Campaign Letter #8: Water and Sanitation.

Thank you for contacting me about improving water and sanitation in the developing world.

At the start of the letter, the rhetorical point was raised whether I could imagine our homes without a good toilet.  I have used a spade on the steppes of Kazakstan,  caught parasites in Uganda, food poisoning in Mauritania, and have been caught short in a dockyard in Angola.  All because of the lack of available of clean water and poor hygiene standards.  Yes, I fully understand the value of clean water, soap and sanitation.

Access to clean and safe water, sanitation and hygiene are among the most basic of human rights. It is dreadfully disappointing that in 2014 one in three people around the world still do not have access to a proper toilet, while almost 800 million can’t access clean water. This crisis has claimed the lives of more than ten million children below the age of five since 2000.  I had access to good doctors and medicine.  Many of those who live with such a situation have neither.

I care passionately about international development issues, and Liberal Democrats have been campaigning for decades to ensure that the UK does what it should to help the world’s poorest. That’s why we have ensured that the Coalition Government strongly endorsed the recommendations of the high-level panel on the post-2015 development framework, which proposed ambitious targets for water and sanitation services, as well as for water efficiency and waste water treatment. We want to see water and sanitation feature prominently in the UK’s own work going forward, and the post-2015 development framework, and I am confident that it will.

Separately, Lib Dem MEP Catherine Bearder has been working hard on sanitation issues in the European Parliament. She officially launched the European Toilet Declaration, calling on all EU countries to back a dedicated Sustainable Development Goal aiming to enable universal access to basic drinking water, sanitation and hygiene by 2030.

In Government, Lib Dems have ensured that the UK spent 0.7% of our national income on the world’s poor for the first time, becoming the first G8 nation to meet this 40 year old promise. Now my Lib Dem Colleague Michael Moore is using his Private Members’ Bill to ensure this goal moves from a target to a legal requirement.

By boosting our spending on the world’s poorest, we are able to provide access to clean drinking water, improve access to effective sanitation and provide basic hygiene education for 60 million people by 2015. This help comes on top of £5.8 million provided by the Coalition Government to WaterAid for work around the world providing people with clean water, safe toilets and hygiene education.

The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on water was met in 2012, by halving the number of people who don’t have access to safe drinking water. More than two billion more people now have better access to water than they did twenty years ago. However, 750 million people still don’t have access to clean water, and though the MDG on water has been met, the MDG on sanitation is still a long way from following suit. Some regions, including Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are unlikely to meet either of these targets, so there’s still a lot of work to do.

Liberal Democrats in Government have honoured our 2010 manifesto commitment to prioritise health and education spending programmes that promote gender equality, reduce mortality, restrict the spread of major disease and supply basic needs like clean water. We are determined to keep up this record and do even more in the next Parliament, which is why continuing to deliver the 0.7% GNI target for development spending and ensuring that the post-2015 development goals leave no one behind were important commitments in our recent pre-manifesto.

Thanks once again for your enquiry.  For me it brought back some memories I would rather forget.  It is good that I should not though.  Owing to my own experiences, you can rest assured that I take the matter with the upmost seriousness.

If you have any other points or issues you wish to raise, please get in contact.  I will be glad to hear from you.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Veart
Scottish Liberal Democrats
Edinburgh North and Leith

What Does Israel Want?

I like trivia. Especially quizzes. And the one in the Jerusalem Post that morning in early December was particularly tough. I only got four out of ten correct. One of the questions stuck with me though as particularly curious. “Outside which town is the proposed site of the new Palestinian airport.” I didn’t have a clue. Ramallah perhaps? Isn’t that the capital of the West Bank? No, the answer was Netanya. Now I know that Israel is really a small place, but I’ve been there and that is definitely still in Israel and not the West Bank. A curious fact which I have been pondering since.

