BLUE COVENANT: Maude Barlow - World Water Crisis

July 2008

Introduced by International Forum on Globalization (IFG) founder JERRY MANDER, Celebrated author and world-class activist MAUDE BARLOW talks about the main points of her new book, BLUE COVENANT: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

Dhaka WASA plans to hike water price

Staff Correspondent, NewAge, August 7, 2008. Dhaka, Bangladesh

The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority is contemplating increasing the price of piped water by about 20 per cent.
 The WASA authorities plan to increase water price came in the wake of increased fuel cost, inflation and to minimise the system loss.
   

‘We are seriously thinking of rising the price of water price by nearly 20 per cent and will make a proposal in this regard to the ministry soon,’ Abdullah Haroon Pasha, chairman of Dhaka WASA, told a seminar, styled ‘Integrated management of urban water cycle: Singapore’s experience’ organised by the Dhaka WASA in its conference room.
   

Shaikh Khurshid Alam, secretary of local government division of the LGRD ministry, was present as the chief guest at the seminar presided over by Haroon Pasha.
   Justifying his proposal to hike the price of water, Haroon said the increase would make the people cautious about proper use of water and help further reduction in the system loss.
   

He said the system loss of the water supply agency had come down to less than 35 per cent from 45 per cent in 2005.
 The Dhaka WASA claims that it supplies an estimated 180 crore litres of water a day against the demand of more than 200 crore litres for domestic as well as industrial consumption.
 The domestic consumers are now paying Tk 5.50 per thousand litres and the commercial and industrial consumers pay Tk 18.25 for the same.
   

An official of the utility service agency said there would be more than 3 lakh holdings under the Dhaka City Corporation of which only 2.55 lakh are authorised consumers.
 ‘The Dhaka WASA is able to collect less than 60 per cent price of its total supplied water due to huge number of unauthorised connections,’ the official added.
 He said the Dhaka WASA could not afford waiting for raising the price of piped water as it had to keep pace with the increased fuel cost as well as the increase in inflation.
   

Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority as well as experts asked the government to take immediate and realistic steps to make the alternative sources of water useable to mitigate the water crisis of the capital.
 ‘The government should take immediate measures to use the alternative sources of water like rainwater, constructing sufficient water reservoir around the capital and setting up of wastewater and effluent treatment plants,’ the Dhaka WASA managing director, Raihanul Abedin, said while presenting the keynote paper in the seminar.
   

‘The groundwater level has been dropping alarmingly in the city due to excessive dependence on it. Currently, 86 per cent of total water is coming from the groundwater,’ Abedin said, adding, ‘The groundwater level is declining by about three metres every year.’

Vandana Shiva: Why We Face Both Food and Water Crises

By Maria Armoudian and Ankine Aghassian, AlterNet, May 15, 2008

Policy-makers are finally grappling with the growing global food and water crises that are upon us. While they grope for answers, Vandana Shiva reminds them that it was their wild economic schemes that created these crises in the first place.

The globalized economic structure is simply incompatible with the basic physics of the planet and the principles of democratic governance, she says. And until we align the economic system with those of the ecological system, the problems will only get worse. While many of Shiva’s books address some aspect of this fundamental problem, one title captures it most succinctly, Earth Democracy, Justice, Sustainability and Peace.

Shiva is a physicist, author, director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology and the founder of Navdanya.

AlterNet: Much of your writing and speaking has focused on our economic structure’s incompatibility with the ecological functioning of the earth. Talk about that incompatibility.

Vandana Shiva: One aspect of the inconsistency is between the principles of Gaia, the principles of soil, the ecology, renewability, how the atmosphere cleans itself and the laws of the global marketplace. The global marketplace is driven by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the illogic of so-called “free trade,” which is totally not free. [The result of this incompatibility] is the current food crisis: The more agriculture is “liberalized,” the greater the food scarcity, the higher the food prices and the more people will go hungry.

Never has there been this rate of escalation in food prices worldwide as we witness now with the global integration of the food economies under the coercive and bullying force of the WTO.

AlterNet: You have said, in the past, that these activities are done in the name of improving human welfare. But instead, poverty and dispossession have increased. Where do we see this the most?

VS: We see the worst dispossession in the countries of the South — tragically — those countries that could feed themselves. India, for example, was food self-sufficient. We were able to feed our people with a universal distribution system, affordable food for all, and agriculture policies that put food first. Small farmers could make a living.

