From: Gabriel Katsh (katsh@fas.harvard.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 23 2002 - 16:18:54 EDT
Related to the last posting on Bechtel in Bolivia, here's a great article from
this week's Village Voice about water shortages and the dangers of
privatization:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0234/otis.php
A World Without Water:
Advocates Warn of Thirst and Turmoil for a Parched Planet
by Ginger Adams Otis
August 21 - 27, 2002
In 1995 World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin made a much quoted
prediction for the new millennium: "If the wars of this century were fought
over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water." Serageldin
has been proven correct much faster than he or anyone else thought. Two years
into the 21st century, the global water wars are upon us.
The very bleak details about water security may finally seep out during the 10-
day United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) starting
Monday in Johannesburg, South Africa. While heads of state and corporate
bigwigs converge in Sandton (rumored to be Africa's wealthiest suburb),
thousands of anti-globalization activists and environmentalists will be
attending shadow summits just down the street. They'll be trying to call
attention to the dangers of privatizing the world's water supplies, and
pointing to places like Nelspruit, 125 miles to the north, where residents now
buy their drinking water from the Biwater corporation, and are all but dying of
dehydration. The problem isn't water flow but cash flow: Poor residents can't
pay privatized rates. It's a scenario that's beginning to play out all over
South Africa. "That's exactly what's wrong with privatization," says Maude
Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, Canada's largest public advocacy
group. "These companies completely reject the idea that water is a common
property belonging to all living creatures. Their only goal is to commodify the
earth's most precious resource."
The concept of privatizing water service has been around since Napoléon III,
but only 5 percent of the world population currently receives water from
corporations. Activists want to stop the process before it goes any further;
the world's water lords want rapid expansion. In 1998, when the private sector
began angling for the water market in earnest, the World Bank predicted the
global trade in water would soon generate revenues of up to $800 billion a
year. Two years later, at a World Water Forum in the Hague, a triumvirate of
multinational water companies backed by the World Trade Organization (WTO)
successfully strong-armed the UN into defining water as a human need (which can
be sold for profit by private companies) instead of a human right (which means
people are ensured equal access on a nonprofit basis).
Faster than you can say Evian, revenue projections jacked into the multiple
trillions. Private companies had a green light to approach cities and states
around the globe (usually cash-strapped ones) and offer to lease, buy, or enter
into a consortium agreement for the existing municipal water systems. After
privatization is complete, the companies make a profit by charging residents
every time they turn on a tap or flush a toilet. Some also offer wastewater
services, such as sewage disposal, and implement water treatment plants. Many
of these companies get profit guarantees written into their contracts. For
example, if residents use less water than predicted, companies can raise rates
so profits don't fall below a predetermined number. Once in control of a water
system, they can also take any surplus and sell it off to the highest bidder,
usually a neighboring city that's experiencing an unexpected shortfall. In some
parts of the world, reports the trade journal Global Water Intelligence, water
commands the same price as oil. No wonder Fortune magazine touted the water
market as a "safe harbor in stocks—a place that promises steady consistent
returns well into the next century."
The two reigning conglomerates are Vivendi Universal and Suez, both based in
France, which have amassed 70 percent of the existing world water market.
Together they deliver water services to more than a hundred million people.
Suez operates in 130 countries and Vivendi in more than 90. Right behind them
are Bouygues-SAUR (French), RWE-Thames (German), and Bechtel-United Utilities
(American). These are the biggest multinationals, but there are numerous other
companies doing the same thing on a smaller scale.
But what of the world's water crisis? Currently the UN identifies approximately
six "hot stains," places where water is so scarce that human life may not be
sustainable and conflict over dwindling resources is an ever present threat.
Water giants like Vivendi insist privatization and conservation aren't mutually
exclusive. They say it can actually improve water service, because for-profit
companies are wealthy enough to invest in new technology and infrastructure
improvements to aging systems where poor governments are not. Activists like
Barlow say for-profit companies are not set up as sustainable enterprises or to
conserve resources. The more water sold, the better their bottom line—so why
should they try to halt the world's parching?
Here's the really hard news Barlow says the water lords don't want known: Not
only is there the same amount of water on the planet as there was at its
creation, it is almost all the same water. There is no secret source to replace
the vast quantities that modern humankind consumes, and technology hasn't come
up with a magic bullet either. Desalination of seawater has proven outrageously
expensive and leaves behind brackish water mostly uninhabitable for marine
life. According to the latest official calculations, there are only 8.6 million
cubic miles of fresh water left on earth, a mere 2.6 percent of the 330 million
cubic feet of total water. The UN predicts that two-thirds of the world's
population will live in water-scarce regions by 2025, and many of them in
regions previously considered water-rich, like the United States.
