Dammed

Starting today, water allocation for Metro Manila’s 15 million people will be reduced by the National Water Allocation Board. The reduction will be from 52 cubic meters per second to just 50. This will mean more areas will be subject to water rationing.

Allocation for irrigation in the surrounding farm areas will likewise be reduced. The cutback is intended to conserve whatever water is left at the Angat Dam, the single fresh water source for Metro Manila and the heavily populated adjacent provinces. Although both concessionaires have invested in treatment plants to use water from Laguna de Bay, the additional water supply is meager.

By end-June, water level at Angat was at 183.25 meters. If there is no significant rainfall over the Angat watershed, the level would fall to the critical operating level of 180 meters in as little as two weeks. Surprisingly, no one seems to be treating this as an emergency requiring a strategic response beyond calling for more prudent water use.

Water from Angat flows to Ipo Dam and then to La Mesa Dam. This is only one system, and one water stream, built during a time when the population of the Capital Region was only 2 million. As the population of Metro Manila and contiguous provinces rises, the water supply will clearly not be enough. With rising prosperity, water demand outpaces even population growth.

The only real relief from this water emergency is the Kaliwa Dam project. But this will take a few more years to complete. Considering how long it took to even begin building the Kaliwa Dam, government should move with a little more urgency in commencing work on the Kanan Dam. There is no time to lose.

Under the present setup, Manila Water owns the La Mesa Dam. Maynilad buys its water from Manila Water under what is called a “cross-portal arrangement.” This arrangement, which gives Maynilad 60 percent of the water flow, was suspended by Manila Water last March in the face of declining water supply.

If the available water is divided evenly between the two concessionaires, Maynilad will be at a disadvantage. The West Zone operated by Maynilad supplies more customers even as it has the older water system (including unmapped pipelines built during the prewar period). This older system requires more investment to reduce non-revenue water flowing out of leaks in the system. This is the reason the first owner of Maynilad went bankrupt.

Maynilad is clearly in a challenged position. It is forced to ration water in parts of its concession area. In order to earn enough to invest in modernizing its pipelines, it must sell more water. But there is not enough water to sell.

Maynilad’s challenged position translates into misery for many of its customers. This cannot be sustainable unless there is more water for the concessions to sell. More water requires building new dams.

There are no ifs and buts about this situation. New water must be supplied the system for the concessions to be sustainable – and the urban center habitable. New water can only come from new dams.

Either we hurry building those dams or Metro Manila and environs, accounting for a major share of GDP, will be damned.

Love

The power of a slogan lies in brevity. That is already a problem for our tourism campaign effort because the country has such as long name.

A few days ago, the Department of Tourism launched a new slogan for the tourism campaign: Love the Philippines. That is probably as short as it could possibly be – unless we take out the name of the country.

The slogan was arrived at using extensive market studies. Those studies showed that what strikes foreign tourists the most when they visit is the warmth of the people. Visitors are welcomed with genuine love. That is the main selling point.

The launch of the new marketing tagline was met with some criticism, however.

Rep. Joey Salceda complained that the video accompanying the new slogan’s introduction did not include Mayon Volcano. That reflects a bit of parochialism that misses the point of the new tagline. At any rate, the tourism campaign will be a continuing one and eventually every nook and cranny of our beautiful archipelago will be projected.

Besides, this temperamental volcano has its way of constantly advertising itself to the world, as we see from coverage of recent volcanic activity. Mayon is one of those disaster zones that actually attracts tourists.

I like the new slogan, actually. It puts the cultural/emotional experience at the center of its marketing pitch. Tourism, after all, should be about something more than splendid beaches and other natural curiosities. It must also be about the people who inhabit these natural wonders.

The new slogan reintroduces the country. That is the first reason the tagline was changed to begin with. We are inviting the world to experience our culture.This is something more than some socially abstracted experience at the beach. It centers on a human emotion and not just some detached visual.

As a social scientist, I have faith in the outcomes of focus-group discussions. This slogan is also a call on our own people to hold the country in higher regard.

Obviously, a slogan alone will not bring in the tourists. Tourism is a priority program in our economic strategy. We are targeting bringing in 12 million tourists a year by 2028.

We must prove ourselves to be not only a welcoming but also a capable host.