But a decade and a half of globalization’s perverse rules have led to 200,000 farmers committing suicide because they can’t make a living anymore — all their money goes to make profit for Monsanto or Cargill. Meanwhile, with the economy’s so-called growth, people are starving. Per capita entitlement to food has dropped in a decade and half from 177 kg to 152 kg per year.

This contradicts the false propaganda being spread about the reason prices are rising. They say it is because Indians are getting richer and Indians are eating more. Well, some Indians are getting richer, but they’re not eating more. There’s a limit to how much you can eat. And the handful of billionaires buys a few more private jet planes and builds a few more private mansions. [But in reality], the average Indian is eating less. The average child has a bigger chance today of dying of hunger. The Cargill’s of the world have a stranglehold of the world’s economy; they’re harvesting super-profits while people die of hunger.

AlterNet: You talk about India being worse off, but many economists — including those on the political left — say that places like China and India are, overall, actually improving. But you say that is not true.

VS: It’s not true. India, under the perverse growth of globalization, has beaten out Africa in the number of hungry people. While we have 9.2 percent growth measured by GNP and GDP, 50 percent of our children have very severe malnutrition. Fifty percent of deaths for children under five are due to lack of food. That’s about a million kids per year.

AlterNet: That is a considerable change that I don’t think the world is seeing.

VS: That’s because the media orchestrates every analysis and interpretation. They would like this crisis to look like a success of globalization, and they would like to offer more globalization as a solution. In fact, the World Bank has said there should be more liberalized trade. Before the WTO was formed, we had protests with 500,000 farmers on the streets of Bangalore in 1993 to say that this is a recipe for starvation, for destroying agriculture, self-reliance and food security. And the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs — before the WTO was born — had a press conference to say that globalization will make food affordable for all.

They forget that food ultimately is not produced in the speculation and commodity exchanges controlled by Cargill in Chicago. It is produced by hard working women and men working with the soil and sun. And if you destroy the capacity of the people to work the land and the capacity of soil to produce, you’re going to have hunger. The tragedy is that the hunger of today and the rise of food [prices] is the result of globalization policies, and it is being implemented on a global scale. Unless we bring local food sovereignty and “food democracy” back into the picture, we will not have a solution to this.

AlterNet: You’re talking about basic ecological principles here. But there are two other aspects about food shortages that are being discussed. One of them is that among some societies, such as China, the diet is changing, which contributes to food shortage. Reportedly, after being exposed to western diets, they are eating more meat which requires an enormous amount of grain — normally fed to people — to instead be fed to cattle. Do you see this as part of the problem?

VS: Well, I can definitely say that is not true for India. Vegetarian India will stay vegetarian India — rich or poor, integrated globally or not integrated globally. And the Chinese have always eaten meat. The difference is that now they are integrated into the global production system: It is factory farming that feeds grain to chicken and pigs and cows.

No indigenous culture — not China or India — has fed grain to animals. Animals have fed on what humans could not eat. Global agribusiness, which makes huge money out of the feed industry, is creating this pressure while destroying what I would call the “real free economy” — the free-range cattle, the free range chicken — and replacing it with prison factories for animals. In fact, in my interpretation, even the Avian flu is being used to violently shut down small economies, the free economies of Asian peasants, and turning them into Tyson and Cargill factory farming systems.

AlterNet: What about the role of climate change in this global food crisis?

VS: Climate change and agricultural food crises do have a connection. In fact, my next book is precisely about this connection. Industrial farming — driven by agribusiness in order to sell more chemicals, pesticides, and costly seeds to farmers — is heavily responsible for emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane from factory farms nitrogen oxide from chemically fertilized soil and fossil fuels from mechanized farming systems.

Further, the long distance trade is responsible for adding food miles, which adds more carbon emissions. Taken together, more than 25 percent of climate instability is being caused by unsustainable farming that [simultaneously] displaces small peasants, creates poverty and bad food. So, tomorrow we could solve 25 percent of the planet’s climate instability if we returned to ecological agriculture as the earth wants it, farming according to 10,000 years of wisdom that evolved from the third world.

Research that we are undertaking now shows a 200 percent higher level of carbon return and 10 times higher level of moisture retention. So if increased drought is one consequence of climate change, what you need is sorted organic matter, not more chemical fertilizers. We have two issues pertaining to climate change: We need to get rid of emissions from agriculture and long-distance transport.

This means ecological farming, localization of the food system and only importing what can’t be grown locally — not forcing imports as the U.S has done on India. It has forced us to buy wheat, give up our mustard and coconut oil and to live on soya. These trade factors are “forcings” that are causing more damage to our climate and destroying our food culture, nutrition and access to food.

