Kelau

How much water does the Klang Valley need, and how much are we prepared to pay for it?

The last stats I had (2001), the amount of water consumed per person (including industrial use and leakage and all the rest) was 525 litres. In Melbourne, they use less than 400 litres per person. According to the authorities, as expressed in their EIAs for the Kelau dam, this amount is NOT expected to decrease - not absolutely but not per person either. It is, in fact, going to GO UP. This is despite attempts to repair leaks, and all the rest of it.

Let us pretend for a moment that this is true. That in order to lead a decent life in the Klang Valley, you, personally need, say, 500 litres of water.

The question then becomes, how much are you willing to pay for it? Do you think that for your car washings, and twenty showers a day, and leaving the taps on while you brush your teeth, that it is worth evicting others from their homes? From their traditional lands? Desecrating their graves and sacred sites? And do this FORCIBLY? Not offering them the right to negotiate their own terms, but telling them, take what you're offered and basically keep quiet?

Because it really really doesn't have to be this way. Even if, even if we say that we in the Klang Valley are desperate. We NEED to have the water. It has to be done. There is still the possibility of entering into an agreement with those who are kindly making way for our 'needs', with the indigenous people of the area. We don't go in, plans in hand.

The first step would be to humbly and with full knowledge of customs, constraints and potential problems (by both the affected people we are asking to move for our benefit and the negotiators) to ask the people 'what would you like, to give up this land'. That's the way it works in business, ain't it?

The second would, um, be to give it to them. Think about what it would take for you, you personally, to give up your land, your livelihood, your graves, and to some inevitable extent your culture (because it is tied to specific sites). You're giving up tens of thousands of years of site-specific information, rendering the equivalent of PhDs of years of study practically worthless.

And if you think that no price would be sufficient, why is it that you're prepared to countenance that for other people? Just because they're Orang Asli?

And why should they be prepared with what the EIA's supplementary documents acknowledge to be an uncertain, harsh and inadequate livelihood (oil palm smallholdings), when they have given up... most everything.

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