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Water
Wars
In
The Hague three years ago, a war of words broke out between corporate executives
and water activists from civil society organizations over the private control of
water and whether access to clean water should be recognized as a universal
human right. The next battlefield in these emerging water wars will be Kyoto,
where the third World Water Forum takes place on March 16-22
By Tony Clarke
IBON Features
Reposted by Bulatlat.com
“The wars of the 21st
century will be fought over water,” a former vice president of the World Bank,
Ishmael Serageldin, declared before the dawn of the new millennium.
To a degree, Serageldin ought to know what he’s talking about. After all, he
played a prominent role in crafting the World Bank strategy to use its lending
policies in compelling developing countries to privatize their water services,
thereby provoking outbreaks of popular resistance. When the World Bank
instructed Bolivia to privatize the water services of its major cities in early
2000, the people of Cochabamba took to the streets by the tens of thousands, day
after day, protesting against the private water company and their government.
He was also chairman of the Global Water Partnership, a big business lobby
organization that co-sponsors the World Water Forum (WWF) to promote the
privatization of water resources and services. When the second WWF was held in
The Hague three years ago, a war of words broke out between corporate executives
and water activists from civil society organizations over the private control of
water and whether access to clean water should be recognized as a universal
human right.
The next battlefield in these emerging water wars will be Kyoto, Japan, where
the third World Water Forum takes place March 16-22, 2003. Some 8,000 people are
expected to participate in over 30 theme sessions. While the WWF sounds like an
official United Nations sanctioned event, it is anything but. To be sure, UN
officials will be in Kyoto along with government representatives of more than a
140 countries who will participate in a ministerial conference. Yet, they will
not be primarily in charge of what happens in Kyoto.
Instead, the WWF is largely organized by the Global Water Partnership while the
agenda and program is set by the World Water Council, a business and
professional think-tank. Both organizations are dominated by the interests of
the World Bank, leading corporations in the global water industry like Suez and
Vivendi Universal, plus several government aid agencies [including CIDA]. Their
main objective for the 3rd
WWF is to build a “consensus” in favor of the commodification and
privatization of water.
Last week, the UN itself set the stage with its first comprehensive report on
the worldwide water crisis, highlighting the fact that close to 2 billion people
on this planet do not have access to clean water. The solution, says the World
Water Council, is to recognize water as an economic good, thereby allowing
corporations to commodify water as a resource and takeover public water delivery
systems on a for-profit basis.
Their method of water management is what’s been labeled the P-3 formula,
namely, “private-public-partnerships”, which make it possible for
corporations to takeover the running of public water services on a for-profit
basis. To enforce this agenda in Kyoto, the World Bank released the Camdessus
Report last week, outlining a strategy for how this corporate water management
agenda could be financed through a mix of government aid and subsidies to the
water industry plus loans from international finance institutions and commercial
banks.
Countering this agenda in Kyoto will be a network of water activists from civil
society organizations throughout the world. Water, they maintain, is life itself
on this planet. As a vital resource, water is part of the “commons” and,
therefore, must not be commodified or privatized. Instead, water is a
fundamental human right that should be made universally available to all people
rather simply than sold to the highest bidder or distributed through market
mechanisms to those who have the ability to pay.
Fortified by experience in their own countries, this international network of
water activists intends to demonstrate that the P-3 model of water privatization
has, for the most part, been a failure. Examples to be highlighted include
attempts to privatize public water systems in cities from Buenos Aires.
Manila, Johannesburg and Puerto Rico to Accra, Jakarta, Grenoble and Atlanta, to
name a few. Community battles waged on these and other fronts signify the
emerging water wars.
In contrast to the P-3 model, these water advocates will propose an alternative
model for water management based on “public-community-partnerships” which
calls for a strengthening of the public sector along with greater citizen
participation and community control. Traditional forms of water harvesting
will also be highlighted along with community-based approaches to water
conservation and restoration of lakes and rivers.
Indeed, this international network of water advocates intends to challenge the
World Water Council’s “manufactured consensus” on water privatization
every step of the way at the WWF in Kyoto with a counter agenda for water
management based on principles of conservation and equity. Moreover, they plan
to show that these alternative models of water management can be financed
through new strategies for public investment along with new forms of private
investment.
So, on the eve of war being declared in the Gulf, the emerging water wars of the
21st
century will be put on display in Kyoto. At the center of these water wars are
two contrasting visions of how this vital element of life itself is to be
conserved and shared for the sake of humanity and nature on this planet. But,
the battle lines drawn in Kyoto will mark a beginning, not the end, of these
water wars. For, increasingly, access to clean water is becoming a life and
death struggle for communities throughout the world. IBON Features/Reposted
by Bulatlat.com
Tony Clark is the director of the Polaris Institute in Canada and
co-author (with Maude Barlow) of Blue Gold: The Battle Against the Corporate
Theft of the World’s Water (McClelland & Stewart)
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