Finally, biodiverse systems actually produce more food. It is an illusion that because there’s a food crisis, we must have [genetically modified food] spread around the world. First, genetically-engineered crops don’t produce more food. And secondly, they make the soil more vulnerable to climate change. They are herbicide resistant and toxin traps. That is not a yield increase.

AlterNet: So the genetic altering of food ultimately exacerbates the already difficult circumstances with food shortages.

VS: Absolutely. I think any recipe today offered in agriculture should be measured against the test of whether it will enhance the food production capacity of the poor and if it will reduce the pressure on the planet.

AlterNet: Let’s also incorporate another concept that you feature in your writing — “biopiracy.”

VS: Biopiracy is the strange phenomenon whereby the richest and biggest of corporations steal genetic resources and traditional knowledge from poor little women and peasants who have shared it for free for over a millennium. The first case I had to fight was against the United States government with W.R. Grace, which became infamous in the film A Civil Action, when it polluted the groundwater outside of Boston.

They stole Neem, which is a tree that gives us [natural] pest and fungal control through its oil. The USDA along with Grace claim to have invented Neem. Of course, my grandmother and my mother used it. Then, I popularized it after Bopal with a campaign called “No more Bopal. Plant a Neem.” When I saw this patent, I had to fight it. We fought for 11 years, and eventually the biggest governmental powers and one of the biggest chemical companies were beaten out by a coalition of civic society groups and movements.

Another case of biopiracy is the famous Basmati rice that comes from my valley. A company in Texas claims to have invented it. The third case was Monsanto, which claimed to have invented an ancient wheat variety, which is very low in gluten. The problem with biopiracy is not simply that they’re taking genetic material and knowledge for free, but that they are claiming an exclusive right to it and then demanding royalty, claim and fame from the very communities and societies [from which they have taken it], communities that have had this biodiversity and this knowledge for years.

AlterNet: Speaking of Monsanto, you have done considerable research on this company and published a report, “Peddling Life Sciences or Death Sciences.”

VS: If I had to rank criminality of corporations, Monsanto will easily walk away with the highest award. Monsanto has taken over the control of world’s seed supply. It has bought up every small seed company in India, Brazil and the United States and become the biggest seed corporation. But its entire model of functioning is through corruption. They corrupted the United States decision-making such that U.S. citizens no longer have a right to know what they are eating, whether milk has bovine growth hormone in it or if soybeans and corn are genetically engineered. They are spreading this corruption worldwide.

I am fighting them through three cases in our supreme court. And we’ve managed to hold them at the level of Bt cotton. They have not yet managed to invade into our food economy with genetically modified food crop. But the worst thing Monsanto is doing is buying Delta and Pine Land, a company that has the patent for terminator technology that designs seeds to be sterilized. It is genetically engineering life for life’s extinction.

AlterNet: We should also talk about water scarcity. There are major water wars occurring and considerable concern about the future of water. Do you think that water scarcity is being created largely by the phenomenon of privatization or is it resulting from climate change and other such phenomena?

VS: Water scarcity [is] being created by non-sustainable systems of production for both food and textile. Every industrial activity has huge water demands. Industrial agriculture requires ten times more water to produce the same amount of food than ecological farming does. And the “green revolution” was not so green because it created demand for large dams and mining of groundwater.

Industrial agriculture has depleted water resources. In addition, as water has become polluted and depleted, a handful of industry saw water as a way of making super-profits by privatizing it. They are privatizing it in two ways. The first is through buying up entire civic, municipal distribution. The big players in this are Bechtel, Suez and Vivendi.

And interestingly, wherever they go, they face protests. Bechtel was thrown out of Bolivia. Suez wanted to take Delhi’s water supply, but we had a movement for water democracy and did not allow them to take over. But there’s a second kind of privatization, which is more insidious — and that is the plastic water bottle. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are leading in this privatization. But in India where Coca-Cola was stealing water, I worked with a small group of village women, and they shut their plant down. Across India, these giant corporations are taking between 1.5 to 2 million liters of water a day and leaving behind a water famine.

AlterNet: Given what is happening as a result of climate change, would we still face a water crisis without these practices?

VS: We would not be facing water problems if people have been allowed to have their economies, to practice sustainability and to live their lives. Every step in the water crisis is due to greed. As the water becomes increasingly scarce, the corporations who control the water become richer. It is the same with food. As food becomes scarce, the corporations controlling food become richer. That is the paradox of the global economy. Growth shows up in the profits of corporations while in the real world, the resources from which they make their profits, shrink.

