Water, as the Knights of St John glumly observed when they arrived in Malta, is scarce, even scarcer than water policies, or the absence of them, through the years and our careless use of the resource shows. It is not just that water is in scarce supply – over the years we have paid that fact little attention.
The British administration set a good example when Malta was a colony. Wied il-Qlejgħa bordering the outskirts of the Rabat and Mosta expanse was converted into stepped catchments of water. To this day it bears the name of the engineer who created the project.
Chadwick Lakes fill up very quickly with the early relatively heavy rainfall. They not only offer a rare attractive sight in an island which has no rivers or heavy streams. They were intended to serve two practical purposes.
They became available for farmers with fields alongside the valley to draw water from, and they caught a lot of water before it rushed on its way into the Mosta valleys and onward to the sea. Thereby a lot of water had more time to seep into our aquifers before it is wasted.
The idea was emulated by Dom Mintoff in the earlier years of the periods he spent as Prime Minister. He came up with the Risq il-Widien – the valleys’ bounty – project. A number of Malta’s many valleys were cleaned up and where possible interrupted with dams on the Chadwick Lakes model.
During the brief stay of another Labour government between 1996-98 Noel Farrugia, who served as Minister of Agriculture exploited the Chadwick Lakes, first cleaning then embellishing them from the Wied il-Fiddien end to exploit their potential as an agro attraction for locals and tourists alike.
As happened with the change of government in 1987 that project, like Risq il-Widien, was largely abandoned when the government changed once more. In time, however, good sense returned. Under Ninu Zammit, when he served as Nationalist minister in charge of agriculture our valleys attracted fresh attention, with cleaning up and repairs to their low dams taking place during the autumn.
Minister George Pullicino too, has been paying attention to our valleys, which is as it should be. That on its own will not guarantee that our supply of ground water will be adequate in the years ahead. But without paying the valleys proper attention the diminishing availability of good ground water, on which the Water Services Corporation still depends in part, will run out faster.
The WSC has been drawing progressively less water from underground. Not because of any conscious decision to avoid over-utilisation of that scarce resource, but because overuse – by the corporation and by private users including some farmers and a lot of cowboys - have harmed our aquifers and in some places punctured the water table.
The result has not simply been the inefficient use of the fresh water supply, both that piped by the WSC and that derived from boreholes, which use did not reflect the cost of a precious resource. It has been a decline in quality, with growing salinity, as well as in supply. It is not as if no one drew the attention of anybody willing to listen to the dangers inherent in such policies and lack of them. Hydrologist Marco Cremona, for instance, has been one of those persistently writing about the subject for well over a decade.
He translated a technical issue into language that everybody could understand. Unfortunately few listened to him. The listening has started now because the water utilisation issue has drawn the attention of the European Union.
The EU recognises the clear value of water especially that derived from the ground. It has noted the fact that it is used inefficiently in Malta, not least because there is not a properly working price mechanism to signal the true value of our water supply. The union has gone to work and our government is now on notice that it must introduce a far reaching policy change.
That will probably include a new burden on the Water Services Corporation, which may be made to pay for the ground water it utilises as part of its piped supply. When that happens, the resource cost will have to be passed on to the consumer. Aside from the fact that metering and quotas of ground water will be imposed on legitimate farmers’, water bills for households will go up very substantially.
Such a development, it is hoped, will be a painful signal to consumers that they should utilise water efficiently – they will simply pay more if they do not.
The outcome should not stop there. In fact there should be an earlier development. More than ever the Water Services Corporation has to ensure that it has in place the means to produce water efficiently. Consumers will have to pay more to reflect more fully the recovery cost of water production. But they should not continue to pay for the inefficiencies of the corporation as well.
Raising tariffs is easy. Yet it should only be a final resort in the whole process of water production and utilisation, whatever the source.