We Have Water. We Just Can’t Deliver It.

We keep hearing the Philippines is running out of water, but that’s an excuse, not a fact.

A new study from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) lays it out plainly: on paper, we are water-rich. The crisis we are feeling – especially here across Panay Island and Negros Occidental, where coverage stubbornly sits at just 68 percent – is not a scarcity issue but a case of aberrant delivery.

Let’s look at the bureaucracy. We currently have around 30 different national and local agencies sharing overlapping mandates over our water. When everyone is in charge, nobody is accountable. Permits stall, infrastructure projects drag on, and consumers keep paying for the inefficiency through rationing and service interruptions. Before we go drilling new wells or blaming the climate, we need to fix the institutions.

And before we chase massive expansion projects, maybe we should stop bleeding what we already have. The PIDS study assumes a non-revenue water rate of 30 percent. That is a polite, clinical term for leaks and outright theft. If nearly a third of our water is disappearing into the ground before it ever hits a meter, fixing busted pipes and enforcing anti-theft measures is the fastest “new” supply we can tap. Every percentage point saved is water that actually makes it to a household.

Down here in coastal hubs like Iloilo City and Bacolod, we have a more localized, ticking threat. We are mining coastal aquifers like they are bottomless pits. This concentrated groundwater extraction is a fast track to saline intrusion and land subsidence. Once seawater breaches an aquifer, the damage is practically irreversible. We need hard caps and protected recharge zones now, before ordinary homeowners are left footing the bill for a ruined water table.

Then there’s the quiet injustice of how we actually pay for all this. Most water districts rely on increasing block tariffs. In theory, you use more, you pay more. But in practice, this structure actively punishes the poor. Low-income families often share a single water connection, and their pooled consumption easily pushes them into higher-priced penalty blocks.

Even with minimum base rates varying – from PHP 157 in Metro Cebu to PHP 367 in Obando – the system is inherently flawed for shared households. When families are forced to rely on refilling stations instead, they pay a massive premium for a basic human right. Shifting to a uniform price with rebates is a much-needed fix.

Finally, we can’t talk about household taps without talking about the farms. Agriculture eats up a massive 83 to 85 percent of our available water. The urban shortfall isn’t happening in a vacuum. If we don’t push for irrigation efficiency and integrated watershed planning, city dwellers and farmers will just keep fighting over the leftovers.

We have less than five years to hit our 2028 water security targets. It’s time to stop looking at the sky waiting for rain, and start fixing the pipes, the pricing, and the policies right in front of us.