Once again here we are to celebrate the WWD: a lot of conferences, articles, debates and public statements not only on the importance of this scarce resource but on the need to take action. FAO is on the forefront of these celebrations and, whilst I am writing, an internal meeting is ongoing to discuss nature-based solutions for water management and bla bla bla.
Since the beginning of the 90s, FAO has insisted in repeating that “water is an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. Of principal concern is the failure to recognize and accept that there is a finite or even diminishing supply of water. The consensus is that the growing water scarcity and misuse of fresh water pose serious threats to sustainable development.” (http://www.fao.org/docrep/V7160E/v7160e03.htm#the%20international%20debate)
Decades have passed and very little, if nothing, has changed. The emerging evidence that “water” is first of all a political issue and not a technical one, is continuously avoided in these international fora. All in all, the conclusions are always the same, i.e. a series of policy recommendations, not binding therefore nobody is forced to accept them, a series of “best practices” in order to give the sense that here and there something is going towards the good solution and that’s all.
As times goes by, for those who have had the possibility of working within this international environment like me, it is more and more evident that either agencies like FAO do entry in a more pro-active way into the political economy of natural resources or they will lose, even more than now, their “raison d’être”.
There is a debate throughout the world on the “nature” of water as a common good. FAO is not particularly active on that, hiding behind the same justification:member countries do not want FAO to enter into those “delicate” issues. In parallel, FAO field workers (staff and consultants) are doing enormous efforts to put in practice their beliefs on the topic, a mix of technical skills, participatory approaches and information sharing in order, if possible, to create a (political) space where these evidences could be used as inputs into a policy debate. But when you scale up into the organization, somewhere these efforts shade away …
In the short run, this tactic of not doing anything against those “major” countries that drive the organization is what allows a generation of internal “managers” to prospere and make their career. In the long run, as we can see after almost three decades of technical and political work in the same division, this is detrimental for the credibility of the organization.
The emphasis on the “innovations”, “more efficient water technologies” gives the idea that what is lacking are those “innovations-technologies”. This is not true. When considering that 80% of groundwater in China is polluted (http://www.ansa.it/canale_ambiente/notizie/acqua/2016/04/12/in-cina-lacqua-del-sottosuolo-inquinata-per-l80_9d98518b-2b5e-431f-be9b-728b96555236.html), the reasons are clearly man-made. When we have a look on the big consumer of water, every year the evidence is the same: agriculture. More than two-third of whole water consumption is due to agriculture and, obviously, not the small farmers, but the industrial one, those big farmers that do not pay a penny for that. Is FAO capable of smooth political efforts to persuade countries to change their way of doing business? If FAO will continue the business as usual (providing information, data and rising awareness) model, soon the question of its existence will come, again, on the table.
There is sense of fatigue that is increasing within and outside the UN agencies. Within because those officers and consultants that try to interprete the “mission” of their agency, like FAO, in a pro-active way, they are never supported at higher level, thus making clear that the message: keep calm and drink … a beer. Outside the agencies, ordinary people as well as governments are no longer expecting any real change from the support they can get from the UN.
Changing this path is not easy, but it is also clear that a serious effort to go towards the problems and not towards the Donors or the “major” countries has not been made since many decades. Unfortunately what is good for the management (past, present and, who knows, future) is not good for the problems that UN agencies, and FAO in particular, have received as mandate when it was created.
Do you guess that in a year from now they will meet again, highlight the same worries, same recommendations and nothing concrete will have happened?
