Shaukat calls for sharing knowledge on water issues: 13th General Assembly of APPCED held

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Wednesday asked Parliamentarians to share knowledge, experience and expertise amongst each other to get rid of the water scarcity problem that is now emerging across the world.
He was speaking at the 13th General Assembly of the Asia Pacific Parliamentarians' Conference on Environment and Development hosted by Pakistan. "As public representatives who formulate and shape public opinion, Parliamentarians must take on the duty of solving problem growing out of hand and which required concerted efforts on the part of the government, the private sector and the society." The Prime Minister appreciated the Conference as an expression of the parliamentarians' resolve to work together to sustain the process of economic development.
The Senate chairman, Mohammadmian Soomro, unanimously elected to chair the conference spoke in his address of the nexus between water crisis and poverty. "The people suffering the most from the water and sanitation crisis were the poor people in general and poor women in particular because they often lacked the political voice needed to assert their claims to water. A concerted drive was lacking to extend access to water for all through well designed and properly financed national plans. "We have the finance, technology and capacity to do it in the 21st century and all must work to consign the water crisis to history just as today's rich countries did a century ago."
Eighty delegates from Canada, China, Indonesia, Iran, Kiribati, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Palau, Thailand, highlighted water issues in the plenary session held at Marriot on Wednesday.
Issues highlighted by the delegates ranged from physical resources, a long cycle of inadequate rainfall, growing population, stagnant economies which can be managed through building dams and reservoirs, a course that Pakistan also advocated.
Senator Nisar Memon, elected chair of the drafting committee in the executive committee meeting held in the morning, presented the Pakistan report.
He said additional dams have to be built and new reservoirs provided, so that practically all the run-off of Indus Basin rivers could be stored and used for irrigation with a minimum wastage being discharged in the Arabian Sea.
Representing China, Ms Ha Shaoling said water population had become a serious problem in her country due to the rapid growth of the economy, and to overcome the problem China has vigorously implementing policies of water conservation. The Iranian delegate Syed Jaffar Sadar Mousvi in his paper said the importance of water shortage drove the attention of UN to consider water management. For this purpose Iran had supported the establishment of UNESCO office in Tehran for advancing scientific knowledge and research for this region.
Head of the Indonesian delegation, Dr Sony Keraf , reading his country's paper recognised the value of cooperation and an influential mechanism to follow and implement global conference outcomes. The Malaysian Deputy Speaker of Senate said problems of availability stemmed from uncontrolled extraction of underground water, continuous degradation, shrinkage of water catchment areas and water wastage.
Delegation from Korea, Kiribati and Kyrgyzstan also spoke on the occasion. The conference co-ordinator Jamil Quraishi taking to Business Recorder thanked God Almighty that the conference mechanism had worked. He said his team had planned for the conference since January 2006 but plans went awry due to the earthquake disaster. So Canada took in the responsibility for the 12th General Assembly. We are proud to host the 13th General Assembly in Pakistan.