Villages must be empowered to protect water resources

Local villages and traditional institutions must be empowered to protect their natural water resources to tackle the island’s impending water crisis, a recent discussion of local environmental activists concluded.

I Made Suarnatha, the founder of Yayasan Wisnu, one of the island’s oldest environmental NGOs, said that the role of villages and traditional institutions, particularly the traditional farming and irrigation association Subak, was critical because the structure of the local government was still in a state of disorientation in dealing with pressing environmental issues.

For instance, Suarnatha said that the preservation and sustenance of water resources were heavily influenced by existing zoning and spatial regulations designed and imposed by the local government.

The Bali administration issued a bylaw on zoning and spatial arrangement that offered stronger protection of the island’s environment.

However, the bylaw so far has failed to create real change due to its unanimous rejection by the island’s regents and mayors, who said that the bylaw would cut the flow of tourism investment.

“The quality and quantity of the water resources will be very much determined by the zoning policy adopted by the island. Presently, the island’s provincial and regency-level administrations are still locked in a fight over the zoning bylaw, thus, rendering that piece of legislation as nothing more than a paper tiger,” he said during a discussion held by the Indonesian Fair Trade Forum and the Indonesia Environmental
Forum (Walhi).

The island would still have hope, he said, if the activists succeeded in organizing villages and traditional institutions to reject any effort to exploit local water resources.

He warned that exploitative efforts might be launched by a private sector company, such as a water bottling company, or the local administration looking to boost its revenue by “selling” its water resources to private enterprises.

He offered an example of how three villages in Petang, Badung, in 2009 refused an advance by a private company offering to manage the villages’ abundant water resources.

“The company promised to give the villages a total of Rp 200 million a year if the villages allowed the company to manage the water resources. The villages refused because they believed that in the long run the arrangement would damage the environment as well as create a shortage of clean water supply for the villagers,” he said.

Suarnatha said that villages and traditional institutions across the island should be made aware of the action taken by those villages in Badung.

He warned that a water shortage problem has gripped the island since late 1990s and the island has yet to come up with a viable solution.

“Since 1998 the island has been identified as having a water problem. It has been 24 years since that year and we are still talking, instead of taking action, about the problem. There has yet a smart and systematic initiative to handle this problem,” he said.

In the meantime, the condition of the island’s water resources continues to worsen. Out of a total of 400 existing rivers, 200 have dried up and sea water intrusion has became a common phenomenon in the island’s coastal regions.

Hendro Sangkoyo of the School of Democratic Economics said that the water problem would also trigger a major problem for the food supply.

In 2015, he estimated, Indonesia would be among several high-population countries suffering from food shortage problems.

“The best solution is reviving traditional farming and irrigation system, which form 70 percent of the world’s irrigation system.”