AlterNet: You have also suggested that these same economic principles are incompatible with the sustenance of democratic governance.

VS: There are many levels at which a market economy called corporate globalization has to kill democracy in order to survive. Take the birth of World Trade Organization (WTO), an undemocratic institution. There are no negotiations on the rules it imposes. These rules are created undemocratically. Then, every time these rules are implemented, there are protests. Normally in democracy, if the will of people say change this policy, governments change. Unfortunately, governance today is run by corporations not the people. Every step of deepening the market economy is a depletion of democracy. Our very governments have been stolen from us, and we have to use democracy to counter these rules, this paradigm, and the absolute destruction [it causes].

AlterNet: Describe your alternative vision that could replace what we currently have.

VS: I try to articulate an alternative vision in terms of a democracy. Global market economy makes the first citizen the corporation. The rest of us are slaves, second class citizens. Secondly, it creates an identity for the human species as consumers in a global supermarket. We are no longer creators and producers. We are just consumers of goods that corporations bring to us from the place where they can manufacture them — at the highest cost to the environment and workers.

What we need is a reclaiming of who we are as human beings. We are first and foremost citizens of this beautiful planet. Our first duty is to protect this planet. And out of that flows the rights to the earth, air, water and food that the earth gives us. Those gifts are common resources, not commodities, private property or intellectual property. They are the commons of the earth and all of us have equal access to it. Nobody can interfere in the access of a person to their share of water, land and air. That interference is a violation of the rules of Gaia and the rules of democracy.

But the polluting industry has privatized even the air by first putting their pollutants into it and then by the carbon trade. They’re basically are saying that because we polluted the atmosphere, we own it. So we can pollute as much as we want and then buy up clean credits from someone else who is not polluting. The commons and the recovery of commons is vital to earth democracy. It’s at the heart of sustainability of the earth and democratic functioning of society.

AlterNet: Do property rights fit into this vision of the commons?

VS: Most private property rights have been carved out of the shared resources of the earth. In India we say “land belongs to creation.” We can use it and have “use rights,” but that is different from ownership and tradable rights. It is British colonialism that created private property in land the way it is now practiced.

Now, the World Bank is trying to create private property in land among indigenous communities. Water was never property either, but today, they are trying to change that. Seeds were meant to be shared and distributed, not treated as property. Intellectual property rights are as recent as the World Trade Organization and need to be eliminated because they are inconsistent with life [principles]. A world of the future governed by intellectual property rights over seed in Monsanto’s hands is a future where biodiversity will be destroyed, farmers will be wiped out and there will be no food worth eating.

AlterNet: You’ve also been involved in the “slow food” movement and organic farming.

VS: I was just elected Vice President of Slow Food [International], and I chair an international commission on the future of food, a commission started by the region of Tuscany in Italy. I convinced the [founder], Carlo Petrini, to recognize that food does not begin in the kitchen or in the chef’s hands. It begins in the farmers’ fields. One of the contributions that I and my colleagues have made in the seed-saving and organic farming movements is the recognition that biodiversity, organic farming and small-scale agriculture produces more food. It is a myth created by industrial agriculture and agribusiness that monocultures and chemical farming produce more food. They use more energy and chemicals, and do not produce more nutrition per acre. In fact, they use ten times more energy inputs than they produce as food. So with the food crisis, it is vital that we move to efficient food systems that also give us better quality food.

AlterNet: How would we carry your vision and language into actual political and farming structure?

VS: In countries like India, it’s not a case of vision being translated into practice. It’s defending a practice that’s being destroyed by a perverse vision. For us, it is defending the rights of small peasants. That’s where lot of my energy goes. An India of the villages was Gandhi’s dream and is my dream. But I do not see India surviving if her villages and her food capacity are wiped out. In the Northern countries like the United States farmers have already been uprooted. We need more farms producing more locally-grown foods. This country that can subsidize biofuel and chemicals should instead subsidize the return of small farmers to the land. This would solve much of the unemployment problem too.

Maria Armoudian is a singer/songwriter, a commissioner on the environment for the City of Los Angeles and host and producer of the Insighters for KPFK. Ankine Aghassian is co-producer of the Insighters on KPFK and a human rights activist.

