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 "Water
promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the
precious commodity
that determines the wealth of
nations."
As the World Summit on
Sustainable Development draws closer, clear lines of contention are
forming, particularly
around the future of the
world's freshwater
resources. The setting of
the summit paints the picture. Government and corporate delegates to the
September meeting will gather in the lavish hotels and convention
facilities of Sandton, the fabulously wealthy Johannesburg suburb that
houses huge estates, English gardens and swimming pools, and has become
South Africa's new financial epicenter. There, they will meet with World
Bank and World Trade Organization officials to set the stage for the
privatization of water.
At the same time,
activists from South Africa and around the world with a very different
vision will gather in very different settings to fight for a water-secure
future. One such venue will be Alexandra Township, a poverty-stricken
community where sanitation, electricity and water services have been
privatized and cut off to those who cannot afford them. Alexandra is
situated right next door to Sandton and divided only by a river so
polluted that it has cholera warning signs on its banks. There could not
be a more fitting setting for Rio+10 than South Africa, because
neighboring Sandton and Alexandra represent the great divide that
characterizes the current debate over water. Moreover, South Africa is the
birthplace of one of the nucleus groups that form the heart of a new
global civil society movement dedicated to saving the world's water as
part of the global commons.
This movement originates
in a fight for survival. The world is running out of fresh water. Humanity
is polluting, diverting and depleting the wellspring of life at a
startling rate. With every passing day, our demand for fresh water
outpaces its availability, and thousands more people are put at risk.
Already, the social, political and economic impacts of water scarcity are
rapidly becoming a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts
springing up around the globe. Quite simply, unless we dramatically change
our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with
severe freshwater shortages within the next quarter-It seemed to sneak up
on us, or at least those of us living in the North. Until the past decade,
the study of fresh water was left to highly specialized groups of
experts--hydrologists, engineers, scientists, city planners, weather
forecasters and others with a niche interest in what so many of us took
for granted. Many knew about the condition of water in the Third World,
including the millions who die of waterborne diseases every year. But this
was seen as Now, however, an increasing number of voices--including human
rights and environmental groups, think tanks and research organizations,
official international agencies and thousands of community groups around
the world--are sounding the alarm. The earth's fresh water is finite and
small, representing less than one half of 1 percent of the world's total
water stock. Not only are we adding 85 million new people to the planet
every year, but our per capita use of water is doubling every twenty
years, at more than twice the rate of human population growth. A legacy of
factory farming, flood irrigation, the construction of massive dams, toxic
dumping, wetlands and forest destruction, and urban and industrial
pollution has damaged the Earth's surface water so badly that we are now
mining the underground water reserves far faster than nature can replenish
them.
The earth's "hot
stains"--areas where water reserves are disappearing--include the Middle
East, Northern China, Mexico, California and almost two dozen countries in
Africa. Today thirty-one countries and over 1 billion people completely
lack access to clean water. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking
contaminated water. The global freshwater crisis looms as one of the
greatest threats ever to the survival of our planet.
Washington Consensus
Tragically, this global
call for action comes in an era guided by the principles of the so-called
Washington Consensus, a model of economics rooted in the belief that
liberal market economics constitutes the one and only economic choice for
the whole world. Competitive Faced with the suddenly well-documented
freshwater crisis, governments and international institutions are
advocating a Washington Consensus solution: the privatization and
commodification of water. Price water, they say in chorus; put it up for
sale and let the market determine its future. For them, the debate is
closed. Water, say the World Bank and the United Nations, is a "human
need," not a "human right." These are not semantics; the difference in
interpretation is crucial. A human need can be supplied many ways,
especially for those with money. No one can sell a human right.
So a handful of
transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, are aggressively taking over the management of public water
services in countries around the world, dramatically raising the price of
water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third
World's desperate search for solutions to its water crisis. Some are
startlingly open; the decline in freshwater supplies and standards has
created a wonderful venture opportunity for water corporations and their
investors, they boast. The agenda is clear: Water should be treated like
any other tradable good, with its use determined by the principles of
profit.
It should come as no
surprise that the private sector knew before most of the world about the
looming water crisis and has set out to take advantage of what it
considers to be blue gold. According to Fortune, the annual profits
of the water industry now amount to about 40 percent of those of the oil
sector and are already substantially higher than the pharmaceutical
sector, now close to $1 trillion. But only about 5 percent of the world's
water is currently in private hands, so it is clear that we are talking
about huge profit potential as the water crisis worsens. In 1999 there
were more than $15 billion worth of water acquisitions in the US water
industry alone, and all the big water companies are now listed on the
stock exchanges.
