Drowning in thirst

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

It’s a cruel joke every Ilonggo knows. One week, we are bracing for floods, our streets turned into murky rivers. The next, we are staring at dry taps, calculating if the last drops in the tank will be enough for a morning bath.

This is the central paradox of life in Iloilo: we are a people drowning in water who have nothing to drink.

We have been conditioned to see these as two separate, unchangeable facts of life. Floods are a “natural disaster.” Water scarcity is an “economic problem.”

This is a lie. They are not two problems. They are one and the same: a catastrophic failure of management, accountability, and imagination.

For decades, we have been told about Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) – a commonsense approach that treats the entire water cycle as one system. You capture excess floodwater (the “curse”) and use it to solve water scarcity (the “crisis”). But in the Philippines, this remains a perpetual “oft-mentioned but never applied” fantasy.

Instead, we stick to the “old ways.” We build gray infrastructure to flush floodwater out to sea as fast as possible, then spend billions on desalination plants to buy that same water back from the ocean at a premium. It is institutional insanity.

This brings us to the second paradox: our insistence on “cheap” water has made it catastrophically expensive.

We are governed by an “ancient” 52-year-old law (Presidential Decree No. 198) that has created financially insolvent water districts. Our average tariff is a “wildly uneconomical” PHP 24.51 per cubic meter. This sounds like a great deal until you realize what it buys us: a system that has collapsed.

According to the Institute of Contemporary Economics (ICE), this “cheap” rate makes it impossible to fix pipes, so our distributor, Metro Pacific Iloilo Water (MPIW), reports a Non-Revenue Water rate of 39%. That means for every 100 liters produced, 39 leak out before they ever reach a home. The rate is so low that the utility has only 26% coverage, leaving nearly three-quarters of its concession area – 74 out of 100 households – to fend for themselves.

And “fend for themselves” they do. They pay the real price. They pay for bottled water, which costs thousands of pesos per cubic meter. They pay for private water trucks at PHP 150 to PHP 250 per cubic meter.

We are trapped in a fantasy where we fight over a proposed PHP 40 rate from a new supplier, all while paying five times that price to private trucks because the “cheap” system is broken.

We are not saving money. We are paying a premium for failure. That failure is built on a mountain of undelivered promises.

In 2016 and 2018, we were told joint ventures would fix everything. The Metro Iloilo Water District (MIWD) spun off its operations. One company, Metro Iloilo Bulk Water Supply (MIBWSC), would handle production. Another, MPIW, would handle distribution.

The result? We have more companies and less water.

MIBWSC was supposed to provide 170 million liters per day (mld). According to the supplied analysis, it appears to be delivering only 30 to 50 mld. This has left us with a staggering 63% supply shortfall – a gap of 139 mld between what we need and what we get.

This new structure has become a black hole of accountability. The distributor can blame the producer for lack of supply. The producer can point to its contract. And the public entity, MIWD – the government body that is supposed to represent our interests – remains bafflingly silent, failing to provide the basic transparency its consumers deserve.

But the rot is deeper than any single joint venture. This crisis is not an accident but a choice, made over and over for decades.

The “long history of neglect” is not hyperbole. A 1998 National Water Resources Board (NWRB) report already identified Metro Iloilo as a “highly urbanized water constraint area.” It called for a groundwater management plan.

It took 15 years for that plan to be written. The 2013 report was a damning indictment, citing an “absence of regular monitoring,” “outdated” data, and “unregulated utilization” (i.e., a free-for-all). It laid out the exact environmental catastrophes – saltwater intrusion and land subsidence – that we are now living with.

And what has been done since? The Institute’s Freedom of Information request for the monitoring data – the most basic “how-much-water-is-left” data – has, fittingly, been met with silence.

We have no other choice but to change. The old ways have failed. We must finally demand an integrated approach that sees a flood as a resource, not just a problem. We must accept that water is not free and that valuing it properly – by paying a tariff that can actually sustain a working system – is the only way to escape the tyranny of the PHP 250 water truck.

As WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said, this is an “opportunity to transform the economics of water.”

For Iloilo, that transformation begins by admitting the truth. This crisis was not caused by a typhoon or a drought. It was caused by decades of political neglect, broken promises, and a collective failure to manage the one resource we cannot live without. We have been warned for 25 years. We are out of time.

***

I am yielding this part of my column to the volunteers of the community book nook in Dumangas, Iloilo that became the subject of Mr. Noel de Leon’s column last November 18, 2025:

Thank you for taking the time to write about the new community book nook in Dumangas. Critique is always welcome, but only when it is grounded in verified information. Many of the assumptions raised in the article do not reflect our actual processes, programming, or intentions, so we’d like to clarify a few points for transparency. 

1.The book nook is not a private hobby, nor is it “inside someone’s home.”

It is part of Magnet Gallery’s ongoing cultural initiative, run by volunteers, artists, student workers, and community partners. It exists for the community, and its development continues to be shaped with the community. 

2.The library is curated and follows structure.

– We implement the Dewey Decimal System, using an established reference site as our model.

– Damaged or outdated materials including magazines and Reader’s Digest are stored separately.

– All accepted books are encoded by our student volunteers. We maintain a detailed internal database tracking book titles, authors, donation dates, and donors to ensure organization and proper acknowledgment. A summary of our collection and donations is available for public viewing, without revealing personal donor information. 

3.Programming already exists – and has existed since 2024.

– The PSN poetry readings held last year will continue this month under the new program POETIKA, soon to be paired with regular book readings and storytelling sessions.

– These activities were not “missing”; they were simply not verified before being written about. 

4.We give priority to local authors and their works.

– We already maintain dedicated shelves for Ilonggo writers. At present we have works from four Ilonggo authors and hope to expand this section as more local writers donate copies of their books. Our collection can only grow from what is made available to us.

5.The children’s section is underway.

– We are currently developing an additional dedicated space for children’s books to integrate early readership with art.

6.The book nook has community guidance.

– We work with pro bono community consultants who help us shape the space, the collection, and its programming. This is not a random accumulation of books but a guided, intentional project. 

7.This project is entirely volunteer-driven.

– Artists, students, cultural workers, and community members share their time to keep the library organized, clean, catalogued, and welcoming.

– Every donor will also receive an acknowledgment email once the current batch of books is fully encoded.

8.And yes, this is a work in progress.

– We do not claim perfection. What we do claim is transparency, sincerity, and a steady commitment to improving what we can, with the resources we have.

We appreciate discourse, and we welcome suggestions grounded in actual observation. We only ask that future commentaries about the space extend the same courtesy we extend to the community: ask first, verify first, then critique.

Everyone involved is simply trying their best to build something meaningful for Dumangas one book, one shelf, one volunteer hour at a time. – Magnet Gallery