Interview with Maude Barlow: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet, February 14, 2008

From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world’s water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, details her discoveries around the globe about our diminishing water resources, the increasing privatization trend and the grassroots groups that are fighting back against corporate theft, government mismanagement and a changing climate.If you want to know where the water is running low (including 36 U.S. states), why we haven’t been able to protect it and what we can do to ensure everyone has the right to water, Barlow’s book is an essential read. It is part science, part policy and part impassioned call. And the information in Blue Covenant couldn’t come from a more reliable source. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which is instrumental in the international community in working for the right to water for all people. She also authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water with Tony Clarke. And she’s the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”) for her global water justice work.She took a moment to talk to AlterNet in between the Canadian and U.S. legs of a book tour for Blue Covenant. (Barlow just kicked off her U.S. tour; for a list of tour stops and dates, click here).

Tara Lohan: This year in the U.S. there has been a whole lot press about the drought in Atlanta and the Southeast, and I think for a lot of people in the U.S. it is the first they are hearing about drought, but the crisis here in North America is really pretty extreme isn’t it?

Maude Barlow: It really is, and it kind of surprises me when I hear people, for instance in Atlanta say, “We didn’t know it was coming.” I don’t know how that could be possible, and I do have to say that I blame our political leaders. I don’t understand how they could not have been reading what I’ve been reading and what anyone who is watching this has been reading.I remember attending a conference in Boise, Idaho, three years ago and hearing a lot of scientists get up and say, “Read my lips, this isn’t a drought, this is permanent drying out.” We are overpumping the Ogallala, Lake Powell and Lake Meade. The back up systems are now being depleted. This is by no means a drought …The thing that I’m trying to establish with the first chapter, which is called “Where Has All the Water Gone,” is that what we learned in grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true. They weren’t lying to us, but they weren’t aware of the human capacity to destroy it, and the reality is that we’ve interrupted the hydrologic cycle in many parts of the world and the American Southwest is one of them.

TL: How is this happening?

MB: By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing — massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff — vegetation and grass — so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can’t use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You’ve used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds — it is not sustainable.This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question.I do blame in a very big way, the political leadership in most of our countries for having failed to heed the call of scientists and ecologists and water managers who’ve been telling us for years now there is a crisis coming — there are 36 states in the U.S. in some form of water stress, from serious to severe. Thirty-six states! Most Americans don’t know this — why is this not part of people’s everyday concerns? That is what I’m hoping this book will help do.

TL: Do you think governments, like the U.S. or Canada, have any kind of a contingency plan?

MB: No. There are people in the U.S. who believe Canada is the contingency plant. Or Northeast water or Alaska water. So, moving water is one of the contingency plans, likely by pipeline. You could also ship it by tanker. Other than that, no. And not only are there no backup plans, but there is not even an understanding that you’ve got to stop increasing the demand on water. In the U.S., people are moving into the very area of the country that has no water — a huge migration is taking place to to the American Southwest where they’re building more golf courses.I just read about a new water theme park in Arizona that will have waves so big you can have serious surfers, like real surfing in the desert. There is just this lack of understanding about how nature works, how the hydrologic cycle needs to be protected and how watersheds need to be protected, and when you start playing god by moving this stuff around like this we are just creating this massive crisis. There is not enough water for the demands being made on it in the American Southwest.

TL: You said 36 states in the U.S. are water stressed — what does that actually mean for the people who live there?

MB: Well, in a dire case, literally running out of water. In many other cases, the predictions are that the demand will increase seriously and they’ve got to start planning. I quote in the book that the demand in Florida is growing so much and overpumping is happening so much that there are actually sink holes opening up and swallowing homes and streets and sometimes whole shopping centers. It is called subsidence. Mexico City is sinking in on itself because all the water under the city has been taken out and now they are going farther afield pumping water.It can go from that kind of crisis, or as in some communities in the Midwest, you face having no water to the Chicago area, where the demand is going to grow hugely, and therefore the demand will be on the Great Lakes, which are already in trouble. There are four trillion liters taken out of the Great Lakes every single day and believe me, nature is not putting a trillion gallons back in. It is not rocket science that we are not allowing nature to refill and replenish. And now there are new demands on the Great Lakes because communities and industries off the basin are now demanding access to it.

TL: You mentioned global warming earlier, and I just want to come back to that for a moment. Are we approaching climate change in the wrong way by not recognizing its connection to water?MB: Yes.TL: So what should we be doing?

