"What We Need Is A 2020 Vision, Not 20/20 Hindsight"
by Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph G. Recto
Keynote Address to the 35th National Convention of the Philippine Association of Water Districts (PAWD) SMX Convention Center, Davao City

Magandang hapon, maayong hapon, good afternoon sa inyong lahat.

In Batangas, the tradition is to begin a speech with a toast. So let me toast you all not just for a successful convention but for making life easier for your 20 million customers.

The glass I am holding contains pure, clean Davao City Water District water - straight from the taps. It is a taste I am familiar with as I grew up drinking NAWASA juice from the communal faucets of Ateneo and La Salle.

And I owe my three terms in the House to my ability to chase gin with Jetmatic water because in Batangas, the way to a voter's heart is through a stomach full of liquor.

Like most of you, I belong to a generation who drank water straight from the spout, at a time when the superstition that tap water is dirty hasn't been invented yet.

I have told President Silva that I will keep my remarks very brief - because I do not want my speech to interrupt your siesta. I shall be done and over within 10 minutes.

33 babies a minute

By the time I am finished, 33 babies would have been born, some of them in assembly-line fashion in crowded public hospitals. We love babies so much that we produce 4,803 of them a day, and yes, a lot of them were conceived during siesta time.

Each of them will need an average 846 cubic meters of water a year, because that is the annual water withdrawal per capita in the country today.

One in five automatically becomes a customer of a water district. Each will use an average of 180 liters of water per day.

So if 1.76 million people are added to our population yearly, then we have to correspondingly increase our potable water supply by 115 billion liters annually.

But that is just water for household consumption: for cooking, bathing, drinking and for shampooing the family car.

1000 liters per kilo

Because there's a rice-loving gene in our DNA, Filipinos need rice, and not just rice, but unli-rice. Each Filipino devours 119 kilos of it every year.

And to produce one kilo of rice, you need 1,000 liters of water. As you very well know, rice is one crop with a serious drinking problem.

So to satiate the rice cravings of the 1.76 million new Pinoys a year, we will need 208 billion liters of water to grow the 208 million kilos of additional rice. And to produce these, we could either coax more yield out of existing ricelands or open up 84,000 hectares of new lands for rice production every year -- an area two and a half times the size of Camiguin.

We also depend on water for the electricity that runs our factories, powers our homes, and yes, charges our phones so you and I can selfie together later, Instagram the cholesterol that will clog our hearts, and log on to FB for the latest on Vhong.

The average Pinoy consumes 594 kilowatt-hours per year, a great deal of it from water passing through turbines.

Almost one-fifth of Luzon's dependable capacity of 11,349 megawatts comes from hydroelectric plants. In Mindanao, the ratio is higher at almost half, or 826 megawatts out of the reliable load of 1,614 megawatts.

Now, the more babies we produce, the more electricity we need. Combined with economic expansion, our annual population increase triggers a need for 850 megawatts of additional power a year.

Yes, sex really does generate electricity, as some scientists have discovered but it is the product of unprotected sex that creates energy demand.

Quick-fix, chop-chop development

My friends, I have juxtaposed population increase and the pressure it applies on water supply in three areas: household use, rice and power - to drive home the point of preparing for the future and planning ahead.

Vision is a commodity in short supply in our country today.

We are experts in the tactical, and proficient on the ad hoc. We love the quick-fix, and expect Band Aid cures to mature into permanent remedies.

Ten-year plans are unheard of in government today. A 25-year outlook is deemed as distant as the next Ice Age. What is used is a planning platform which hews to the electoral calendar, meaning projects must be finished within three years. Projects are bookended by elections.

As a result we are stuck with 1,000-day battle plans, which coincide with the term of the incumbent. Projects carry "best before election" expiry dates so that when inaugurated they can be milked for reelection propaganda.

Because of this constricted time frame, only short-gestation, and therefore small projects are considered. Big projects that take more than three years to finish take the back seat.

The tragic result of limited vision and planning myopia is chop-chop development in which progress comes in small increments. Instead of embarking on big projects that would span several administrations, and which are oblivious to the changing of the guards, we content ourselves with piecemeal construction.

Against this backdrop, the challenge for all of us, whether we are the national government or a small LGU or a GOCC, is to drop the election calendar as a planning guide.

We should stop pressing the reboot button every three or six years.

2020 vision, not 20/20 hindsight

So what must we do? My suggestion is for us to look beyond 2016, to, for example, 2020.

Instead of having a 20/20 hindsight, let us have a vision for 2020.

2014 to 2020 consists of six years, equivalent to one presidential term. There are 2288 days to the end of 2020. By then, our population would have grown to 110.6 million from a little over 100 million this year. We are adding one Singapore every three years.

For water districts and utilities, it means 10.6 million more Filipinos, or seven and a half times the population of Davao City today, who will be needing 696 million cubic meters of water a year by then.

Handa na ba tayo? Mayroon na bang mga dams at reservoir na pagkukuhanan ng tubig? We have 72 months to lay down the infrastructure to meet the demands of 10.6 million new customers.

10.6 million more in 6 years

On rice, 10.6 million more mouths to feed means we have to ramp up rice production, or smuggling, by 1.26 million metric tons a year.

As I've said earlier, we can either improve productivity on existing ricelands, or open up newly irrigated lands for rice production at a rate of 83,968 hectares a year for the next six years.

That's equivalent to readying land the size of four Lunetas every day until 2020.

At a cost of P200,000 per hectare, the total bill for irrigating 503,809 hectares of land is about P100 billion, an amount almost thrice our budget for all state colleges this year. Mayroon na ba tayong pagkukuhanan ng perang ito?

