EDITORIAL - Policy crisis in water

Knowing Jamaican bureaucrats and given the ministerial leadership of the island's water sector, we wouldn't be surprised if the sense of crisis, from months of drought, has already dissipated. There was a sharp shower in Kingston last Thursday and a spattering of rain in a handful of parishes.

Bobby Pickersgill, the water and climate change minister, perchance he assumes otherwise, must be prevailed upon that even if the drought has broken - and we don't know it has - Jamaica is not out of the woods. Or, perhaps, more to the point, the minister (and the Government more broadly) needs to be convinced of the need for a serious national conversation about water, leading to the enunciation of a policy towards its use and management for, say, the next 40 years.

Jamaicans understand the immediate problem in terms of the absence of water in their taps and other restrictions on the use of the commodity by the National Water Commission (NWC), the government company with a near monopoly on the distribution of the resource to domestic consumers. The commission's dams and reservoirs, visibly, have substantially less water than their capacity.

The proximate cause of the crisis is that, between January and June, Jamaica received 84 per cent of the mean average rainfall of the past 30 years, or 16 per cent less than what would be expected for this period of the year. June is part of the wet season that starts in May. This year, the 47mm of rainfall recorded was one-third the average. We suspect that, when the data for July is published, the situation will hardly be better, and more likely significantly worse.

climate-change phenomenon

The meteorological drought being faced by Jamaica is most probably part of the phenomenon of climate change, manifested in, among other things, warming temperatures and rising sea levels. It is a global matter for which Prime Minister Portia Simpson was prescient and path-breaking in naming a portfolio minister. The only problem, in our view, is that she is being proved to have named the wrong person.

Mr Pickersgill is a likable individual, against whom only the most cantankerously splenetic individual would maintain a grudge. But when it comes to policy, Mr Pickersgill is monomorphic. His attention, primarily, has been the electoral politics of water as it relates to the NWC: how to get the company, with leaky pipes and earning nothing from 70 per cent of its output, to deliver more water to more people who don't pay and have taxpayers foot the bill without knowing that they are doing so. Except that fixing the financing of the NWC - as big a problem as that is - is only one part of the solution.

The more fundamental issue is how, in a changing global climate, to maintain viable sources of water in Jamaica, and the policies and partnerships that will be required to ensure this. During last Thursday's shower in Kingston, for instance, millions of tons of water tumbled from the roofs of public buildings into inadequate drains and flooded streets, flowing to waste in the sea. Did Mr Pickersgill and his policy advisers notice?

The conversation on water needs to be as robust as that taking place about energy, except that it must be more focused, leading to definitive action. Mr Pickersgill is not the man to lead it.

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