MB: Well, we have to put it into the equation. I’ve found that some politicians are actually using global warming as an excuse not to do anything, and I’ll give you an example. It is the polar opposite of the Bush administration, which is that global warming doesn’t exist. In Australia, which thankfully has gone through a government change, they are disengaging the water from the countryside and letting farmers sell it through brokers, they are disrupting streams and aquifers. They are draining the wetlands. They are privatizing. They are doing all sorts of things wrong, including overusing and polluting it, and so on. And what did the prime minister say? “It’s got nothing to do with anything we’re doing; it’s global warming, and it blew here from away — we didn’t even create it.”I think global warming is becoming a little bit of a catch all for some governments to do nothing or to put off a solution to other things until they find a solution to global warming, and there is no excuse. Right now we have got to stop the abuse of water. The single most important thing that we can do for global warming, aside from stopping the overpumping of greenhouse gas emissions, but the twin to that is to retain water in watersheds. Because the hydrologic cycle is what cools the temperature.Global warming can be averted through a great extent if we could maintain watersheds and maintain the cycle in its purest form. That means keeping green spaces, building green rings around urban centers — everything from parks and gardens — stop polluting, stop overmining groundwater and retain water in watersheds, which means we have to live more sustainably, we have to grow our food differently, we have to stop believing in unlimited growth and more stuff and more competition, and all of that.I find that global warming is such a crisis that we won’t do anything on any other front because all our attention is going there. I think we are terribly missing the boat on this, and I’m very interested in getting a debate going on this in the climate-change community so that when people are talking about the causes of climate change, our drying up of the earth from below will be considered as serious a cause as the trapping of heat from greenhouse gas emissions. It is not only part of the analysis we are missing, but part of the solution.

TL: That is interesting. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about it from that angle.

MB: Nobody.I’m working with a group of scientists in Slovakia and a few other places, voices in the wilderness, but when you start putting it together, honestly, it makes such sense. I mean if you start to look at the growth of deserts — in the last 30 years we’ve doubled the growth of deserts in the world, and it will double again in 20 years. Well, if you are creating deserts and you’ve got heat rising from the earth with urban heat islands, the inability for the hydrologic cycle to be maintained because of urbanization, it makes a lot of sense. Of course that is all exacerbated by melting glaciers and the lowering of the ice packs, which protects from evaporation. It is kind of a deadly combination. I spoke at a conference about this recently in London, England, and was received by people from the climate change world, really, really well, and I thought “This is a good sign.”

TL: You spent a lot of time in this book, and also in Blue Gold, talking about privatization. Can you talk a little about why we should be concerned about it?

MB: Well, as water dwindles in the world and available fresh water is becoming more scarce, the demand is growing, water is becoming a commodity, it is becoming valuable to those who want to put a price on it, which is why I called the first bookBlue Gold. And this blue gold is attracting private sector interest in many, many ways, and there is a private sector interest coming together to control every level of water, from when we take it out of the ground, bottle it, to how we deliver it, to wastewater treatment, and now the biggest and newest is water reuse and recycling. That sounds benign at first, but when you really start to look at it, really it is about big, big corporations like GE, Dow Chemical, Proctor & Gamble getting into the ownership, control, and recycling of dirty water, which because there are billions of dollars at stake, in my opinion, becomes a disincentive to protect source water. And you can start to understand why governments, in collusion with these companies, are starting to spend millions of dollars on cleanup technology but will not enforce rules to stop pollution in the first place.And then we have desalination. There are 30 desal plants planned for California alone. They are now talking about nuclear-powered desalination. They are talking about building those plants as we speak. The people in the anti-nuclear movement had better dust off and come back because it is all coming back with desalination. And then there is nanotechnology, which they want to be totally deregulated. I’ve got a great quote in the book where this guy says, “We are going to do to water what we did to telecommunications in the 1990s,” which is total deregulation. They want governments out of the business of water.I have a whole section in the book on how water has become such a hot commodity. When I wrote Blue Gold there was no water being exchanged on the Stock Exchange, now there are over a dozen indexes just for trading water. It has become a multi-multibillion-dollar industry just overnight. A lot of it is this water reuse — it is the fast-growing section of the water industry. I argue that there is a race going on over who’s going to control water, whether it will be seen as a public commons, a public trust, and part of our collective heritage that also belongs to the earth — or whether it will be controlled by private corporations, and I don’t know who will win.

TL: But it is not all bad news.

MB: No, we are making good inroads in the bottled water area — a lot of universities, high schools, are having drives to reject bottled water. We’re getting restaurants now taking the challenge up to not serve bottled water, and we’re getting people to take a pledge not to drink bottled water.There has been a huge fight back from the big utility companies, particularly in the global south, to the extent that Suez has basically announced it is going to leave Latin America because people are so furious with them, which has been the result of fabulous grass-roots activism. So, it is not that this is a done deal, but most of the our governments are supportive of these private-sector incursions.It is all about technology and not about lifestyle and alternative ways and decreasing growth and stuff — they are saying we are not going to challenge the model, it is unlimited growth, continued competition, continued economical globalization, continued privatization, continued deregulation — we’ll just continue to find ways to clean up the mess as we go along.