Water Lords
There are ten major
corporate players now delivering freshwater services for profit. The two
biggest are both from France--Vivendi Universal and Suez--considered to be
the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry. Between them,
they deliver private water and wastewater services to more than 200
million customers in 150 countries and are in a race, along with others
such as Bouygues Saur, RWE-Thames Water and Bechtel-United Utilities, to
expand to every corner of the globe. In the United States, Vivendi
operates through its subsidiary, USFilter; Suez via its subsidiary, United
Water; and RWE by way of American Water Works.
They are aided by the
World Bank and the IMF, which are increasingly forcing Third World
countries to abandon their public water delivery systems and contract with
the water giants in order to be eligible for debt relief. The performance
of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well
documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cutoffs to customers
who cannot pay, no transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality,
bribery and corruption.
Water for profit takes a
number of other forms. The bottled-water industry is one of the
fastest-growing and least regulated industries in the world, expanding at
an annual rate of 20 percent. Last year close to 90 billion liters of
bottled water were sold around the world--most of it in nonreusable
plastic containers, bringing in profits of $22 billion to this highly
polluting industry. Bottled-water companies like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and
Pepsi are engaged in a constant search for new water supplies to feed the
insatiable appetite of this business. In rural communities all over the
world, corporate interests are buying up farmlands, indigenous lands,
wilderness tracts and whole water systems, then moving on when sources are
depleted. Fierce disputes are being waged in many places over these "water
takings," especially in the Third World. As one company explains, water is
now "a rationed necessity that may be taken by force."
Corporations are now
involved in the construction of massive pipelines to carry fresh water
long distances for commercial sale while others are constructing
supertankers and giant sealed water bags to transport vast amounts of
water across the ocean to paying customers. Says the World Bank, "One way
or another, water will soon be moved around the world as oil is now." The
mass movement of bulk water could have catalytic environmental impacts.
Some proposed projects would reverse the flow of mighty rivers in Canada's
north, the environmental impact of which would be greater than China's
Three Gorges Dam.
International Trade
At the same time,
governments are signing away their control over domestic water supplies to
trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, its
expected successor, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the
World Trade Organization. These global trade institutions effectively give
transnational corporations unprecedented access to the freshwater
resources of signatory countries. Already, corporations have started to
sue governments in order to gain access to domestic water sources and,
armed with the protection of these international trade agreements, are
setting their sights on the commercialization of water.
Water is listed as a
"good" in the WTO and NAFTA, and as an "investment" in NAFTA. It is to be
included as a "service" in the upcoming WTO services negotiations (the
General Agreement on Trade in Services) and in the FTAA. Under the
"National Treatment" provisions of NAFTA and the GATS, signatory
governments who privatize municipal water services will be obliged to
permit competitive bids from transnational water-service corporations.
Similarly, once a permit is granted to a domestic company to export water
for commercial purposes, foreign corporations will have the right to set
up operations in the host country.
NAFTA contains a
provision that requires "proportional sharing" of energy resources now
being traded between the signatory countries. This means that the oil and
gas resources no longer belong to the country of extraction, but are a
shared resource of the continent. For example, under NAFTA, Canada now
exports 57 percent of its natural gas to the United States and is not
allowed to cut back on these supplies, even to cut fossil fuel production
under the Kyoto accord. Under this same provision, if Canada started
selling its water to the United States--which President Bush has already
said he considers to be part of the United States' continental energy
program--the State Department would consider it to be a trade violation if
Canada tried to turn off the tap. And under NAFTA's "investor state"
Chapter 11 provision, American corporate investors would be allowed to sue
Canada for financial losses [see William Greider, "The Right and US Trade
Law: Invalidating the 20th Century," October 15, 2001]. Already, a
California company is suing the Canadian government for $10.5 billion
because the province of British Columbia banned the commercial export of
bulk water.
The WTO also opens the
door to the commercial export of water by prohibiting the use of export
controls for any "good" for any purpose. This means that quotas or bans on
the export of water imposed for environmental reasons could be challenged
as a form of protectionism. At the December 2001 Qatar ministerial meeting
of the WTO, a provision was added to the so-called Doha Text, which
requires governments to give up "tariff" and "nontariff" barriers--such as
environmental regulations--to environmental services, which include water.