* * *

By a telephone call, I had just been snatched from working on my house, again, flown overnight from Edinburgh via London to Tel Aviv and frankly I was pessimistic. My driver Momi was pumping me with questions “Martin, will they find anything? Is there gas there?” Having just left the rig six days previously, I had seen no indication of the major find that was about to take place. But that is the nature of exploration: one day there is nothing, the next the whole world wants to be your friend.
Gas was not the only thing on Momi’s mind that morning. “Our attack in Gaza will be a failure if the Hamas leadership survives. But what do they do? They hide under the hospital! We don’t want to kill civilians. Why can’t they hid somewhere else?”
Perhaps they weren’t very enthusiastic about being killed, I thought to myself. What did people expect? Hamas to move into a field so that they could be decently bombed?
“But Momi,” I said. “All the Arab states have said that if Israel retreats to the pre-1967 borders, there will be peace.”
“Why can’t these people accept that they lost! We won, they lost. Get over it and move on!”

The attack on Gaza is now over. Momi didn’t get his wish: the Hamas leadership did survive. But the effect on the people and the city are terrible and it will take years to rebuild. Personally I don’t think that matters much to Israel, even less now that the Tamar gas find is looming larger and larger in the public consciousness. The Saudi’s have already pledge $2 billion worth of aid to rebuild the territory. As I outlined in my previous article “Israel and Gaza – it’s a gas!”, the Palestinians could be a lot richer than they are if Israel had not been consistently blocking the development of the gas fields offshore Gaza. But on the grounds that profits would go to finance weapons for Hamas, negotiations were ended with BG Group and the company closed it’s offices in Tel Aviv in 2007. That was not the end of the story however: talks were restarted in 2008 in an attempt to convince BG Group to sell their stake in the Gazan gas fields to a new consortium, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC).

Israel needs gas in order to secure water. The chosen method is the building of new desalination plants which are very energy-intensive. So Israel wants energy in order to deal with the effects of global warming. There is even an alternative to this however. Since I last commented upon this issue, I have been contacted by Terry Spragg who has been kind enough to outline to me a new technology for moving large volumes of fresh water across oceans without the need for container vessels, potable water tankers or laying pipelines. Known as the Spragg Bag, each individual section can hold up to 17,000 tonnes of fresh water, with what is claimed to be the world’s strongest zip fastener linking together up to five of these bags. The real smart trick however is that these bags can then be towed by a vessel as modest as a standard-powered tug boat. I can certainly see the value of this remarkable technology, especially in emergencies such as the one that Gaza is facing at this moment. Whether the Israelis will go for it to solve their own water issues, that is a matter which shall be considered in a moment.

There are a few more apparently random thoughts that I would like to add to the mix before struggling to some kind of conclusion. The first is Israel’s recently built security fence, or apartheid wall as it has been called by it’s critics. I think there is truth in both labels. As far as security is concerned, it seems to have worked. Well I was here in 2000, people were a lot more nervous. I was in a bar in Natanya which was then bombed the following week. Security was very tight within Israel. Now it is a lot more relaxed. But there are negatives to it as well. The routing of the wall was little more than a blatant land grab in many places. It’s main function however is to control, absolutely, the movement of people and goods into the Palestinian West Bank.

Likewise the withdrawal from Gaza. It was true that Israelis did withdraw people, but that is nothing like the same as granting the Palestinians within autonomy. The reason being is that the supply of goods and services remain in control of the Israelis. The bombing of the supply tunnels were justified on the grounds that these were the routes by which weapons were smuggled into the territories. Probably true, but they were also the way that most other supplies moved into Gaza too. Laying siege is not the same as granting freedom.

We finally return to the proposed Palestinian airport and why I love trivia. If the airport is built outside Netanya, it is obvious that Israel intends to remain in full control of the movements of people and goods into the West Bank. Just as in Gaza. Just as it was unhappy with the attitude of BG Group and is now pressing that company to sell out it’s stake to the Israeli-controlled IEC. What Israel wants more than anything else is total control over it’s land and resources. The political implications are even more obvious: there will never be a viable two-state solution because an independent Palestine will be outside the control of the Israeli government and this can never be tolerated.

