Chipping away at India's water problems

This NewsHour piece from several days ago is interesting.

Voices from Mali

This post (by two political scientists from Notre Dame) reports data from surveys of 500 Malian villagers conducted in Jan. 2012 and summer 2012.

The main message:

...while the international media has fixated on political crisis, the respondents actually cared much more about a different sort of crisis: daily survival in the context of increasing desertification and unprecedented drought....We hope that their testimony is a reminder of the many underpublicized crises that rural citizens experience every day, regardless of political instability. Coups and rebellions incite international action and capture headlines, but [lack of] access to food, clinics, and potable water continually create life-or-death situations for many Malians.

Food, water, and conflict

A post by Daniel Little with numerous links.

The UN water rights resolution

The UN General Assembly today declared access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation a human right, in a resolution that no country opposed but on which 41, including the U.S., abstained. The abstainers raised various objections, one of which had to do with the status of an ongoing 'process' on the subject at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, another with the alleged absence of a basis in international law for declaring the right to water a "free-standing" right (as the British delegate put it).

2.6 billion people, or roughly 40 percent of the world's population, lack access to sanitation, and nearly a billion people lack access to clean water. This resolution, like all General Assembly resolutions, is non-binding and must be seen as aspirational. It apparently does not commit states to any specific actions, though it does call on them to "scale up" efforts to transfer technology and expertise that would improve the situation. Aspirational resolutions are not meaningless, and abstaining on this particular one makes little sense. It only makes the abstainers look small-minded and mean-spirited. Moreover, pronouncements about the "existing state of international law" merely reinforce the accurate perception that international law in this respect is in need of renovation.

Update: S. Carvin at Duck of Minerva has a longer post about this here.

UN report on sanitation

On a day when Nelson Mandela, celebrating his 90th birthday, called for renewed attention to poverty in South Africa and the rest of the world, it's worth noting this recent U.N. report on access to clean water and basic sanitation. Although the number of people without access to clean water has been cut in half since 1990, roughly 1.2 billion people still lack basic sanitation, and this causes a significant part of the daily toll of child mortality. Even in a time of economic uncertainty and recession, most people (not everyone to be sure, but most) who live above subsistence level can do something constructive about extreme or 'absolute' poverty, even if it's just contributing something to Oxfam or a similar organization every month or every year, signing up for the One Campaign's email list, or something comparable.