People line up to fill
jerry cans with water from the Wuaraira Repano mountain in Caracas on
Jan. 21, 2016. Venezuela suffers a severe water shortage, which the
government attributes to the delay in the arrival of the rainy season
for the third consecutive year. (Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images)
Venezuela is experiencing critical shortages, prompting concerns that a humanitarian crisis
will engulf this oil-rich South American country. Food, medicine,
money, electricity, and water are all either rationed or unavailable, as
Nicolas Maduro’s government confronts deep recession and drought.
The halving of the international oil price in a country dependent on oil for 95 percent of its export earnings has sharply reversed advances made in reducing poverty and inequality in the mid-2000s.
But Venezuela’s problems run deeper than an over-reliance on a volatile commodity. Since his election as president in 2013,
following the death of Hugo Chavez, Maduro has significantly failed to
address chronic problems of economic mismanagement, poor planning,
opacity, and corruption.
His administration has retained debilitating price and exchange controls
that fuel inflation, black markets, and shortages. In its ongoing quest
to construct 21st-century socialism, the government has continued ad
hoc and unaffordable nationalization programs.
Billions of dollars may yet be drained from the country in litigation
for asset and land seizures, while an accumulation of unpaid bills and
contracts have prompted speculation the state oil company, PDVSA, may default on upcoming interest payments on its debts.
Critical Shortages
No sector better represents the ambitions, limitations, and
ultimately the failure of Hugo Chavez—and subsequently Nicolas
Maduro—than Venezuela’s perennially rationed water. Currently struggling
with drought caused by El Niño, the government announced extended Easter holidays in March, and the closure of shopping malls and a reduced working week in April.
These measures were intended to conserve electricity as water levels in the Guri hydroelectric dam, which supplies 65 percent of the country’s power, has fallen to critical levels.
In 2007, 2010, and currently, Guri’s water reserves dropped to 244 meters above sea level, just above the 240-meter limit at which it has to wind down generation, closing eight turbines at the loss of 5,000 MW.
A Troubled History
Venezuela has huge water resources, but in the wrong place.
According to official estimates, 85 percent of water resources are
located in the southeast of the country, home to only 10 percent of the
population. By contrast, only 15 percent of water resources are in the
rapidly urbanized north of the country where the bulk of the population
lives.
Infrastructure investment in the 1950s and 1960s improved supply,
providing 80 percent of Venezuelan households with access to water. But
investment and planning did not keep up with demand and average
consumption of an estimated 350 liters per day (450 liters per day among the 4 million residents of the capital Caracas).
In 1989, popular frustration with shortages, inefficient services,
pollution, clandestine tapping, and deteriorating quality standards
prompted the formation of a new regulatory framework. This decentralized
the state monopoly of water services to ten regional utilities and
created a new agency: Empresa Hidrologica de Venezuela (Hidroven).
The overcrowded federal district was served by Hidrocapital, created
in 1991, which prioritized renovation of aqueducts bringing water from
the Tuy River Basin complex. But rolling water bans and social protest
continued across the country in the 1990s. Popular antipathy to
privatization of water services made it difficult for the government to
generate foreign investment.
The Chavez Years
Like so much in Venezuela, water policy changed during Chavez’s
presidency. The government took radical steps to address an intensifying
water crisis that largely affected residents of the shanty towns—a
bedrock of support for the Chavez government.
After a 2001 study by the
National Statistics Institute found that 231 of Venezuela’s 335
municipalities had insufficient water and sanitation services, 4.2
million people had no access to piped water and 8 million lacked
adequate sanitary facilities, the Water and Sanitation Law was
introduced by presidential decree. In line with the government’s vision
of popular empowerment and a “new geometry of power”
this law decentralized water policy down to 7,000 community
“roundtables” (associations involved in monitoring water at neighborhood
level) linked to the national water company Hidroven.
It became the responsibility of local populations to identify their
needs and investment priorities. Running parallel with localization of
utilities management, the government nationalized key sectors, including electricity in 2007.
Failed Promises
Chavez’s vision of empowered communities and national energy
self-sufficiency has, like the plans of his predecessors in the 1990s
failed to deliver improvement. Investment and supply in both water and
electricity (an estimated $10 billion investment in water
and $60 billion in electricity over the past decade) has failed to keep
up with accelerating demand driven by demographic and economic growth.
Management has been poor due to high ministerial turnover and a lack
of technical capacity, while administrative waste and profligacy thrived
due to poor oversight and limited accountability. As with other
examples of Chavez’s vision of community-led democracy, the water roundtables were quickly undone by—among other problems—unresponsive officials.
The country is now at a fateful juncture. Financial collapse
precludes any state capacity for large-scale water investment. The
country’s ongoing political crisis has pushed questions of resource
management and conservation to the back seat.
There could also be dangerous health consequences. Households
stockpiling scarce water resources could increase the exposure of an
already vulnerable population to mosquito-borne diseases including Zika, yellow fever, dengue, and chikungunya.
Julia Buxton is a professor of comparative politics at
the Central European University at Hungary. This article was originally
published on The Conversation.
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