Editorial | Water price debate

The National Water Commission (NWC), Jamaica’s state-owned producer and distributor of piped, potable water, says it wants to introduce a scheme that mirrors one this newspaper floated more than a decade ago: charging a higher price for the commodity during periods of drought.

The idea would be to use a normal inter-play of markets – consumers paying a premium for a good that is in short supply – to penalise people who do not conserve water when the commodity is scarce. As we argued in February 2010, in the face of the NWC’s difficulty in getting Jamaicans to use water sparingly: “People are more likely to conserve when they feel the impact of squander and waste in their pocketbooks.”

While this economic principle is immutable and provides the basis of our broad support for the NWC’s proposal, the commission needs to provide further and better particulars, including how it will ensure that poor Jamaicans are not deprived of this critical resource, before it can enjoy The Gleaner’s unalloyed imprimatur. In this regard, the NWC, its government overlords and other relevant agencies also have to breathe life into the seemingly still-born national water policy that Prime Minister Andrew Holness presented to Parliament over two years ago.

That draft policy, among other things, addressed issues such as the monitoring of droughts and water harvesting by households. Unfortunately, it has not been the subject of the kind of wide-scale public discussion in a country that is likely to be among the worst sufferers from human-induced global warming and climate change. Hopefully, the coincidence of NWC CEO Mark Barnett’s proposal of the scarcity tariff, last week’s complaint by a group of experts about the Government’s failure to mobilise people around water conservation and Prime Minister Holness’ presence at this week’s climate summit in Glasgow, will spur the authorities to engage Jamaicans on the policy.

According to the NWC’s publicly available information, it supplies around 190 million gallons of water daily to over 400,000 registered customers, representing about two million people, which is around seven in 10 Jamaicans.

SERIOUS PROBLEMS

The NWC, however, has serious problems. It loses large wads of money annually, and by some estimates, more than half of the water it produces never reaches its customers. It is lost during delivery via old, leaky pipes that the company can’t replace at a fast-enough rate, despite recent schemes to reduce the waste in its biggest market – the Kingston Metropolitan Region. Clearly, the NWC’s future, including its long-term ownership, needs sorting out.

In the meantime, it faces another crisis: increasingly frequent droughts fuelled by climate change, which are set to become worse. A Jamaican Government document, four years ago, warned that if earth’s temperature continued to rise unchecked (the aim of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was to keep the hike to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century), Jamaica could pay a heavy price. By the 2050s, the island’s average temperature would be 0.7 to one degree higher than today. The jump could be as much as three degrees by the 2080s.

Further, over the next three decades, average rainfall could plummet by as much as 40 per cent, although there could be wild swings in the weather. Some of these shifts in weather patterns are already evident in Jamaica. There are more frequent and longer spells of drought, exacerbated, perhaps, by the fact that the earth is heating faster than scientists previously predicted.

In times of drought, the NWC imposes restrictions on water use and rations supplies. People can be criminally charged and fined for breaking the regulations. Mr Barnett said that these measures have limited effect. Often, during droughts, water demand rises, which, the NWC argued, needed a deterrent, given the predicted, long-term decline in rainfall.

In the circumstances, he posed the rhetorical question: “In our rate structure ... should it not be one wherein, at the time of drought, where persons consume beyond a certain quantum, that the rate becomes so punitive that it is a discouraging cost, so that persons may be forced to conserve and keep consumption within a particular level?”

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FAULT LINES

The NWC is doing the preparatory work to take a proposal for such differential/drought tariffs to the Office of Utilities Regulation. Those proposals, however, must be subject to the most rigorous analysis and transparent public review to ensure that in times of scarcity, water, which is essential to life, is not pushed out of the reach of people who cannot pay the premium rates. Already, water and sanitation are sharp social and economic fault lines in Jamaica. This chasm must not worsen, even as policymakers work to a rational response to a troublesome problem.

Indeed, while a well-thought-out and appropriately implemented differential/premium pricing regime would be rational, a reasonably structured scheme could only be part of the response to the island’s water crisis – as was highlighted by the various experts who spoke at the forum with Mr Barnett. For instance, given the water policy’s emphasis on water harvesting, it would be useful to know how many of the several high-rise complexes going up across the capital, and approved since 2019, were required to have water storage systems as a condition of their approval – and at what capacity.

It is surprising, too, that water conservation and related issues are not the subject of an aggressive government public information/education campaign. The crisis requires more than bits and pieces of public service announcements.