TL: Water is not just an environmental issue, but a national security issue, you discovered with this book.

MB: Yes, water has become an issue of national security in the U.S. Six years ago I couldn’t find any inkling at the national level — the Pentagon or White House — of a coming water crisis, either globally or in the U.S. But in the last, two to three years, this has been hugely changed. There is now a consortium advising the Bush administration and the Pentagon — it is called Global Water Futures. It is made up of this think tank called the Center for International Studies and Sandia Laboratories. Then I dug deeper and found it is being contracted out to be run by Lockheed Martin. And this consortium involves Coke and Proctor & Gamble and others. So you finally have the U.S. government saying, “Holy crap, we’re in trouble here, you can’t be a super power if you don’t have energy and water.” Now they’ve got this advisory body that not only has this think tank and the corporate side too, and the high technology side, and the military side. It becomes very clear what you are dealing with.

TL: Can you talk more about the grass-roots resistance to all of this?

MB: The thing that is so stunning, especially in the global south, is that when you are dealing with water, you are dealing with life and death. For a lot of people it is like, “Well, we didn’t know what to do when they privatized our education or shut down our public hospitals — but water is different.” They are willing to go the wall for it — as one person said to me, “You may as well kill me with a bullet as dirty water.” People just take a stand and are determined they are not going to compromise.We took the time as a movement … whenever anybody always asks me how to build a campaign, I always include these steps. We took the time to find language that we all jointly agreed on — that water is not a commodity, that it belongs to the earth and all species, it is a public trust and human right, and so on. We’ve taken the time to work this out so that if you ask any of us around the world, you are going to hear the same kind of language. There is a trust that we have built in this shared philosophy and shared vision.

TL: How is it that you’ve managed to create such as worldwide message and come together?

MB: Part of the origin was when I wrote a report for the International Forum on Globalization back in 1999. It was called Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World’s Water Supply. It took off, and a bunch of people from around the world started reading it. We got it translated into many, many languages, and I started hearing from people saying, “I thought this was personal and we were fighting this particular company in our community, and we didn’t know that this was a global fight.”So, to my knowledge, that was the first analysis, and that morphed into the book. I started traveling and meeting people and Food & Water Watch got set up in the U.S. And then there was meeting people in Europe who were fighting big water companies, coming together at the big World Water Forum and bringing folks together from the global south to challenge what we call the “lords of water.” And, of course, technology has been incredible. You don’t have to have a computer in every house — you just have to have somebody on the other end who has the capacity to receive this information.

TL: What else do we need to be doing?

MB: We need laws. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Legislation won’t change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless.” We need legislation at every level of our government. It is all well for grass-roots people to do all their wonderful work — but they shouldn’t have to do all the work. We need laws at every level, from municipal up to state to national to international, that protect water ecologically on one hand and protect the notion of a human right and right of the earth, and not a commodity, and that is so fundamental.That is why I call the book “blue covenant” — we need a covenant of three parts — from humans to the earth to stop destroying the lifeblood of the earth, from the rich to the poor (global north to the south) for water justice, not charity — justice. Water should be a fundamental right for all generations, and no one should be allowed to sell it for profit. We want this right up to the United Nations. It is a struggle at every level. But we just keep going. The fight back around the world is claiming space, but we have to have the weight of law behind us. We have to make, as a society, decisions about what matters. And if we believe that people shouldn’t die because they can’t afford water, then we have to bring things to bear to make that happen — we have to change things. If the World Bank has money to give to Suez or Veolia, they’ve got the money to give to a public agency.

TL: So are you hopeful we can move change in the right direction?

MB: I’m always hopeful — it is part of my job. I consider hope to be a moral imperative, and I also don’t think you have any right to go around alarming people with these facts unless you are also prepared to talk about what needs to be done, and success stories, and be hopeful. I am very very hopeful that we can collectively do this.If I’m worried — it is about the exponential abuse of water — can we catch this and stop it fast enough?

For a list of stops and dates for Barlow’s book tour, click here.Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

Maude Barlow: It’s Time for the UN to Make Water a Human Right

Maude Barlow, AlterNet, February 21, 2008 

The global water crisis is evident. We need a global solution in form of a United Nations covenant on water. 

Note: Maude Barlow is currently in the U.S. touring for her new book, Blue Covenant: Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. Visit Food and Water Watch to see a list of cities and dates.

