Negotiators fail to win US over to sanitation target

Negotiators at the United Nations Earth Summit have failed to agree on a global target for the provision of sanitation to 2.4 billion people.

European Union member states, including Britain, are committed to setting a specific timetable, but a coalition of rich countries led by the United States is completely opposed.

The issue is so divisive that it will have to be referred to heads of state and government, who start arriving for the summit on Saturday.

The UN 2002 Human Development Report has estimated that 1.1 billion people lacked access to safe drinking water in 2000, and twice that number did not have adequate sanitation. Water, according to the UN, will become the number one environmental and developmental issue of the 21st century.

The UN's global 2000 Millennium Declaration has already committed the world to halving the 1.1 billion people without access to clean water by 2015. But environmentalists say it is pointless trying to meet a target on the provision of clean water supplies without an accompanying sanitation target.

Pressure is now expected to mount on the US, Canada, Japan and Australia. Their opposition stems from a reluctance to commit additional resources.

The World Bank has said that to meet the 2015 water target, about 300,000 people per day will have to be connected to water systems over the next decade. The estimated price tag is $25bn (£16bn) a year.

Campaigners want rich nations to commit resources to achieving both goals. "There is absolutely no point in tackling water without sanitation. You can have clean water which gets quickly polluted because of inadequate sanitation," Joan Green, of the environmental group, Tearfund, which is based in London, said.

The Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, told the summit's plenary session yesterday that a sanitation target was essential to get the world to focus on the problem.

EU officials, who support inclusion of the sanitation target, said the opposition was baffling. "It's important not only that people should be able to get drinking water, but to be able to get rid of waste water," the Danish Environment Minister, Hans Christian Schmidt, said.

Although delegates will include the 2015 water target as part of the Earth Summit's global action plan to reduce poverty, the US has remained trenchant in its opposition to the inclusion of a sanitation target.

Ms Green said there was a chance that lobby groups would succeed in forcing Japan, Australia and Canada to relent during negotiation of the final text, but the chance of persuading America remained remote.

South Africa said it was leading the charge to have a sanitation target agreed. "We have made great progress and the main opposition to a target on sanitation is now coming from the US and Australia," the Water Affairs and Forestry Minister, Ronnie Kasrils, said. "It remains to be seen if they will come on line."

Since the end of apartheid, 10 million people in South Africa have been given connection to clean drinking water.

Environmentalists said the summit had so far failed to come up with plausible proposals to deal with the threat of dwindling water supplies. Desertification, deforestation and surging urban populations, are exacerbating the problems, especially in areas already suffering low rainfall such as parts of Africa.

But there is scant prospect of new resource commitments on this scale from rich countries. The summit is also ignoring the need to reform institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their approaches to water issues.

Water consumption has outpaced population growth, multiplying six-fold in the 20th century when the number of people on the planet tripled.

Regions that face critical water shortages in coming years include northern Africa and western Asia.

A World Bank report estimates that the Middle East and North Africa, with five per cent of the global population, have just one per cent of the world's available freshwater resources.

The inequitable distribution of water among Middle Eastern states is an added source of tension in a region that is already one of the most unstable in the world.