Private Blue Planet
by Jamie Dunn
CovertAction Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2000
"A City Sinking into a Sea of Mud" was the title
of a 1966 Readers Digest article about the depletion of Mexico
City's ground water. Thirty-three years later, the Toronto Star
revealed that this city of 20 million people may have to be evacuated
by 2006 due to the exhaustion of its water supplies-a city that
in 1519 the Spanish called the Venice of the New World.
Around the world, the stories are the same. Nations have either
diverted, depleted or polluted their water resources to such an
extent that authorities like the United Nations and the World
Watch Institute predict that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's
people won't have enough water. Less than one-half of one percent
of available water is fresh. Many point to population growth as
the culprit, but the truth is that consumption of water is growing
at twice the rate of the planet's population. Human beings use
only 10 percent of the planets fresh water-65 percent goes to
industrial agriculture and the rest goes to other industrial uses.
TOWING WATER IN GIANT BAGS
New plans for water diversions are being drawn up and old
ones resurrected. The Northern Alliance for Water and Power that
would have used 800 kilometers of the Rocky Mountain trench as
a giant sluice-way and flood one-fifth to one-tenth of British
Columbia and the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal,
which would have diverted James Bay south to the American Midwest.
These options are once again being promoted as viable given the
rising global market value of water.
New technology allows the creation of giant bags up to 650
meters long and 150 meters wide (that's seven football fields
by one-and-a-half football fields), which would carry 1.75 million
cubic meters of water at a time. These bags would be pulled behind
tugboats across oceans, making bulk shipments of fresh water less
expensive and more profitable than if shipped by refitted oil
tankers. Smaller versions have already been tested off the coasts
of Monterey, California and Vancouver, British Columbia.
Meanwhile, experts like Sandra Postel say that we could make
significant reductions in our use of water without any real change
in our lifestyles. However, the solutions that have gained the
most momentum have not been to adopt these techniques, but instead
to take water out of the commons-those diminishing parcels of
things we should be stewarding together- and divide it up as private
property Water scarcity has not led to a solution. It has focused
the world's biggest corporations on a growing and very lucrative
market.
WARS OF THE FUTURE WILL BE OVER WATER
What Maude Barlow has called "blue gold" in her
synthesis of the worldwide water crisis and the move to cartelize
the worlds water, is seen as the oil of the future. "The
wars of the next century will be fought over water" according
to the often quoted declaration of Ismail Serageldin, vice president
of the World Bank. King Hussein of Jordan once said the only reason
he would go to war with Israel would be over water."
For more than 10 years, with this specter looming before us,
we have been corralled into the belief that the same paradigm
that brought you global free trade will solve the water crisis.
In other words, let the market work its magic.
Since 1992, the commodification of water has been wrapped
in some very nice packaging. That year the Dublin Accord called
for a holistic approach to water management. To raise awareness
and to encourage participation in solving water problems-particularly
by women-it finally called for the recognition of water as an
economic commodity. Section 21 of the Rio de Janeiro Agreement
of the following year adopted the same position. In 1998, a conference
sponsored by UNESCO announced that the only way to guarantee equitable
distribution of water and water services was the total commodification
of water, relying on the forces of the open marketplace. Nowhere
has any document adopted the position that access to a sufficient
supply of clean water is a basic human right. The only reason
the private sector is motivated to supply a thirsty world is that
people are so dependent on water they will pay anything for it.
The poorest people living on the outskirts of cities in Central
and South America and Asia pay many times more for water than
do those in upper and middle class areas. Within free-trade zones
like the maquiladoras of Mexico, toddlers drink Coke and Pepsi
from bottles with rubber nipples because the water they have access
to will literally strip the paint off a pencil. Meanwhile, nearby
industries keep their landscaping green. This pattern of exploitation
mirrors the pattern of water scarcity
At present, more than one billion people live without enough
water. Seventy-five percent of these people live in developing
countries. By the time the problem reaches the proportions predicted
in 2025, people in developing countries will account for 95 percent
of those affected. The water crisis is not one of supply, but
of overuse and equitable access.
These rights of access to water for commercial purposes have
been codified in trade deals since the first half of the last
century. Water has been listed as a commodity under the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) since 1947. ~ 3 The mechanisms
allowed under GATT for controlling exploitation of water disappeared
in 1994 with the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). 14 Furthermore, under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, corporations
gained the right to directly sue governments if their right to
investment was thwarted by legislation. Currently Sun Belt Water
Inc. of Santa Barbara, California, is suing the Canadian government
for $10.5 billion because a license to export water from British
Columbia to California was revoked. As NAFTA becomes a hemispheric
agreement under the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)
every country in Central and South America will come under these
obligations.
Measures to protect water from pollution have proved to be
just as vulnerable to trade agreements. Methanex, a Canadian company
that makes MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) is suing the U.S.
government under Chapter 11 of NAFTA for $970 million, because
California has moved to ban the gasoline additive, w may be responsible
for contaminating water supply of up to 100 million Americans
and has been called the greatest environmental disaster of the
next decade 16 In fact, no protection of the environment has ever
survived a challenge under the WTO or NAFTA.
Changes to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS),
currently being negotiated, will gradually force the wholesale
privatization of municipal water services around the world, despite
the horrible record of the private companies that provide them.
Two of these companies, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Vivendi had
combined 1998 revenues exceeding $70 billion, to provide water
or water services to 120 million people worldwide. Some of the
corporations now entering the water business are heavyweights
like Bechtel, Enron, and Monsanto. Rebecca Mark, president of
Enron's new water division, has said she won't retire until all
the water of the world is privatized 20 She has trade agreements,
governments, and the World Bank on her side.
Environment watch