Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 90)
TUESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2006
MR MARK
LOWCOCK, MR
ELWYN GRAINGER-JONES,
MR GREG
BRIFFA AND
MR IAN
CURTIS
Q80 Richard Burden: How does it do
what you say?
Mr Grainger-Jones: I think it
funds a team of experts and colleagues who work in more of the
detail in looking at these issues.
Mr Curtis: It is fundamentally
looking at the constraints to making progress to achieve access
to water and sanitation as well as water allocation in the Nile
basin.
Mr Lowcock: Shall we send you
a note about this as well?[9]
Chairman: Anything that will help us
understand this in more detail. As I said at the outset, it is
a big challenge to DFID and the world and a lot of questions have
been thrown into the pot as to how it is going to go. The more
you can explain that the better.
Q81 Hugh Bayley: There is something
that is not clear to me in your memorandum. Could I ask you to
look at paragraph 99 of your memorandum.[10]
It is to do with the European Union funding. This paragraph states
that the EU Commission and Member States together provide around
€1.4 billion annually for water and sanitation in developing
countries. Then it says that DFID on its own contributes through
the EC programmes more than any other multilateral, more than
£1 billion—almost identical sums. I appreciate that
a third of the EU spend is not directed to developing countries,
which makes it even more surprising. The figures do not seem to
match up.
Mr Lowcock: Yes, Mr Bayley, thank
you for giving us a chance to clarify that. The second figure,
the £1 billion, refers to Britain's total contribution to
the EC programmes, not those on water.
Q82 Hugh Bayley: So altogether the
EC spends about £1 billion on water and sanitation, roughly
30% of which, at the moment, is spent in sub-Saharan Africa—I
think I picked up from your paper. You are leading a review of
the EU Water Initiative. What do you hope to achieve: more money
overall; a greater proportion of resources directed to the countries
that are furthest away from the water and sanitation MDGs? How
hopeful are you that you will be able to turn this initiative
into something that really delivers?
Mr Lowcock: The basic objective
of the EU Water Initiative was to try to bring donors together
with governments in countries in support of the development of
an effective national approach to dealing with water and sanitation.
In some places it has done better than others, frankly speaking.
No doubt with colleagues from the European Commission you will
be able to explore that in a bit more detail. Ethiopia, where,
as I mentioned earlier, we have seconded someone to work with
the Ministry, is one of the better cases. So a big, big prize
for us, consistent with one of the "five ones" I mentioned
earlier, which is about a national plan, would be for the EU Water
Initiative to contribute more effectively in more countries to
the development of that process. There are other things that we
would like the EU, especially in the African, Caribbean and Pacific
regions, to do as well. As you know, within the last 12 months
the Member States have committed themselves to provide €22
billion to the Ninth European Development Fund (EDF). There is
an ongoing process now to determine, within each country, how
those resources should be used. One of the things we are saying
in that process is we hope that countries, who ultimately will
have the main voice in the choices, will give more priority than
in the past to water. The signals on that, frankly speaking, are
a bit mixed at the moment, so that is something that we have been
talking to the Commission about and we think there needs to be
adequate profile to. Also on the European Commission programmes,
obviously, there is the European Water Facility, which has been
quite heavily criticised for taking a long time to get off the
ground. Certainly we think that there is room for improvement
there. Equally, we do believe that if it is run in the way it
is supposed to be it can make a significant contribution, and
that is one of the reasons why in the document we published last
week—Why we need a global action plan on water and sanitation—we
said that there should be scope for further building up of the
European Water Facility. The funding for it just comes from the
last EDF, so there is an issue about how it could be funded in
future.
Q83 Hugh Bayley: What would your
goal be? If the current spend is €1.4 billion, what would
you think would be a satisfactory level of spend, and what is
your target level? Can you be specific—you say it is a mixed
picture amongst other EU Member States—which countries would
support committing more resources to water and sanitation and,
in particular, committing more resources to those countries which
are most off-track from the MDG? I ask that because Members of
this Committee and Members of both Houses of Parliament engage
closely and frequently with parliamentarians in other EU countries
through a whole range of inter-parliamentary bodies and assemblies,
and we ought to raise in our discussions with MPs from other Member
States our policy and discuss their policy if they are not supportive.
