File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0108, message 271


From: "Margaret" <margaret-AT-rie.net.au>
Subject: AUT: Art: water privatisation
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 10:24:59 +1000


Blue Planet targets commodification of world's water
by Patrick Bond and Karen Bakker

The July 5-8 "Blue Planet" conference in Vancouver opened with a call by
Maude Barlow to promote "a global water revolution. This is the first of
many international civil society meetings to take back control of our
water." The host Council of Canadians, a 100,000-member citizens' group,
was joined by several hundred representatives of indigenous peoples,
Third World communities, anti-globalization activists, radical youth,
public-sector trade unions, environmentalists, anti-dam campaigners,
World Bank watchers, and consumer groups.

Barlow, the Council chairperson, was in the news in April for helping
turn out "Maude's Mobs" of middle-class Canadians to the Quebec City
protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. For several years,
she and Tony Clarke of Polaris Institute have fused citizens'-rights
respectability with surprisingly radical rhetoric against the ravaging
of Canada by corporations and pocketed politicians. Barlow and Clarke
recently supported local activists in Vancouver as they fought off a
privatised wastewater treatment plant.

In contrast to previous criticisms that the Council has been excessively
nationalist, this conference recreated the internationalist spirit of
the Porto Alegre World Social Forum. Aiming directly at next year's
tenth anniversary of the UN Conference on Environment and Development,
Blue Planet took on corporate globalization more generally, posing
routes that lead from multi-faceted resistance to alternative
conceptions of water management.

The trends in virtually all countries are towards the commodification
and privatization of water. Blue Planet promotes a radical manifesto and
global treaty as seminal documents in the international fight-back. The
manifesto stresses the essential nature of water to life and to social
and ecosystem integrity, and identifies cultural resonances and the
sense of the sacred associated with water in various spiritual
traditions. Aboriginal communities played a key role in framing the
debate during the conference.

Getting governments to sign up to the treaty, it is hoped, will be a
rallying cry and political tool for the movement. The documents provide
a broad-based way of arguing for water as a human right, and will have
universal applicability in sites of struggle around the world.

Indeed, five scales of water struggle are, in the process, being fused:
local communities, national governments, world water policy fora, sites
of global rule such as Free Trade Agreements and the Bretton Woods
Institutions, and the more general takeover of water by multinational
corporations.

Solidarity with campaigns underway in a variety of Third World settings
represented at the conference--Ghana, India, Bolivia, Mexico, South
Africa, Guatemala, Colombia, Tanzania, Slovakia, Honduras, Philippines,
Mozambique, Indonesia, as well as First Nations within North
America-received serious attention.

The concerns included damage from mega-dams and cross-catchment water
transfers, despoilation of groundwater and aquifers, municipal water
privatisation, tariff price hikes and "water poverty," agribusiness
abuse of water in the wake of the irrigation-guzzling green revolution,
global warming/drying, worsening droughts and floods, scarcity and
wastage, and the extension of corporate bill-of-rights protections to
water via the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and Free
Trade Agreement of the Americas.Canada is a poignant host for some of these
issues. The week before the
conference, Mike Harris--conservative leader of Canada's main province,
Ontario--was a witness at a judicial hearing on the seven deaths and
thousands of poisonings at the town of Walkerton last year.

He was explicitly asked whether his "ideology" of privatisation was to
blame, given that testing the town's water for E.coli was outsourced to
a local firm. It failed to do so and attempted a cover-up. Harris was in
full denial mode too, but Canadians got the point.

Other local struggles include anti-dam fights in Quebec and British
Columbia, resistance to bulk sales of water to the US, and campaigns to
bring services to indigenous peoples who suffer Third World water
poverty in one of the world's richest countries.

Water can become a locus of the anti-globalization movement, some
speakers contended, for several reasons. Water struggles tend to bridge
traditional red/green divides, link North and South in solidarity,
endorse the notion of a global Commons that mustn't be privatised, focus
on the public (especially municipal government) character of service
delivery, involve the expansion of the service through expanded labour
and jobs, and offer a way to practice local self-management and
sustainable consumption.

Thus if water becomes a public good protected from the market, it also
serves a progressive political trend towards an expansive eco-social
localism, unlike the establishment's faddish "communitarianism" which
leads inexorably to gated-community protections.

