I recently wrote a column on Presidential Adviser for Environmental Protection Neric Acosta, who simultaneously wears the hat of general manager of the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA). In both positions, Acosta moves back and forth from the theoretical to the practical.
While he advises President Aquino on the crafting of policies to stave off the more alarming effects of global warming and keeps the leadership up-to-date on the latest research in the field, Acosta must deal “up close and personal” with the problems of Laguna Lake. Tasked by the President to clean up what Acosta himself has called “one of the largest lakes and the dirtiest in Asia,” he finds himself dealing with not just biological waste, fish pens and water lily. He must also contend with human inhabitants not just on the lake’s edge, but on the fringes of all the rivers and streams that feed into the lake.
And it is dealing with the humans who both depend on the lake (for fresh water and fish supply, for instance) and cause the most environmental damage that I suppose presents the gravest challenge to Acosta as he seeks to save the Lake.
For instance, in an earlier column, I quoted Acosta as saying that one short-term strategy he has adopted is to address pollution in Laguna Lake by clearing its shores of informal settlements, since “domestic waste makes up to 70 percent of pollutants in the lake.”
This drew an immediate response from Denis Murphy of Urban Poor Associates, an NGO that champions the rights of the urban poor. Murphy wanted to know if the figure of 70 percent represented the “domestic pollutants of the informal settlers only or the combined waste of all who dwell in the lakeside towns, rich and poor?”
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In the 1990s as the Lason (poison) Award was being given to polluting companies on the Pasig River, Murphy recalls, the award-giving body “used to say pollution in the river was 4 percent caused by the poor people along the banks, 20 percent by industry and the remaining 76 percent by the liquid waste from the toilets of all classes of people in Metro Manila. The river was everyone’s sewer.”
The matter of who contributes the most waste to Laguna Lake is important, says Murphy, not just for blaming and shaming, but also because “it seems the Supreme Court relied on inaccurate science data (similar to that in your column) when it made the poor people along the rivers, esteros and the coastline appear to be the main cause of pollution in Manila Bay, and urged local and national government to halt the pollution, going so far as to remove the poor families.”
Adds Murphy: “What if the poor only contribute 4 percent of the total pollution? We have to get to the real problem and build waste treatment plants.”
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I forwarded Murphy’s letter to Acosta, and he replied that the figure of 70 percent of domestic wastes is from all sources (poor, middle-class and rich), although to his mind the 4 percent attributed to informal settlers “would be, from all our LLDA data, far too little.”
In a later message, Acosta said the LLDA is currently “crunching some numbers based on average domestic waste per household x total number of households etc.” that is based on “biological oxygen demand loadings.” I must confess he lost me at this point, but it seems the current LLDA leadership is finally barking up the right tree: the lack of water treatment plants that would treat sewage before returning it to rivers, lakes and the sea. Currently, most middle-class households rely on septic tanks (pozo negro) to contain and break down their waste matter, but after some time, the black sludge in these tanks will have to be siphoned out. Have we ever given a thought to where the siphoning companies dispose of the waste matter?
And let’s not get started on informal settlements, which lack the most basic of amenities, including sewers. With no septic tanks or sewerage systems, they end up depositing raw waste matter directly into waterways. The solution, I would think, is not to drive them away, but to develop their settlements into habitable communities equipped with the basics of decent living, including sewerage systems.
I remember once talking with the management of Manila Water, one of the metropolis’ water utility franchises. The “water business,” they said, has reached maximum capacity in their franchise area and the next profit area could be sewerage. Certainly, the need exists, but to make the cost of building water treatment plants and sewerage systems worth it, awareness must be raised among families, communities and local governments to make the necessary investments to make the dream of a clean Laguna Lake (and other waterways) a reality.
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ACOSTA is currently serving a 90-day suspension while hearings on a graft case against him are going on. The case stems from charges filed more than a decade ago by his political enemies that he misused his countryside development fund during his first term as a congressman.
The beneficiary of his CDF happened to be a micro-credit cooperative patterned after the Grameen Bank model. In fact, Acosta even spent some time in Bangladesh under the tutelage of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus learning the system and later establishing the first micro-credit system targeting poor rural women in his native Bukidnon. Some years ago, I had the chance to visit with the women and saw first-hand how the cooperative had changed their lives. It’s unfortunate that media coverage of the case has focused on the more sensational aspects and failed to discuss the real contributions of the project, a testament to “Teacher Neric’s” lifetime commitment not just to the environment but to meaningful development as well.