SINCE the run up to the end of last year, climate change has been blamed pretty much for everything. The great floods and the disasters that struck the country were attributed to climate change. This year, with climate change still a distant possibility, much of everything is now being blamed on a weather event that is right here right now—El Niño.

We have heard the Department of Energy (DOE) secretary quip that “[t]hese are force majeure. Acts of God. If you want to blame somebody, blame God” referring to the power supply problem in Mindanao.

The island is finding water levels in Mindanao-based hydroelectric power plants falling prompting the DOE to recommend the declaration of a “power crisis” situation on the island-region to enable the procurement of additional generating capacity. The DOE said the cost of such measures “can either be shouldered by the government itself in terms of subsidy or passed on to consumers.”

One must note that having El Niño does not automatically mean there will be drought for all parts of the Philippines. In fact, according to records of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), Mindanao in general has been experiencing normal to above normal rainfall in the past month. The receding water levels in Agus could thus be due to other factors such as heavy siltation in the dam and less from the El Niño.

We have written in this column on the recurring nature of El Niño. It has a fairly regular 5 to 7 years period of return and everyone knows (since the Pagasa has announced it last year) that 2010 is an El Niño year. Emergency powers should be exactly for that—unforeseen emergencies. The problems that government officials attribute to El Niño only reflect the fact that they have not prepared for its return nor do they realize, as Rep. Luz Ilagan of Gabriela said that “the long years of neglect, inefficiency and wrong prioritization cannot be corrected by the magic wand of emergency powers.”

On top of this neglect, much of our water resources such as rivers, springs, waterfalls and underground water are being controlled and used by big foreign and private corporations through water permits, according to the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (KPNE). Water is primarily treated as an economic good to be distributed, controlled and profit from by big business and the government making water for basic public services such as irrigation and community water supply becomes only secondary.

KPNE found that according to the 2007 summary of water permits granted by the National Water Resources Board, 19,695 entities were the granted permits to a total volume of 60,164,70.752 liter per second (lps) that may be used for any of the following purposes: domestic, irrigation, power, fisheries, industrial, livestock, recreational and commercial. The power sector takes up much of the water, with a volume of 3,432,133.193 lps, or 57 percent of the total volume granted to all the water permit holders, while other sectors receive much less such as irrigation (35-+ percent) and domestic (3 percent).

The power sector gets the lion share of the volume of water allocated by the government but it only has 235 water permit grantees or just 1 percent of the total number of grantees. On the other hand, irrigation has the biggest number of grantees 10,329 (52 percent), followed by domestic/households:
6,447 (33 percent), industrial: 1,403, fisheries: 482, commercial: 343. While it is water for irrigation and domestic supply that are used by the overwhelming majority of the population particularly the farmers and urban residents, the two sectors only get 35 percent and 3 of the total volume of water extracted from surface and ground water sources.

Drought and lack of rainfall brought by the El Niño phenomenon compounds the effects of the long-standing practice of our government of appropriating our resources and selling them to a few foreign and businesses instead of ensuring clean, cost-efficient water be available to the majority of the people.

This unequal distribution of water resources is also very pronounced in the provinces hit by the long dry spell and water scarcity. In Region II (Cagayan Valley), a total of 1,492 water permits were granted with 96 percent or 1,426 given to farmers and only 2 percent (32) for power corporations. Yet it is the power generators who control and use 78 percent (1,054,306 lps) of the total water volume in the region while the majority of the farmers only get 22 percent (297,347 lps).

These water permits should be reviewed. Government should cancel the water permits of big private and foreign corporations who are wasteful and pollutive. A moratorium on issuing water permits to big private corporations should also be implemented. Water allocations given to these corporations should be immediately channeled for public consumption and benefits such as irrigation and domestic supply.