KEYNOTE SPEECH

Water Philippines 2015 Conference and Exhibition

SMX Convention Center | 25 March 2015

DONT LET THE WELL RUN DRY

Magandang umaga po sa inyong lahat.
Some of us today may have skipped breakfast, but
I know that there were four things we surely did
this morning: Drank water, brushed our teeth, took
a bath, and flushed the toilet.
And tonight, we will end the day the way we
started it as water consumers.
A typical Pinoy uses 180 liters of water daily
largely because men here bathe twice, and the
women thrice a day.
This comes up to a per capita water consumption
of 66 cubic meters annually.
But because the dog and the car get shampooed
often too, total water withdrawal per capita in this
country is about 846 cubic meters annually.
This number covers what factories and farm need
because water, as we all know, is a universal
production ingredient.
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For example, the cup of coffee we drank this

morning, from growing the bean to brewing, went
through a process which required 140 liters of
water.
If we had rice for breakfast, then a kilo of it
required 1,000 liters of water to produce. Palay is
a crop with a serious drinking problem.
And for those of you who have no drinking
problem but would like to cap your day with a
bottle of beer, heres a sobering thought: It
requires 75 liters of water to brew one mug.
Luckily, the Philippines is abundant with water.
Average annual rainfall here is 7 feet 7 inches
lampas tao.
In Australia, it is about 1 foot 9 inches lampas
tuhod.
In Bahrain, it is 3.8 inches hanggang sakong
lang.
In all, the annual renewable water available for
every Filipino is about 5 million liters.

Water per se is free, goes a familiar refrain, but the

cost of bringing it to the homes of consumers is
not.
Water has to be dammed or drilled, filtered and
treated, before finally being piped to households.
And these, I understand, are what all of you are
doing.
But oftentimes we take water and what you do
for granted. The signs are all over that we should
not.
On my home last night early, I must stress
because while the Senate is in recess and I don't
have to register my attendance but my wife checks
it at home there were two things about water that
I heard and did which underscore the need to give
water our serious attention.
First, I listened to a radio discussion on how even
a mild El Nio can trigger a dry spell, cause water
rationing, slash irrigation supply, and render
hydroelectric plants inoperable.
And when I stopped by a restaurant to buy food
upon orders of the attendance-checker at home,
by the way it was one of those eateries which
offers free wi-fi but no free drinking water.

We have come to attach value to clean drinking

water.
If you doubt it, heres Exhibit A: A liter of diesel
from oil drilled 8,000 feet below and shipped from
refineries 8,000 kilometers away now costs less
than a liter of mineral water bottled locally.
But the above pales in comparison with what must
be done.
I have told myself to limit my speech to 10
minutes, which by senatorial standards is the
speed of light.
By the time I am finished, 33 babies would have
been born in this country.
We love babies so much that we produce 4,785 of
them a day.
Yearly, we add almost 1.8 million to our population.
By 2020, there will be 10 million more of us than
we are today. We are adding one Singapore every
three years.
So if our population grows by that much yearly,
then we have to correspondingly increase our
potable water supply by 115 billion liters annually.

And we havent included the water needed to grow

our food.
Because there is an unli rice-loving gene in our
body, then we have to open up 60,000 hectares of
new lands for rice production every year, an area
two and a half times the size of Camiguin.
Because we need electricity to power our laptops
so we can post our selfies in our FBs, then we
must see to it that our hydroelectric plants don't
run out of water.
Half of Mindanaos electricity come from dams, as
do one-fifth of Luzons. No water in dams, no juice
in our iPads.
So this is why activities like this expo is important.
It raises the water quotient of the nation. Not only
are machinery and equipment on display here,
what is also being sold is the idea to make our
country water-ready.
State-of-the-art technology has no use if policies,
preparedness and projects on water
remain backward.
Fortunately, efforts are underway to achieve water
security.
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Of course, you are doing your share.

We are also doing ours in the Senate. There might
be a dry spell out there, but there is no El Nio of
water initiatives in the Upper House.
We may have given the impression that we are
fixated by Mamasapano. But what is unreported is
the unheralded work we do in crafting laws related
to water.
For example, we have boosted the budget for
community water supply in the national budget for
five years in a row now.
We have also been religiously allocating billions of
pesos for the National Greening Program to
nurture watersheds indispensable in water
delivery.
Last week, we passed on second reading, without
fanfare but with much resolve, the bill reiterating
the tax-exempt status, and condoning the tax
liabilities of local water districts.
We promised local water districts that we will pass
it. On this pledge, the Senate is time-on-target.

The approval of the bill is in recognition of the

important work of 514 local water districts in
providing 20 million Filipinos clean water roundthe-clock.
It is an excellent piece of legislation because
taxes foregone will be returned to consumers, by
making services better, broader and bigger.
It will be used to finance improvements, like new
wells and fresh sources, new pipes and modern
meters to end leaks, and even computers to plug
leakages of the monetary kind.
Hindi naman ganun kalaki ang ipapatawad na
utang. The 78 LWDs had a combined liability
of P842 million. And the total receivables from all
LWDs is P1.005 billion.
The reason I am citing these is to compare it with
other obligations incurred by other industries which
the government, in an act of grace, and condoned
in the past.
We have written off debts and crossed out arrears
in the books of government corporations in
amounts far greater than what LWDs are asking.

Three years ago, P30 billion, in three tranches,

was plowed to the Central Bank as added
capitalization without congressional leaders
receiving a text that the transfer has been made.
In the power sector, we have written off hundreds
of billions of their debts.
In numerous pieces of legislation, banks, which
are hardly examples of penury, have been given
reprieves, the SPAV, to cite one.
In contrast, what LWDs are asking is a drop in the
bucket of what has been given to private
companies.
And the best thing is that taxes saved will not be
kept for profits but will be used to improve service.
For that is essentially the prayer of LWDs: Forgive
us our debts and we will deliver more water.
We hope that this and the other things we are
doing in the Senate help meet the challenge of
providing clean water for more people in the years
to come.
In addition to this future demand which must be
met, there is a backlog to be wiped out.

Nakarating na ang rover sa Mars, but the irony is

that 16 percent of homes dito sa Pilipinas have no
access to clean water.
At a time when we have catapulted a probe 15
billion miles from the Sun, the equivalent of a
galactic homerun, 12 percent of the population
have no flush toilets here.
This is unfortunate because there is no right as
basic as access to clean water.
While technology has cloned many things and
invented substitutes for many commodities, it has
yet to create synthetic water.
It is for this lack of any alternative to water that
its denial to a person exacts a heavy toll on
his quality of life.
Regular hand-washing alone cuts by one-third to
one-half the number of severe diarrhea cases of
which about half a million are reported yearly.
Water-borne diseases cost Filipinos P2.8 billion
annually in treatment costs and lost economic
opportunities.

So please let us have more meetings like this,

more expositions like this, and more advocates for
clean water like us to pressure our government
that when it comes to the basic human right of
access to clean water, it cannot wash its hands of
this responsibility
There is a Chinese saying which says - We only
know the worth of water when the well is dry.
Let us make sure that it wont.
Maraming salamat po.

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