In Year of Sanitation, U.N. should clean its own house
By Claudia Rosett
Philadelphia Inquirer
November 5, 2007
The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. What this portends was heralded last week by a four-day conference in New Delhi, awash in bureaucrats from about 40 countries and dubbed the "World Toilet Summit."
If that sounds like a joke, sanitation is no laughing matter. According to U.N. estimates, 2.6 billion people worldwide lack access to hygienic toilets. The U.N.'s aim is to halve this number by the year 2015, as part of a broader agenda of halving poverty. By its own account, the United Nations has been falling behind in this goal. At least six major U.N. agencies have now been enlisted, and will seek more funding, to hurry up remedies to what one of them, UNICEF, is calling the "global sanitation crisis."
Will that help? Modern development has taught us that decent plumbing does not spring from the visions of U.N. planners. It emerges when ordinary people gain some say in their own government, and enjoy the freedom to make individual decisions and trade-offs about what they see as a better quality of life.
At the United Nations, different priorities prevail. In the name of better hygiene for the poor, scores of government officials and U.N. staffers have already traveled to preparatory meetings in Shanghai and New York. Off to an early start, the Year of Sanitation will be officially launched Nov. 21 at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. Those ceremonies will be followed by workshops, thematic exhibitions and conferences in venues around the globe, such as Sweden, Spain and Macau.
If the goal were simply for the United Nations to spend taxpayer money, occupy conference halls and top up the frequent-flier accounts of U.N. officials, it might all translate into a highly successful year. While I don't doubt the goodwill of many involved, this looks like yet another U.N. campaign in which the erstwhile beneficiaries will have almost no say, while U.N. eminences and well-paid globocrats claim to represent their interests.
The goal is to provide better sanitation for impoverished people. When people are free to make their own decisions about their living circumstances, they tend to demand sewers, buy toilets, and vote for authorities who keep the infrastructure working.
One instructive example, in my own experience, is Taiwan, where my family lived for a while in the late 1960s, and where I have returned periodically, most recently in 2005. When I first saw Taiwan, in 1968, the government was a military dictatorship, millions were dirt poor, and the sanitation was horrendous. The cities were packed with squatters' huts, and the streets were edged by open sewers. Parasites were common, and disease was rife.
But Taiwan's government allowed its citizens private property rights, and over time began easing its martial ways, becoming democratic by the 1990s. As this happened, decent plumbing became the norm.
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Senator Tom Coburn
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
340 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2254 Fax: 202-228-3796
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