The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. What this portends was heralded last week by a four-day conference in New Delhi, awash in bureaucrats from about 40 countries and dubbed the "World Toilet Summit."
If that sounds like a joke, sanitation is no laughing matter. According to U.N. estimates, 2.6 billion people worldwide lack access to hygienic toilets. The U.N.'s aim is to halve this number by the year 2015, as part of a broader agenda of halving poverty. By its own account, the United Nations has been falling behind in this goal. At least six major U.N. agencies have now been enlisted, and will seek more funding, to hurry up remedies to what one of them, UNICEF, is calling the "global sanitation crisis."
Will that help? Modern development has taught us that decent plumbing does not spring from the visions of U.N. planners. It emerges when ordinary people gain some say in their own government, and enjoy the freedom to make individual decisions and trade-offs about what they see as a better quality of life.
At the United Nations, different priorities prevail. In the name of better hygiene for the poor, scores of government officials and U.N. staffers have already traveled to preparatory meetings in Shanghai and New York. Off to an early start, the Year of Sanitation will be officially launched Nov. 21 at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. Those ceremonies will be followed by workshops, thematic exhibitions and conferences in venues around the globe, such as Sweden, Spain and Macau.
If the goal were simply for the United Nations to spend taxpayer money, occupy conference halls and top up the frequent-flier accounts of U.N. officials, it might all translate into a highly successful year. While I don't doubt the goodwill of many involved, this looks like yet another U.N. campaign in which the erstwhile beneficiaries will have almost no say, while U.N. eminences and well-paid globocrats claim to represent their interests.
The goal is to provide better sanitation for impoverished people. When people are free to make their own decisions about their living circumstances, they tend to demand sewers, buy toilets, and vote for authorities who keep the infrastructure working.
One instructive example, in my own experience, is Taiwan, where my family lived for a while in the late 1960s, and where I have returned periodically, most recently in 2005. When I first saw Taiwan, in 1968, the government was a military dictatorship, millions were dirt poor, and the sanitation was horrendous. The cities were packed with squatters' huts, and the streets were edged by open sewers. Parasites were common, and disease was rife.
But Taiwan's government allowed its citizens private property rights, and over time began easing its martial ways, becoming democratic by the 1990s. As this happened, decent plumbing became the norm.
This took place without the United Nations. Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations in 1971, when its seat was turned over to the People's Republic of China. Without the United Nations, Taiwan went on to become one of the miracle economies of Asia. Likewise, it reached the realms of modern hygiene by way of democratic government and free markets - not U.N. planners and conferences.
The U.N. resolution anointing 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation was backed by 55 member states. A few are wealthy, free societies, and presumably on the donor side of the equation, such as France, Japan and Germany. But among the rest, many qualify as only partly free or "not free," in the 2007 rankings put out by New York-based Freedom House. And a half-dozen figure on the Freedom House list of "the world's most repressive societies." These include Belarus, China, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
For those individuals privileged to be flown to U.N. conferences and to sit in U.N. assembly halls, the Year of Sanitation represents yet another potential pot of funding. From it will flow employment, consultancies and per diems for people who already have toilets. It dignifies the fiction that regimes such as those of China, Belarus and Zimbabwe are dedicated to serving their people.
If the aim is truly to promote sanitation for the most disenfranchised, far more could be achieved were the United Nations to look first to its own moral and political hygiene - and proceed not by promoting toilets, but by demoting repressive governments.
(Note: For a sample of what UN conferencing can entail, check out on
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