How long does it take to devise a water policy?

Sir,

There has been much discussion lately about the need for water conservation – and very sensibly many good ideas have been suggested and published.  What is dismaying is that all the comment about desalination is as if this technique has just occurred to government as being an important issue.     

Desalination brings in its train expense, environmental damage to the sea surrounding on a minor scale and yet one more facility to go wrong.  But this is an island with a long and sometimes chronic history of water shortage and with an ever increasing infrastructure load. One might have thought that one government or another could have put aside its short term thinking and planned decades ago to construct sufficient desalination plants so that water supply became no longer a matter of great and continuing consequence in Cyprus.

For how many more years will there be no more than high flown talk and advice, political hand wringing, and urgent exhortations about a basic commodity which is an essential public service?

Clive Turner, Kamares

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.