Sludge Watch ==> COC on Water Privatization - sucking up the water - sticking you with the bill

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=2181

The Texas Observer

$H20,000,000: Gracias for Sharing

BY GABRIELA BOCAGRANDE


Last week, the Fourth World Water Forum concluded in Mexico City, where over 
the centuries the older buildings on the central plaza have acquired an 
alarming tilt.

Architects agree that this has occurred because the city is subsiding as it 
pumps the underlying aquifer dry. Given this setting, you might think that 
the Water Forum would assume a certain urgency in addressing problems of 
water scarcity and contamination, but you would be wrong.

The business-dominated Forum, ostensibly convened to resolve these issues, 
is a gathering of government reps, private corporations, certain 
non-governmental organizations, and UN water “experts.” It was cosponsored 
by the World Bank and Coca-Cola, among others; René Coulomb, President of 
Suez, one of the world’s major water companies, chaired the World Water 
Council. One of the other cosponsors was CONAGUA, the water ministry of 
Mexico, which has been widely criticized for corruption and misuse of funds.

The UN hacks are regularly included in this triennial meeting because they 
provide cover and camouflage for the real dealings here: to lay the PR 
groundwork for extending the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) 
to the water sector, which, fortunately for us, is taking quite a long time.

According to the social movements fighting this, the water companies may 
well be losing the battle of the GATS. Nonetheless, they are working hard—on 
both the GATS and the PR. If they’re successful, then water will become just 
another product to be bought and sold on a global market, kind of like 
Hondas or Little Debbie Snack Cakes®. If you can’t pay for it, you can’t 
have it. Trade unions and NGOs, such as Food and Water Watch in the United 
States and Red VIDA in the Americas, object to treating water this way 
because people die when deprived of it, whereas they can live long and 
healthy lives without access to a single snack cake. Or a Honda.

At the Forum, the hacks had done their PR best, though: They released the UN 
World Water Development Report (WWDR), entitled Water, A Shared 
Responsibility. Somewhat optimistically, the authors of the WWDR stated in 
their preface, “We trust you will find this and future Reports informative 
and stimulating.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzz. At the outset, the Report demonstrates its irrelevance by 
informing us that problems of access to clean water and sanitation are the 
result of changing demographics, shifts in geopolitics (new boundaries), new 
technology, climate change, extreme weather conditions, poverty, warfare and 
crowded urban conditions. Notice the lack of human engagement here. If we 
follow this logic, then somehow a billion poor people simply popped up 
without clean water because the climate changed and the borders moved. And 
another billion or so people materialized without sanitation because of bad 
storms, war, and generalized misery that involved no one in particular.

No one is implicated, no one is to blame and, therefore, we shall all work 
together to clear this up. The Report tells us what we need to do. Ready? 
First, we need better governance. This means better equipped and more 
efficient water companies, better planning, better training, an end to 
corruption and blah, blah, blah.

Second, says the Report, we need to set some targets and develop better 
indicators. “We need robust and reliable indicators,” the authors declare, 
taking a brave and principled stand. And better indicators and targets are 
necessary because, “Water is difficult to measure in time and space.”

Is that right? Well, guess what? We can measure people both ways quite 
readily. According to the World Health Organization, 1.1 billion people 
around the world currently lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion, 
nearly half the world’s population, lack sanitation. The public health 
implications of this deficit are inestimable, but the most immediate and 
obvious consequence is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of babies 
annually from gastrointestinal disease. To complicate matters, it appears 
that neither the babies nor their mothers can pay the going rate for Evian.

This is a big problem, which successive World Water Forums and 24 UN 
agencies have been working on for some years. During the last few decades, 
we have already enjoyed the UN Conference on Environment and Development 
(UNCED), Agenda 21, the Millennium Declaration—which articulated the 
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—the World Summit on Sustainable 
Development (WSSD), the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) and 
national Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) plans. Presently, we 
are one year down the road into the International Decade for Action: Water 
for Life 2005–2015. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?

Me either. Despite the kickoff of the Action Decade, the scribes behind the 
Report and the Forum have noticed—with dismay—that many countries “did not 
meet the goals of the 2002 WSSD and develop plans for IWRM.” And although 
some countries did do their IWRM homework, they did not Devote Any Money To 
Implementing Their Integrated Water Resource Management Plan (DAMTITIWRMP). 
While the UN successfully collected a number of signatures on its various 
declarations, it did not, unfortunately, collect any cash. In clever, 
“liquid-y” language, observers of this process report that commitments are 
“diluted” and funding has “stagnated.”

So who is responsible for the funds we’ll have to spend to get water to 
people who need it? Well, if we are going to have an Integrated Water 
Resource Management plan, then everyone must cooperate, right? The 
government, NGOs, private companies such as Suez, the EDF Group, and others. 
Get it? The World Water Forum said that water is a shared responsibility, 
and everyone must help. So if the UN is boldly stepping up to supply the 
targets and the measures, then the people with the capital—for example the 
World Bank, multinational corporations, and governments—should cough up the 
funds. (Let’s ignore for the moment the uncomfortable fact that these 
institutions have money because they collected it from us.)