So who is backing DFID on committing more EU resources and targeting
more specifically sub-Saharan Africa, and who are you having difficulty
convincing at the moment?
Mr Lowcock: On your first question
on whether we set a target for how much the EU should spend on
water, we have not done that actually. I think what we would particularly
like the Commission to focus on is the fact that within that €22
billion there will be a substantial proportion—possibly
up to half—which is in very flexible forms of financing.
What the Commission is in a position to do is have a dialogue
with developing countries about (given the fact that their budgets
are being supported in this way) how are they increasing their
budgetary share to water. That is one of the most powerful things
they can do. On your question on which other Member States are
key, I would say Germany, Italy and France are important. Germany
and France—I have discussed this with my opposite numbers
from those countries recently—are supportive, not least
because bilaterally they give a significant priority to water.
Germany has the EU and G8 Presidencies; France has ownership of
the action plan coming out from their 2003 G8 Presidency. So I
would say those are the priority areas for further dialogue and
collaboration.
Q84 Hugh Bayley: Who should we target?
You need consensus, I guess, within the European Union. Which
countries are not committed, at the moment, to significantly increasing
resources for water and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa?
Mr Lowcock: I have not heard anybody
say they would be opposed to that. I think the issue is more:
how do we get this high enough up the list of things that Member
States are articulating to the Commission and the Parliament that
they regard as very important? The issue is there are lots of
competing claims on resources. So that is the challenge: to have
water addressed in the Council meetings under the German Presidency,
in G8 processes as well, as a kind of signalling effect, if you
like. It is like lots of things; you do not often find people
objecting to good things, they might just not give it the degree
of priority we think it should be given.
Q85 Joan Ruddock: Chairman and witnesses,
please forgive me, I have to leave the Committee at this point,
but I wanted to ask a question right at the end because it affects
all the aspects of water provision—sanitation, irrigation
and everything. I wanted to ask: to what extent are you beginning
to factor in considerations such as climate change? In terms of
water provision and abstraction—everything—clearly
climate change is going to be a major factor, and mitigation and
so on and so forth. I do not know if the Chairman will want to
pursue that or if it could come in a note, or wherever, but I
just think we ought not to have this session without some reflection
on climate change.
Mr Lowcock: Would you like us
to respond now?
Q86 Chairman: If you could do it
briefly and just comment on what Mr Bayley was saying. I suspect
that the ability to motivate other partners in the EU to deliver
more resources is proof that the money is actually delivering
measurable results against the MDGs, because it is a lot of money
each, but equally if people do not see the direct results you
have to put more in bilaterally. If you could respond to that.
Mr Grainger-Jones: We would very
much agree with the emphasis on climate change that the question
indicates. We are very struck by the results we are seeing now
of the potential impact of climate change on water and sanitation.
Some of the statistics in the Stern Review are really striking
about what, for example, even a two degree Celsius increase in
temperature will mean, which is, as they suggest, one to four
billion people experiencing growing water shortages. The melting
glaciers will have enormous impact on the availability of water.
The statistics are extremely striking. Climate change is part
of the group in which water and sanitation sits in DFID, and there
is a constant interaction on this issue. I think one of the most
important interactions is over the issue of water resource management.
There it is not necessarily a question of a different methodology,
it is just more emphasis on some of these issues, more research
and more understanding. Water resource management in relation
to climate change more generally will be a key part of the new
research programme that I have just mentioned. We are also doing
some internal policy work in the team over the next year or so
where we are really doing some work to harvest the work that has
gone on on climate change and water resource management, and we
will be interacting quite closely with some of the areas where
water resource projects are going on in-country.
Mr Curtis: I am involved in putting
in place a climate development programme in Addis Ababa, together
with the African Union, the African Development Bank and the UN
ECA[11].
