ENVIRONMENT: Critics Accuse Water Forum of Sidestepping U.N.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

KYOTO, Japan, Mar 20 2003 (IPS) - Just as the U.S.-led war on Iraq has undermined the significance of the United Nations, an international conference on water here may soon be fighting the same charge.

For activists at the Third World Water Forum (TWWF) here, evidence that the meeting has been seeking legitimacy for a global water agenda beyond the scope of the United Nations’ authority has grown from a trickle to a flood since the eight-day forum began on Mar. 16.

The most contentious issue has been over financing future water projects, resulting in a widening gulf between the positions maintained by the World Water Council (WWC), an independent think tank and principal organiser of the forum, and civil society groups here.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have expressed their anger during the discussions on water issues here and through the many flyers and background notes being distributed to counter the tide of the WWC’s positions.

The WWC is backing both private sector and public sector involvement to solve the world’s water problems, ranging from lack of safe and adequate water supply for millions of the world’s poor. This French-based body is also open to the continuation of mega water projects, like large dams, for irrigation and hydropower.

The NGOs working on environmental, grassroots and human rights causes are livid at what they see is an attempt by the WWC to use the water forum to secure legitimacy for the concept of enabling water corporations to flood the predominantly public-service dominated water sector.

Tomoko Sakuma of the Japan Centre for a Sustainable Environment and Society is also critical of the attempt by the WWC to seek a ”new level of legitimacy,” through the ministerial meeting at the TWWF.

Over 100 government ministers are billed to participate in a special meeting at the end of the water forum, which has attracted over 18,000 people ranging from water and health experts, government and U.N. officials, company executives and NGO activists from nearly 160 countries.

”The water forum is not the United Nations nor an inter-governmental group. It does not have that legitimacy,” says Sakuma. ”They are trying to achieve that through the ministerial meeting, making it a government forum.”

Other NGOs have argued along the same vein about the WWC, implying that it is creating the groundwork to achieve its policy objectives by operating outside the U.N. system.

The California-based International Rivers Network had a flyer that began: ”Who’s Behind the World Water Forums? A brief guide to the world water mafia.”

”A web of think tanks, corporations, agencies and lobby groups is attempting to control the global discourse of water problems and solutions,” it went on. ”(The WWC) is a lobby group heavily weighted with engineering and construction companies, dam-building state agencies and water supply corporations.”

Public Services International (PSI), a French-based global trade union, sees the WWC’s vision being ”blurred by profit motive”. It argues in a note that the council’s aim is to change ”the public systems out of existence” and ”restructuring government in the service of water multinationals instead of expanding and improving public water systems”.

On Thursday, Joji Carino of the Tebtebba Foundation, a Philippines-based NGO that represents indigenous people, challenged what she called the still continuing bias at the WWC towards building large dams during the first round of discussions on ‘Dams and Sustainable Development’.

”What is happening here is an attempt to seek approval to build large dams despite evidence about the scale of damage attributed to large dams,” she says.

On the privatisation of the water sector, the WWC has been talking the language of compromise. ”The council does not advocate a particular stance, but the private sector is within the water sector and has always been,” Francois Guerquin, a WWC spokesman, told the media.

By midweek, the WWC released a statement on public and private sector partnerships saying that ”the success or failure of a country’s water sector has nothing to do with its ration of public-private involvement”.

The WWC aims at using the discussions and debates at the water forum to seek endorsement for an action-oriented blueprint to dramatically change the course of global water management.

Ministers from over 100 countries are due to support this declaration that the TWWF is to produce by the end – consequently conveying governmental support for it.

For the WWC, the Kyoto event is the appropriate follow-up to a U.N. summit on sustainable development in September last year, when international leaders pledged to reduce by half the 1.1 billion people who have no access to safe water and the 2.4 billion people who lack adequate sanitation by 2015.

But by Thursday evening, the WWC language had failed to draw the NGOs into its ranks, revealing how unbridgeable the divide is between those who hold power here – be it policymakers or those with the purse strings – and the powerless, the NGOs working on the ground.

This divide was starkly reflected at the end of two days of discussions on the public and private sector partnerships to fund the water projects needed to accomplish the goals set at the U.N. summit last year. The private sector participants and the civil society representatives delivered two separate statements to the TWWF secretariat to be included in the final declaration.

”There is no transparency in the process here, unlike at the United Nations,” says Carino, the Filipino activist. ”It is a process we are suspicious about.”