The Case Against
Privatization
If all this sounds
formidable, it is. But the situation is not without hope. For the fact is,
we know how to save the world's water: reclamation of despoiled water
systems, drip irrigation over flood irrigation, infrastructure repairs,
water conservation, radical changes in production methods and watershed
management, just to name a few. Wealthy industrialized countries could
supply every person on earth with clean water if they canceled the Third
World debt, increased foreign aid payments and placed a tax on financial
speculation.
None of this will happen,
however, until humanity earmarks water as a global commons and brings the
rule of law--local, national and international--to any corporation or
government that dares to contaminate it. If we allow the commodification
of the world's freshwater supplies, we will lose the capacity to avert the
looming water crisis. We will be allowing the emergence of a water elite
that will determine the world's water future in its own interest. In such
a scenario, water will go to those who can afford it and not to those who
need it.
This is not an argument
to excuse the poor way in which some governments have treated their water
heritage, either squandering it, polluting it or using it for political
gain. But the answer to poor nation-state governance is not a
nonaccountable transnational corporation but good governance. For
governments in poor countries, the rich world's support should go not to
profiting from bad water management but from aiding the public sector in
every country to do its job.
The commodification of
water is wrong--ethically, environmentally and socially. It insures that
decisions regarding the allocation of water would center on commercial,
not environmental or social justice considerations. Privatization means
that the management of water resources is based on principles of scarcity
and profit maximization rather than long-term sustainability. Corporations
are dependent on increased consumption to generate profits and are much
more likely to invest in the use of chemical technology, desalination,
marketing and water trading than in conservation.
Depending on desalination
technology is a Faustian bargain. It is prohibitively expensive, highly
energy intensive--using the very fossil fuels that are contributing to
global warming--and produces a lethal byproduct of saline brine that is a
major cause of marine pollution when dumped back into the oceans at high
temperatures.
A New Water Ethic
The antidote to water
commodification is its decommodification. Water must be declared and
understood for all time to be the common property of all. In a world where
everything is being privatized, citizens must establish clear perimeters
around those areas that are sacred to life and necessary for the survival
of the planet. Simply, governments must declare that water belongs to the
earth and all species and is a fundamental human right. No one has the
right to appropriate it for profit. Water must be declared a public trust,
and all governments must enact legislation to protect the freshwater
resources in their territory. An international legal framework is also
desperately needed.
It is strikingly clear
that neither governments nor their official global institutions are going
to rise to this challenge. This is where civil society comes in. There is
no more vital area of concern for our international movement than the
world's freshwater crisis. Our entry point is the political question of
the ownership of water; we must come together to form a clear and present
opposition to the commodification and cartelization of the world's
freshwater resources.
Already, a common front
of environmentalists, human rights and antipoverty activists, public
sector workers, peasants, indigenous peoples and many others from every
part of the world has come together to fight for a water-secure future
based on the notion that water is part of the public commons. We
coordinated strategy at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
last January. We will be in South Africa for the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in September and in Kyoto, Japan, next March, when
the World Bank and the UN bring 8,000 people to the Third World Water
Forum. There, we will oppose water privatization and promote our own World
Water Vision as an alternative to that adopted by the World Bank at the
Second World Water Forum in The Hague two years ago. We will stand with
local people fighting water privatization in Bolivia, or the construction
of a mega-dam in India, or water takings by Perrier in Michigan, but now
all of these local struggles will form part of an emerging international
movement with a common political vision.
Steps needed for a
water-secure future include the adoption of a Treaty Initiative to Share
and Protect the Global Water Commons; a guaranteed "water lifeline"--free
clean water every day for every person as an inalienable political and
social right; national water protection acts to reclaim and preserve
freshwater systems; exemptions for water from international trade and
investment regimes; an end to World Bank and IMF-enforced water
privatizations; and a Global Water Convention that would create an
international body of law to protect the world's water heritage based on
the twin cornerstones of conservation and equity. A tough challenge
indeed. But given the stakes involved, we had better be up to it.
Steps needed for a
water-secure future include the adoption of a Treaty Initiative to Share
and Protect the Global Water Commons; a guaranteed "water lifeline"--free
clean water every day for every person as an inalienable political and
social right; national water protection acts to reclaim and preserve
freshwater systems; exemptions for water from international trade and
investment regimes; an end to World Bank and IMF-enforced water
privatizations; and a Global Water Convention that would create an
international body of law to protect the world's water heritage based on
the twin cornerstones of conservation and equity. A tough challenge
indeed. But given the stakes involved, we had better be up to it.
September 2, 2002
www.thenation.com
Reprinted
by permission of the authors.
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