70 percent of the world’s water goes to irrigate farm crops and nourish livestock. Much of that water could be saved through the use of drip irrigation, which takes water directly to the roots of plants. But drip irrigation is expensive, and farmers would probably need subsidies to convert from their widespread use of sprinklers. Indeed, much of Latin America’s water is consumed by soy farmers and cattle ranchers in Brazil.

The situation in Latin America and the Caribbean is not as bad as in Africa and India. But the United Nations reports that about 36 million people—more than all the people in Mexico City, Bogotá, Lima and Buenos Aires combined—are living without clean, safe drinking water.

It’s hard to say when things will get better for these people. The water problem in Latin America, as in Africa and India, is mostly a matter of poverty. It is not, as one United Nations agency pointed out a few years ago, that there is not enough water to go around. That is especially true in Latin America, which has some of the most bountiful water resources in the world.

Manuel Rodriguez Becerra served as Colombia’s first Minister of the Environment years ago and has worked on environmental projects for the United Nations. One of the first things he mentioned in an interview with me was the inequality in Latin America: “it is the poorest of the poor who don’t have access to clean drinking water,” he said by telephone from Bogotá.

Around the world, a lack of sanitary facilities—toilets—is a big factor in theunhealthiness of the drinking water. Some people simply wade into rivers and streams where others get their drinking water. Cattle defecate in the same water. In Latin America, as in other parts of the developing world, many rivers are choked with chemical and industrial waste. The Rio de la Plata, which sweeps past Buenos Aires, is one of the most polluted.

The poor often lack the ability to bring pressure on political leaders. They are invisible from the steel and glass skyscrapers of São Paulo and Buenos Aires. And even when governments and humanitarian agencies try to help get water to the poor, they struggle with logistics and coordination and with providing solutions that fit in with the lives of the people they are trying to help.