FEATURE
STORY | August 27, 2002 The Nation
Who Owns Water?
by MAUDE BARLOW & TONY
CLARKE
"Water promises to be
to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century:
the precious commodity that determines the wealth of
nations." --Fortune
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-century.
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 an issue of poverty, poor sanitation and injustice--all
areas that could be addressed in the just world for
which we were fighting.
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 nation-states are abandoning natural resources
protection and privatizing their ecological commons.
Everything is now for sale, even those areas of life,
such as social services and natural resources, that
were once considered the common heritage of humanity.
Governments around the world are abdicating their responsibilities
to protect the natural resources in their territory,
giving authority away to the private companies involved
in resource exploitation.
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.