Environmentalists—and even some heads of state—are frantically trying to undo
the damage. Much of the problem can be traced to river damming and the Green
Revolution, both of which were embraced by the American government during the
last century and exported globally. The Green Revolution was supposed to solve
the world's hunger problem by introducing high-yield miracle seeds to
developing nations, especially India and China. Instead it created an ongoing
irrigation crisis by replacing drought-resistant indigenous crops with water-
guzzling varieties. Farmers were forced to forgo traditional and sustainable
irrigation methods; deep wells became the norm, pulling precious groundwater
out of already water-scarce areas. Then developers began trying to solve the
irrigation problem by building big dams. According to Sandra Postel of the
Global Water Policy Project, a water conservation advocacy group, there were
5000 large dams (more than 15 meters high) worldwide in 1950. There are now
45,000. On average, there have been two large dams constructed every day for
the past 50 years. "They were built with the best of intentions," says
Postel, "to supply hydroelectric power, irrigation, and public water, and to
control floods. But we didn't understand the full range of ecological
consequences that would unfold."
Now four of the world's greatest rivers (the Ganges, Yellow River, Nile, and
Colorado) routinely dry up before reaching the ocean, and water that normally
would roll through the earth and feed aquifers runs off pavements and rooftops
into sewers, eventually ending up (usually carrying pesticides and toxins) in
the ocean, but without moisturizing forests and marshlands on the way. Add
relentless human consumption, industrial farming, and global warming and you've
got the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from the Texas Panhandle to South
Dakota and is believed to have once contained 4 trillion tons of pristine
water. It's now mined continuously by over 200,000 groundwater wells. They pull
out 13 million gallons per minute—which is 14 times faster than nature's
replenishing rate. Each year since 1991 the aquifer's water table has dropped
three feet—a huge amount when multiplied by the area. By some estimates, more
than half its water is gone. And that's not America's only problem area: one of
the heaviest water-using places on the planet—California—is in serious trouble.
The state's Department of Water Resources says that if more supplies aren't
found by 2020, residents will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great
as the amount that all of its towns and cities together are consuming today.
And the U.S. is still considered water-rich; countries with less abundance are
in even more danger.
That's one note activists will stress at next week's meeting: danger. Since
they've had no luck convincing governments to stop making quick profits
off "the commons"—essential resources that historically belong to one and all—
they're going to invoke public security. "Water scarcity is now a serious
source of conflict in many places," says Barlow. "Almost every country in the
Middle East is facing a water crisis of historic proportions." Israel has
aggressively mined water wherever possible throughout the region, severely
taxing water systems in Syria and Jordan (not to mention Palestinian
townships). And Turkey has caused serious tension with plans to dam the
Euphrates River, thereby diverting much of its life-sustaining flow to Syria
and Iraq.
Bangladesh, which depends heavily on rivers that originate in India, is
suffering terribly now because India has diverted and dammed so many of its
water sources. In Africa, relations between Botswana and Namibia are severely
strained by Namibian plans to construct a pipeline to divert water from the
shared Okavango River. Ethiopia plans to take more water from the Nile,
although Egypt is heavily dependent on those waters for irrigation and power.
And as water tables fall steadily in the North China Plain (which yields more
than half of China's wheat and nearly a third of its corn) as well as in
northwest India's Punjab region, experts are bracing for a highly combustible
imbalance between available water supplies and human needs.
Officials attending the upcoming WSSD meeting are certainly aware of these
problems. They just can't figure out which way to approach a solution. Most of
the northern governments (essentially the U.S., Canada, and the European Union)
want the UN to start adopting trade agreements similar to those put forth by
the WTO. They're pressuring the UN to solve the world's resource crisis by
implementing "voluntary partnerships" with private companies to take over
government-run industries devoted to public health, clean air, and water.
Representatives from the companies will be on hand to reassure officials that
they can privatize and conserve at the same time.
Delegates from poorer nations, with the possible exception of South Africa,
aren't buying that idea. They got a taste of WTO justice when northern trade
partners wanted to export genetically modified seeds. Several developing
countries declined to buy because they don't want modified food in their
environments, and they landed in WTO court for trade violations. But under
previously signed UN accords, nations do have the right to refuse products they
feel are environmentally unsound. One of the questions poorer nations want
answered at the WSSD is which entity has ultimate power when agreements
conflict. They hope it's the UN—otherwise they can all too easily envision
their natural resources being siphoned off to nurture the golf courses and
swimming pools of the world's elite.
Realistically and unfortunately, says Barlow, the shadow summits planned for
next week probably won't have much of an impact on the final WSSD outcome. The
bigger goal, she says, is to flame public outrage and derail the privatization
trend at the World Water Forum scheduled for next March in Japan.
But Barlow and crew had better hurry: The water crisis is growing so fast that
even developed nations are swigging from each other. Canada's abundant fresh
water supply has already whetted the appetite of George Bush. There's been talk
from his administration about using the existing oil-pipeline infrastructure in
the Northern Provinces to flow Canadian water to the American Midwest, which,
under existing the North American Free Trade Agreement, is perfectly
legitimate. And once Canada opens the taps, it can't turn them off again
without violating NAFTA accords. "Isn't it great," says Barlow, "that while
much of the developing world is grappling with extreme water deprivation, the
U.S. is making contingency plans to keep desert mirages like Las Vegas up and
running?"
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