 It is only by confronting issues of more general concern to the movement
against corporate globalization that the water struggles will come to
fruition. Targets thus emerge in the form of the World Bank/IMF,
utilities undergoing commercialization, big government aid agencies,
powerful water multinationals like Suez and Vivendi which dominate the
global market in water supply provision, Free Trade Agreements and
neoliberal advocacy agencies.

Key enemies of Blue Planet include the pro-privatisation World Water
Council (a platform for major water firms); the Global Water Partnership
(initiated by senior World Bank staff); Business Partners for
Development (an industry/World Bank promoter of privatization); the GATS
as a lever for water companies to invade Third World countries; and
other advocates of the Dublin Principles and Hague Declaration, which
advance the proposition that water is mainly an economic good.

These players will be key targets of protesters at the World Bank/IMF
meeting in Washington in early October and at the Rio+10 conference in
Johannesburg in September 2002, as well as at related meetings in Bonn
later this year and follow-ups at Kyoto in 2003 and Montreal in 2006.

In contrast, groups and events promoting water decommodification include
the P-7 Declaration on Water authored by Vandana Shiva, the Cochabamba
Declaration emanating from the Coordinada struggle of low-income
residents against water-privatiser Bechtel in Bolivia, and the Global
Water Contract of the Group of Lisbon social democrats.

But even if the main contradiction between North and South in this
sector, is that the former already have water infrastructure networks in
place, and the latter must still expand access to more than a billion
people without potable water and decent sanitation, the process of
commodification is similar.

Those with the networks--including residents of most Third World cities'
elite neighbourhoods--will have to begin addressing overconsumption;
those without must address the need for provision of a free lifeline
supply of water for, at minimum, subsistence purposes. (Not just a
matter for households, in which women would benefit most, this might
also include small-scale irrigation in the context of radical land and
agricultural reform.)

Here, perhaps, the only real cleavage emerged. For most of the world,
the human right to a subsistence water supply must ultimately occur on a
free "lifeline" basis.

This demand has led, for example, South African campaigners in the SA
Municipal Workers Union and Rural Development Services Network to only
partially endorse the African National Congress electoral promise late
last year to give a free 6,000 litres a month to each family--half what
campaigners insist upon. (In early July the promise was meant to come
into effect, though it did only for a tiny minority of consumers, not
for the poor rural women who need it most, for example.)

But a free lifeline supply would not mean the right to lifestyles which
in the wealthy North, are insensitive to real--not just
socially-constructed--water scarcity. Such scarcity comes from
pollution-intensive industrial practices, water-wasting domestic
appliances, and more fundamentally from poorly-located urban areas such
as Johannesburg, far from natural bodies of fresh water. But scarcity is
also a reflection of aquifer degradation, which is common in most urban
areas.

Commented Barlow, "When we have a famine somewhere, our response is not,
`Oh goody, customers for life!', yet that is exactly the way the
scarcity argument is playing out when it comes to water." Or, as Shiva
put it on the first night of the conference, "Sustainable development is
capitalism's way of turning the threat of ecological crisis into an
opportunity."

Capitalism has colonised the life world so thoroughly that the alleged
ability of private companies to fix system leaks and provide more
efficient services has become common sense.

But such conventional wisdom can be undone. Typical red/green conflicts
pit jobs against protection of resources from extraction. Water does not
have this feature, and so transcends the (usually false) paradox between
equity and efficiency that plagues attempts to bring together social
justice and environmental justice concerns.

The conference was dedicated to the struggle of the Colombian anti-dam
activist Kimy Pernia Domico, who was abducted two days before departing
or Canada for his keynote speech. The conference closed with a vibrant
demonstration organised by youth activists at the Colombian consulate in
downtown Vancouver.

***
(See http://www.canadians.org for Blue Planet information.)

Patrick Bond is based in Johannesburg at Wits University's Municipal
Services Project:
pbond-AT-wn.apc.org

Karen Bakker is doing a post-doctoral study of water privatisation at the
University of Oxford's School of
Geography and the Environment:  karen.bakker-AT-geog.ox.ac.uk

www.iww.org Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the
workers of the world, organised as a class, take possession of the means of
production, abolish the wage system and live in harmony with the earth


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005