Letter: ‘Equity’ in water tariffs

Dear Editor, I write to you in response to your contributor Ruta Mave in her column in the Monday, July 15th edition titled ‘Water tariff public consultations a tick-box exercise?’.

In the second to last paragraph, she states “Tourism is our largest revenue earner and water user, yet agriculture within the next five years will pay $1.3 million and that’s more than the tourism sector”. In their final report on tariff structure alternatives the ADB funded consultant quotes from a “comprehensive usage estimate” from a New Zealand firm AECOM. This was based on calendar year 2023 usage. This study estimated that the agriculture sector uses 4600 cubic meters (4,600,000 litres) per day and the tourism sector uses 1936 cubic meters (1,936,000 litres) per day. This equates to 42.6 per cent and 17.9 per cent respectively of net consumed water usage. So in fact the tourism sector uses less than half (42 per cent) of the water that the agriculture sector is estimated to use. I would also like to add that if the Government is set on continuing to underfund TTV and require user pays to fund it then we are prepared to pay our share as long as this is equitable across all commercial users.

Your sincerely

Liana Scott – President

Cook Islands Tourism Industry Council