LIQUID GOLD RUSH: PRIVATISING GLOBAL WATER RESOURCES

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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BERKELEY, Feb 1 2004 (IPS) - The issue of water and who controls it has suddenly taken centre stage in world affairs, writes Mark Sommer, director of the US-based Mainstream Media Project and hosts of \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’, a syndicated radio programme. Nearly a billion of the world\’s six billion people lack dependable access to affordable drinking water, and this figure is expected to triple within the next 25 years. Several trends are contributing to this growing scarcity: increasing use by water- intensive industries, inefficient irrigation, desertification, global warming, and chemical and organic pollution. At the heart of the debate over the future of fresh water is whether it is a commodity like oil or gas, to be bought or sold on the open market to the highest bidder, or a human right, a resource so essential that a minimum allowance should be provided to every person as an acceptance of his or her right of survival. But there is no substitute for water. To deprive up to a third of the planet\’s population access to safe and affordable water is to sentence that portion of humanity to slow death by deprivation and disease.

The issue of water and who controls it has suddenly taken centre stage in world affairs. Once plentiful, fresh potable water is a strictly finite and increasingly scarce resource for which demand is now growing at twice the rate of a rapidly- rising global population.

Just one-half of one percent of the world’s water is fresh, safe, and available for human consumption. Nearly a billion of the six billion people on earth today lack dependable access to affordable drinking water, and this figure is expected to triple within the next 25 years. Several trends are contributing to this growing scarcity: increasing use by water-intensive industries, inefficient irrigation, desertification, the myriad effects of global warming, and chemical and organic pollution.

This looming water shortage has recently attracted profit-seeking corporations hoping to capitalise on its increasing value by privatising it and charging hundreds of times the cost of municipal tap water for water that has been bottled, filtered and sometimes falsely labeled ‘spring water.’

The liquid gold rush is being driven by three European conglomerates — Suez, Vivendi and RWE — that through national subsidiaries now dominate the private global water market. Having successfully lobbied the World Trade Organisation and other international financial institutions to set highly- favourable terms for the privatisation of publicly-operated municipal water systems, these so-called ”water barons” initially set their sights on large but decaying water systems in the mega-cities of the developing world where they believed they could make rapid improvements and equally quick profits.

The flagship experiment was to be Buenos Aires. Raising 97 percent of the USD 1 billion cost of privatisation from public funds supplied by the World Bank and other financial institutions, in the mid-nineties Suez expanded service to a limited extent and reaped profits of 25 percent a year. But it failed to meet its projected targets and recently announced plans to withdraw from Argentina, blaming the country’s currency crisis for its plunging profits. Similar privatisation plans have recently gone awry in Johannesburg, New Delhi, and Manila as well as in such first-world cities as Atlanta and New Orleans.

But the most famous battle to date in the 21st century ”water wars” was an epic confrontation in 2000 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. While opposition to water privatisation has now spread to middle-class communities in first-world nations, resistance to this global trend emerged first not in advanced industrial nations, where citizens’ rights are most firmly established, but in poverty-ridden regions of the developing world where residents have few resources to call upon in their struggles to reclaim control of their communal water supplies.

In Cochabamba, an ad hoc coalition of rural campesinos and urban shantytown residents flooded the streets of that city of a million people, endured a hail of bullets from the Bolivian Army and forced cancellation of a contract with the U.S. engineering giant, Bechtel, that had tripled their water rates and claimed ownership of wells, springs and rivers that had been a common resource for thousands of years. Today the city is running the water system again as a common asset and struggling to maintain and improve it with scarce financial resources.

Cochabamba was the opening battle in what ”water warrior” activists call ”the coming water wars.” The fact that all living things are connected to water and by it to one another bears the potential of uniting widely disparate classes and communities around a unifying principle. At the heart of the debate over the future of fresh water is whether it is a commodity like oil or gas, to be bought or sold on the open market to the highest bidder, or a human right, a resource so essential that a minimum allowance should be provided to every person as an acceptance of his or her right of survival.

In a global capitalist order, it makes simple business sense to pursue profit wherever demand and scarcity send prices soaring — and to leave high and dry those who can’t pay the price. That may work for oil or gas, or even meat or vegetables, but there is no substitute for water. To deprive up to a third of the planet’s population access to safe and affordable water is to sentence that portion of humanity to slow death by deprivation and disease.

Nor would the impacts of this drought be limited to those without water. In the absence of clean water basic hygiene is impossible, and in a globalised economy diseases spawned in the sewage-laden water sources of Asian and African cities would quickly infect the global bloodstream.

The struggle for control of the world’s water may shift the course of human history. From Porto Alegre, Brazil to Accra, Ghana, from Kerala, India to Stockton, California, a conscienceless capitalism is running headlong into communities catalysed by the expropriation of their most essential resource into rediscovering a sense of common purpose. We belong to water and water belongs to all of us. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)