Despite our shared responsibility, it seems that the World Bank and the 
water multinationals have cut back their investments in water infrastructure 
and services, while waiting for their preferred international trade rules 
to, shall we say, fall into place at the World Trade Organization. Private 
companies, in particular, are not investing until they can be sure that 
their investments can be recovered, no matter what. In other words, until 
they can get the GATS to privilege them appropriately, they are not sharing. 
Suez, Bechtel, the EDF Group, and the like want taxpayers around the world 
to guarantee that they can make money on water concessions, contracts, and 
leases before they’ll invest. If they have their way, public water services 
will become private water markets where, for example, water quality may vary 
according to ability to pay, just like gasoline. I’m not kidding. We could 
get, for example, different concentrations of fecal matter in our water, 
according to whether we can afford regular, plus, or premium. And if the 
companies don’t get the returns they expect, they can sue the government for 
the difference.

While these companies tolerate the blah, blah, transparency, blah, 
governance, blah, targets of the UN, they are actually working hard as hell 
over at the Word Trade Organization, where the real game is played. And once 
you get behind the closed doors at the World Water Forum and into the 
hospitality suites, you find the Action Decade in full swing on this front 
here too. Countries around the world (including our own) are altering their 
judicial systems to resolve claims involving international investors more 
quickly and guarantee investor profits more securely. Governments are 
changing their laws to ensure that national legal systems conform to the 
terms of the developing trade agreements that cover public/private services, 
including water.

The multinationals point to the hardship suffered by Suez in Argentina as an 
illustration of what can happen when the rules aren’t right for them. In 
2002, after the Argentine economy collapsed, pitching half the population 
into poverty, Aguas Argentinas, a consortium of private water companies led 
by Suez, wanted to dramatically raise rates in the province of Buenos Aires. 
Under tremendous political pressure, the government held the line on water 
rates, and the consortium is now suing the government of Argentina for money 
it could have made, if it had raised the rates.

In Bolivia, Bechtel ran aground in a similar dispute and virtually lost its 
suit against the government when its concession was yanked for exorbitant 
rate increases in Cochabamba.

It seems, then, that despite the UN Report, water is not really a shared 
responsibility. It is a costly responsibility that water corporations want 
the public to assume in order to allow them to suck up profits.

Fortunately for us, there is another side to this debate. Parallel to the 
World Water Forum last week, the social movements of Mexico hosted the 
International Forum in Defense of Water. The alternative Forum was kept far 
away from the official Forum, which was heavily guarded by hundreds of 
police in riot gear. According to Sara Grusky of the Washington, D.C.-based 
nonprofit Food and Water Watch, who attended both the official and parallel 
Forums, the police seemed to expect the Defenders of Water to attack at any 
moment and maintained a tight perimeter with shields and weapons.

The alternative Forum, meanwhile, drew over one thousand participants who 
used it to promote democratic, community-controlled water access and to 
demand that the World Trade Organization stay out of the water sector. The 
meeting drew up its own “Joint Declaration,” emphasizing that water is not 
merchandise.

Explicitly, the alternative Forum declared “Water is a Human Right,” and 
pressured the UN to draw up an international convention reflecting this. 
Speakers pointed out that, without water, people die speedily, and 
governments therefore have a responsibility to provide water. This 
responsibility is not to be “shared” with private interests.

The point is hard to contest. Few politicians want to go on record in favor 
of letting people die of thirst and disease for lack of water and 
sanitation. The visuals alone can be very bad. So the suits and hacks at the 
official Forum came up with compromise language. Take note: “Water is a 
guarantee of life for all of the world’s people.”

Personally, I don’t know what this means, but I suspect it means nothing. 
The World Water Forum has proven adept at mealymouthing publicly while 
privately pursuing a corporate-friendly agenda that you wouldn’t like much 
if you knew about it. While shoving new trade rules into place over at the 
WTO to favor the few large corporations that wish to monopolize an element 
of the Earth humans cannot live without, the World Water Forum produces 
World Water Day and the International Decade for Action: Water for Life 
2005–2015, as political cover.

When asked why the official Forum could not declare water a human right, 
Diego Cevallos, the Mexico City correspondent for the Inter Press Service 
(IPS) news agency, reported that delegates said they favored the principle 
but “argued that it was not feasible to include it in the final declaration, 
because it could generate legal problems at the national and international 
level.”

Funny. The delegates and the suits work tirelessly to amend the national and 
international legal systems, such as the GATS, to protect Suez and EDF and 
make sure they get a steady flow of funds, but changing the rules to ensure 
that everyone gets a steady flow of water is too long a legal stretch.

The eagle-eyed Gabriela Bocagrande has been watching and writing about water 
privatization schemes for many years. Her article about Bolivia, “The 
Difference Between God and Bechtel,” was published in the June 23, 2000 
issue of the Observer.



Susan Howatt
National Water Campaigner, Council of Canadians
1-800-387-7177 or 613-233-4487 ext. 239
613-761-2482 (mobile)
www.canadians.org