PGMA's Speech during the Launching Ceremony of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Global Human Development Report 2006 "Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis"

Rigodon Ballroom, The Manila Peninsula Hotel, Makati City, MM, 04 Dec 2006
Thank you, Secretary Reyes, for your introduction.

Speaker De Venecia, other officials of the Philippine government, Secretary Duque, Miss Noble and the other officials of the United Nations and multilateral agencies, members of the diplomatic corps, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

Nileema says it is ironic that we're discussing this at this time. I think it's providential. But the irony really is -- and I think about this all the time -- we have water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink in some areas. We have deadly mudflows in Albay, we have water shortage in manila. So, indeed, this year's UNDP Global Human Development Report is providential. As Nileema says, the report posits that the growing water crisis not just in the Philippines but in the world is not from a shortage of supply but from causes created by man, and only collective human intervention can alleviate it.

We view the report's strong warning as a good argument for governments to adopt stronger policies to overcome poverty and inequality and to act together to prevent global disaster. In our Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan in our Anti-Poverty program, one of our ten points is to provide water to all the waterless towns in our country. We in the Philippines have been victims of successive super typhoons that we believe are a result of severe climatic shifts. Right now, we all have the Albay tragedy.

This is a time for unity and continuous action as we pour in more troops, medical personnel and volunteers as well as dispatch more equipment in the search and retrieval operations and facilitate direct assistance to the victims. We join the Filipino people in praying for that miracle of finding more survivors. We are no strangers to this kind of tragedy, and in the past we've always been able to recover and become stronger. Nevertheless, such recurrent tragedies cannot cut, cannot underscore the need for greater preparedness, operational effectiveness and predictive capacity.

We have had great improvements in our predictive capacity in the past few years. We knew and the whole country was uprised of the hourly changes in the tragictory of the typhoon. But we had to spend lot of money to invest in that. In other words, effectiveness comes with investment, and investment could only happen when we had our tax reforms. But right now we have more things to do, and for the immediate relief and recovery and rehabilitation for the victims of 'Reming,' 'Paeng' and 'Milenyo,' I have released one billion pesos. But in the medium-term, we have to spend about 15 billion pesos on recovering from this severe water-related disasters and also from preventing them from being so deadly.

So, I'm glad that Secretary Reyes is here. He is our man as far as water is concerned. He is not a user of water - DENR -- he is the... Because you have the competing uses of water: you have water for drinking, you have water for power, you have water for agriculture, and so they're all competing with one another. So the water resource work could not have been made up of those agencies or they'll never come to an agreement. So I decided that it should be a line office under the DENR because DENR is not a user of water, it is the caretaker of all our natural resources including water. And DENR should arbitrate which water resource will go to what use.

Related to this also, I'm directing the secretary of natural resources to step up the National Hazard Mapping Program. This is another program that Secretary Reyes inherited as 'work in progress' to forewarn vulnerable communities and help increase the capability for local governments for early warning and action. The gullies on the slopes of Mount Mayon that bear potential mudflows are a case in point. The death and destruction in the wake of calamities can be minimized by organized and systematic human intervention. We have started, as what I've said, by investing in our predictive capability which has been bearing fruit in the past typhoons. We have 'work in progress' as far as hazard mapping is concerned. We have to do things to mobilize all that wasted -- not only wasted water but destructive water -- and mobilize instead for life and livelihood.

And as Speaker De Venecia has been pointing out, we do have this certain water management projects in the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan -- big, huge projects. They cost a lot but they will also save a lot not only of money but of lives when they are on stream. We are talking about such major project as the Layban Dam which will be meant to solve the water crisis in Metro Manila in the long-term and the other uses of the Agno river basin in Northern Philippines for power, for irrigation and for drinking water -- all the uses of water.

We must not leave things to fatal luck when we can develop the tools to prevent harm. And as I mentioned earlier, the fiscal space we have garnered from the pruned down interest payments and improved credit ratings is being applied to economic opportunities including microfinance being made available to more Filipinos. I like to keep repeating that we're saving 22 billion pesos on interest payments for 2007. And the 22 billion pesos will be allocated to: 16 billion pesos for additional in education spending; five billion for additional health spending, a lot of which will go to PhilHealth, to health insurance for the people; and one billion pesos will go to additional spending by the Department of Social Welfare including microfinance.

We are making a dent on self-perceived and actual incidence of poverty. Ever since the self-rated poverty statistics has been gathered by the survey companies, it is in our administration that the self-rated poverty has become lowest. But we need to institute better water management practices to emphasize conservation and effective distribution for the short and long term.

Social scientists project that future wars -- wars among nations, but also wars within nations and among social groupings in the nations -- will be fought over water. But such conflicts can be averted by strong policies and agreements that will protect the common interest of mankind and not just those of certain nations or certain sectors by understanding and cooperation among vulnerable peoples and societies and by a determined effort to eradicate global poverty in all its forms including the severe deprivation of water resources.

So, we thank the United Nations for your focus on this great and important issue and we commit to work for water in all the towns of our country, but also to make water a life-giving resource rather than a deadly weapon of destruction.

Thank you.

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