"Clean water" Conference Begins today

African and U.N. leaders opened an international conference on water and sustainable development on Monday, urging effective management across borders to solve Africa's poverty-perpetuating water shortages.

Speakers at the conference, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's adviser on water, linked poverty in most developing countries, especially in Africa, to the water crisis.

"The 40 worst water-famished countries in the world, in many of which people live on just two gallons a day for all uses, can never escape poverty and achieve sustainable development without first addressing their water scarcity," the prince said in his opening statement.

Pointing to countries where "poverty and lack of water is inextricably linked," he cited Gambia, Djibouti, Somalia, Mali, Mozambique, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Among countries beyond Africa, he listed Cambodia, Bhutan and Haiti.

Two hundred delegates, including several African cabinet ministers, are attending the conference — a prelude to the World Summit for Sustainable Development opening in Johannesburg, South Africa this August.

The three-day conference in Accra, the capital of Ghana, was organized by the Dutch government under sponsorship of the African Development Bank Group.

The focus of the conference is proposals by the Willem-Alexander and others in the United Nations on increasing awareness on the gravity of inadequate supplies of water and on solving the problems.

Willem-Alexander set targets of halving the number of people without safe drinking water by 2015, and of making more effective use of water in agriculture without increasing the amount diverted for it.

More than 1 billion people worldwide lack safe drinking water, the crown prince said, and more than 2 million die each year from water-related diseases.

"The water crisis is especially acute in Africa, where only about 60 percent of the 680 million people have access to safe water supplies," he said.

People in the worst-off 50 countries, at least half of them in Africa, are forced to get by on 30 liters or less per day for farming, cleaning, and all other needs. That's well under than the 50 liters per day that the United Nations says constitutes the absolute minimum.

Opening the conference, Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor mourned the fact that Africans lacked adequate safe water despite the "mighty rivers" of the Nile, the Congo, the Limpopo, the Volta as well as the Great Lakes.

Kufuor encouraged partnerships to attract investment in water to reduce the burden on individual countries' economies.

Also attending the conference is the former secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity, Salim Ahmed Salim, named water ambassador for Africa.

Salim is expected to work out guidelines on protection of Africa's water resources based on suggestions from the conference.