Q87 Chairman: We might hear something
of that when we are in Ethiopia.
Mr Curtis: Yes, indeed.
Chairman: One aspect of managing water
resources is irrigation.
Q88 Ann McKechin: Given that the
area of land in sub-Saharan Africa which is irrigated is less
than 4%, I wonder what proportion of DFID's new budget in this
area is going to be spent on irrigation. Where do you see the
priorities in terms of trying to increase it
Mr Lowcock: The honest answer
to that is that our funding is focusing on the MDGs, so on access
to water and access to sanitation. We do a bit of policy work
on irrigation but it is not a major area of financing for us.
We did draw attention to the importance of it when we did our
agriculture strategy last year—and Ian can say a bit more
about that—but we are quite focused on the MDGs on the water
issue.
Mr Curtis: Specific to Africa,
of course, it is given quite a significant profile in the Commission
for Africa reports, and part of my responsibility is taking forward
some of our commitments from 2005. One is the commitment around
agriculture. The vehicle that we are working with on this is called
the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme,
and one component of that is looking at land and water issues.
Our engagement with that is principally at the policy level to
encourage good policy in investments in irrigation programmes
that are going to deliver outcomes. There are a lot of bad stories,
there are a lot of failures around irrigation investments in the
past that have not delivered outcomes, and I think it is important
that we do not make a jump between the level of irrigation in
Africa and the level of irrigation in Asia and assume that it
will be possible for Africa to move from one to the other, because
the hydro-geology and the land are very different.
Q89 Ann McKechin: Given the scale
and the proportions, irrigated land is under 4% in sub-Saharan
Africa and over 50% in Asia—while I appreciate your comment
that it is, maybe, not capable of a rise to the same level it
is certainly capable of being increased by a very substantial
amount. It does seem to be very odd that, on the one hand, irrigation
seems to have been silo-ed into the area of agricultural production
but is not actually being incorporated more fully into the area
of water and sanitation, given that water consumption in developing
countries very much relies on irrigation. I am just puzzled about
why there is a kind of separate delineation going on rather than
an emphasis on the outcome on the ground?
Mr Curtis: I would say quite the
opposite: it is not being silo-ed, it is actually an interesting
point where we are bringing considerations not of water supply
and sanitation but of water resources management together with
the needs of agriculture. It is part of this whole question as
to how countries should manage their water resources in a way
that allows for allocation that will deliver outcomes, and the
outcome we are particularly interested in here is economic growth
in rural areas and the way that irrigation can support that. So
it is put firmly in that quite broad context. We look at irrigation
alongside other interventions as well because it makes no sense
just to be involved in irrigation. Irrigation is about improved
agricultural production and about access to markets, so it needs
road transportation and there is a need for electricity as well.
If you set those three together then you get very significant
multiplier effects. We are working together with the World Bank
and we are working together with the FAO,[12]
and we are working together with African governments on this to
raise the issue within national plans.
Q90 Ann McKechin: How successful
have you been in securing other donors' commitments to this type
of work? You mentioned the Commission for Africa. How successful
have you been in trying to get that change and shift in priorities?
Mr Curtis: There is a rising interest,
I would say. It is an area where the Germans and the Japanese
and the World Bank all have an interest.
Chairman: Thank you very much. As you
can appreciate, coming at this from a number of different directions
the more you get into it the more questions arise, so I appreciate
the fact that you have not only answered our questions but you
have recognised that some of them require a follow-up, which we
will look at with interest. Obviously, when we go to Ethiopia
we are hoping we will see some of these things have been practised
and, possibly, also get some of the questions on the ground as
to what people want and what is not being done. If this report
has any value it will be to be able to feed that kind of information
back in. Thank you very much. I am sure the dialogue will continue.
We appreciate the time and trouble you have taken to come and
give evidence.
9 Ev 112. Back
10
Ev 105. Back
11
Economic Commission for Africa. Back
12
UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Back
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