On power, our annual peak demand of around 13,900 MW will increase to about 19,000 MW by 2020. To meet this demand, we have to inaugurate two 100-megawatt plants every quarter for the next six years.

The question is this: Have we lined up enough commitments to give us the confidence to assure those who had occasionally cursed the darkness that there's light at the end of the tunnel?

Halimbawa, nagtanim ba tayo ng dagdag na puno sa ating mga dam? Itinuro na ba natin kay Duterte kung sino ang mga illegal loggers?

No substitute for water

But these concerns pale in comparison with our need for water, as water is irreplaceable. We can live off the grid, opt not to go to school, walk to work, delete our Facebook account, and find a substitute for every commodity, except for water. We cannot live without it.

So in our checklist for 2020, the following ranks first :

Will there be enough water to drink, grow food with, quench our animals' thirst, and run our hydroelectric plants in 2020?

This is the question to ask because nothing is produced in this world without water.

Yung kapeng iniinom n'yo ngayon, to produce one cup of it, 140 liters of water is needed.

To manufacture 1 kilo of steel, 234 liters of is needed.

Attention deficit on the water deficit

And if someone will invite you later to "come up to my condo and dala ka ng food" and you will bring one kilo of beef salpicao and a liter of beer, remember that it took 15,000 liters of water to produce that amount of beef and 50 liters for that beer, so be sure to have a wonderful time.

Eh kung bibili ka pa ng bagong karsonsilyo, the estimate is that it takes 378 liters of water to grow the cotton required to weave one pair of boxer shorts.

Unfortunately, water security as an issue does not register in the public radar. How I wish it could cry "rape" to grab our attention.

The truth is, this country suffers from an ailment diagnosed as ADWD - or attention deficit on the water deficit.

Except for you guys, of course, because you operate on the business model that delivery of water only remains viable for as long as it is available.

Yours is service anchored not on the provisional or the momentary but on the long-term. That is why you plug leaks, reduce NWR, protect watershed, and guard your sources.

In your business, lack of water can only be avoided through an abundance of vision and plenty of foresight.

Malaki pa ang gagampanan nyong papel sa darating na panahon. Mahalaga ang inyong tungkulin.

No faucet, no toilet

Let me give you one example.

Regular handwashing cuts by one-third to one-half the number of diarrhea cases. If we use the number of people diarrhea downed in 2010, which was 269,000, imagine how many cases will be avoided and lives saved if we can bring more clean piped water to homes.

At a time when man has put a rover in Mars, the irony is that 16 percent of homes still have no access to clean water in this part of the world.

At a time when we have catapulted a probe 15 billion miles from the Sun, the equivalent of a galactic homerun, as much as 12 percent of the population have no flush toilets here.

Seriously, water-born diseases cost Filipinos P2.8 billion annually in treatment costs and lost economic opportunities. Sa tulong n'yo, sa pamamagitan ng simpleng koneksyon ng malinis na tubig, mababawasan natin ito.

Napoles-proof

But for you to do the above, you need help from the government.

To your grab bag of proposals on what help you need, let me just add a few:

In the 2014 national budget, there's a P6.2 billion allocation for the National Greening Program. Ang proposal ko, bakit hindi i-earmark ang maliit na bahagi nito para sa local water districts? Kasi kung meron mang pinakapanatiko sa pagtatanim ng puno sa watershed, kayo na yun.

It also boosts transparency as replanting can be subjected to dual audit, by your auditors and by DENR's auditors. You want to Napoles-proof it? Then course some of it through local water districts.

Condone tax liabilities

We should also condone the tax liabilities of 164 water districts as commanded by the condonation clause in RA 10026.

We have undertaken a lot of debt-forgiveness schemes. In the power sector, we have written off billions of their obligations. In numerous pieces of legislation, banks, which are hardly examples of penury, have been given reprieves. So why not water districts?

Kapag may nagsabing water districts don't deserve it, isang sagot lang ang ihahambalos ko:

Ang labor productivity ng nasa water supply sector ay mataas. Total value added per worker is P1.3 million. Ibig sabihin, ang mga magtutubig ay mukhang mas masipag pa sa mga mambabatas.

Your representative can while away his time in Congress for years with nothing to show for, not even hot air, and his constituents won't even care. But once air comes out of water faucets in your service area, even for just a few hours, you start trending in the social media.

Beat pork barrel into water pipes

But for taps not to go dry, government must invest more in the water sector, as spending trends are mere drops in the bucket. According to the UN, annual average spending for water development, from irrigation to sanitation, was about P22 billion from 2002 to 2011.

Sa water resource protection nga, P72 million lang daw ang naigugol bawat taon. Hindi tumataginting pero katiting na sitenta sentimos bawat Pilipino sa kada taon.

But as the population swells, seas rise and typhoon visits become too often, too lethal and too strong, so must we increase what we spend for water.

Kung kulang ang pondo, then we can pound pork barrel into water pipes.

Maswerte nga tayo kasi compared to other countries, we are blessed with abundant water.

Average annual rainfall here is 7 feet 7 inches, lampas tao. Sa Bahrain ay wala pang isang dangkal kada taon, 3.8 inches. Sa Australia, isang bansot na 1 foot 9 inches. Kaya naman ang annual renewable water available sa bawat Pinoy ay halos limang milyong litro.

Well must not go dry

But this water must be captured, stored, processed, piped and delivered. In other words, to God's gift we must give and increase our equity, not tomorrow but today.

Kasi sabi nga ng kaibigan kong Tsinoy, ng binati niya ako nung Chinese New Year:

We only know the worth of water when the well is dry.

I know that because you have 2020 vision the well won't go dry.