Let us return to water. The gas is so valuable to Israel because it will allow the planned desalination plants to be powered independently of Egyptian supplies. The is an alternative however in the form of mass-importation of water from Turkey (a close ally of Israel) via giant water bags. But we have already seen the case for Israel’s love of control. I therefore think that importation of such a vital resource will not be looked upon favourably by the Israeli government. The only ray of hope I can offer Terry Spragg is this: it is Israel’s stated aim that the planned desalination plants are intended not only to supply the country with it’s water but are also to be used to replenish the depleted aquifers beneath the land. What if the fast-track to refilling the aquifers was not the desalination plants but by limited term importation from Turkey? This would mean that the desalination plants would not have to produce so much water and that the new finds off Haifa will last the country even longer. Hell, it would even be good for the environment!


Selected sources

IEC control
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2133287/?relatestories=1

Spragg Bags (and photo credit)
http://www.waterbag.com/

Please refer to my previous article “Israel and Gaza – it’s a gas!” for other references.

Gaza and Israel: it's a gas!

The semi-submersible drilling rig on location over the Tamar-1 well

It was bound to happen. Israel can’t carry on indefinitely it’s ruthless bombardment of Gaza. With only three days left before the inauguration of Obama and the 44th President of the United States of America, it wouldn’t look good if there wasn’t as least some form of ceasefire on the table by then. The last thing that Israel needs is to get off to a bad start with the new president.

It is therefore by total serendipity that the upcoming ceasefire follows on from one of the most fortunate events in Israel’s recent history: the discovery of potentially the largest hydrocarbon reserves the country has known. Since I am directly involved in the project, I cannot say much. But I can refer you to the various press releases made by partners and a government website, The Israel Export and International Co-operation Institute.

“The Tamar-1 drilling, some 90 kilometers west of Haifa, is considered the most promising of the potential drilling sites off Israel's coast. Initial estimates were of a 35% chance of finding a reserve of 87 billion cubic meters of natural gas.”

This is relevant to Gaza, as Michel Chossudovsky points out in his article The Israeli Invasion & Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields, there has been a long-running feud between Israel and Gaza as to the exploitation of the large gas reserves that were discovered off the coast of Gaza in the late 1990s. To this day, these gas fields lie unexploited because of blocks put on development by various Israeli governments. Following the election of Hamas, efforts were redoubled to ensure that the Palestinian authorities would not see any of the estimated $2 billion that the project would yield for the Palestinian people. These blocking efforts culminated in the intervention of Tony Blair with the operators BG Group (formally British Gas) when they finally lost patience with the Israelis and approached the Egyptians instead.
Chossudovsky puts the case that Israel, increasingly desperate for natural resources, planned Operation Lead Cast to be rid of Hamas, not to prevent a few rockets being fired, but to install a Palestinian authority which would be a more suitable partner for the exploitation of Gazan gas. In other words, effective annexation of the most valuable resource the Palestinians have.

Why does Israel need this energy so badly? On top of the normal needs of a modern society, Israel is having to face another more pressing crisis: the lack of water. With climate change leading to less rainfall in recent years and an increase in population (a growth of over one million, mainly from Eastern Europe in the 1990s), the country has been growing increasingly thirsty. Development of existing aquifers has met with limited success so the authorities have turned to desalination to solve their water needs. A plant opened at Ashdod in 2006 with supply five percent of the country’s needs and more are planned. Desalination has long been used in the Arabian Gulf, where the energy required for this process has not been an issue. The same cannot be said in Israel. As the old joke goes, Moses may have led the chosen people to the land of milk and honey but it seems to be only place in the Middle East without oil. Israel is already dependent on Egyptian gas supplies and are willing to do anything to avoid becoming even more dependent on a neighbour which is still viewed as a potential enemy.

If the hopes for this discover are realised, the Tamar project may be just what Israel needs: a large supply of energy, independent of Arabic sources.

In the meantime, the people of Gaza are still dying. Expect the number of sorties to increase right up to the ceasefire being signed because there is a lot at stake. But the Tamar gas project may not just benefit Israelis but may supply what all the people of the region need: a little respite.

Let us all hope the time is used searching for a long-term peace, and not just another ceasefire.



Selected sources:

Tamar gas projecthttp://www.export.gov.il/Eng/_Articles/Article.asp?CategoryID=391&ArticleID=10137
Waterhttp://www.water-technology.net/projects/israel/
www.waterwebster.com/documents/desalinationreportjune2007.pdf (page 28 - Israel)
Gaza gashttp://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0901/S00101.htm