All over the world, groups who are fighting for local water rights are championing an international instrument on the right to water. Due to over-development and climate change, fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce. In addition, in many communities across the globe, people cannot get access to whatever clean water does exist without paying private corporations. The global water crisis is evident. We need a global solution in form of a United Nation Covenant on water.

For the past 15 years, the World Bank and the other regional development banks have promoted a private model of water development in the global South. This model has proven to be a failure. High water rates, cut-offs to the poor, reduced services, broken promises and pollution have been the legacy of privatization.

At the March 2006 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City, the UN cited the failure of privatization and called for governments to re-enter the water services arena. Calls for a UN Covenant to re-assert the crucial role of government in supplying water to the poor increased dramatically at the Forum and new impetus was given to this campaign.

Why a UN Covenant?

The fact that water is not now an acknowledged human right has allowed decision-making over water policy to shift from the UN and governments toward institutions and organizations that favour the private water companies and the commodification of water. These institutions include the World Bank and other regional development banks, the World Water Council, the Global Water Partnership and the World Trade Organization.

Not only have these institutions vigorously promoted the interests of the private water companies in the global South, they have ceded much political control over water policy to them. Many nations-state governments have gone along with this trend, allowing creeping privatization with little or no government oversight or pubic debate.

Behind the call for a binding instrument are questions of principle that must be decided soon as the world’s water sources become more depleted and fought over: 

• Is access to water a human right or just a need?
• Is water a common good like air or a commodity like Coca Cola?
• Who is being given the right or the power to turn the tap on or off — the people? Governments? Or the invisible hand of the market?
• Who sets the price for a poor district in Manila or La Paz — the locally elected water board or the CEO of Suez?

What is the Practical Use of a Covenant?

Would a Covenant on water solve the world’s water crisis? Of course not. Almost two billion people now live in water stressed parts of the world and the situation is getting worse, not better. But it would set the framework of water as a social and cultural asset, not an economic commodity. As well, it would establish the indispensable legal groundwork for a just system of distribution.

A Covenant on the right to water would serve as a common, coherent body of rules for all nations and clarify that it is the role of the state to provide clean, affordable water to all of its citizens. Such a Covenant would also safeguard already accepted human rights and environmental principles.

It would also set principles and priorities for water use in a world destroying its water heritage. The Covenant I envisage would include language to protect water rights for the earth and other species and would address the urgent need for reclamation of polluted waters and an end to practices destructive of the world’s water sources.

At a practical level, a right to water Covenant gives citizens a tool to hold their governments accountable in their domestic courts and the “court” of public opinion, as well as seeking international redress.

A Covenant could also include specific principles to ensure civil society involvement for conversion into national law and nation action plans. This would give citizens an additional constitutional tool in their fight for water.

Why should activists in the United States care?

No country needs to be held more accountable to this crisis than the United States. Many of the companies privatizing water are based in the United States and the United States is among the chief backers of the privatization strategy through the World Bank and other mechanisms. If we are to stop this crisis, the United States government must become part of the solution, not the problem.

In addition, water privatization is encroaching in U.S. communities, being fought back at every turn by citizens insisting that water is a basic right and should be free for everyone. A UN Covenant will help advance these struggles in the U.S. as well.

More broadly, it is essential that American activists push for greater recognition of international law and treaties in the United States. In the long run, this will not only help advance causes in the United States where the international community is leading and domestic lawmakers are lagging behind, but it will also help shift the political center of gravity away from the U.S. alone. U.S. policies should not be dictating the world’s fate. We need robust international standards and communities of action so that the world’s diverse peoples may, together, identify key problems and enact viable solutions.

Support among civil society groups around the world is growing rapidly and we are collecting the names of these groups for reference in the near future. For instance, a right to water convention has been adopted by Red Vida, the network of grassroots groups fighting for water justice all through the Americas. To become involved please go to the Blue Plant Project at the Coucnil of Canadian’s Web site.

The right to water is an idea whose time has come. Let us make sure no future generation ever again has to suffer from the horrors of living without clean water.

 

News and Update: Criminal Charges Against Coca-Cola Likely in India

Press Release: October 15, 2007

Contact:
R. Ajayan, Plachimada Solidarity Committee +91 98471 42513 (India)
Amit Srivastava, India Resource Center +47 9881 3216 (Norway)

For more information, visit www.IndiaResource.org

Thiruvananthapuram, India: The state government of Kerala has initiated the process of filing criminal charges against the Coca-Cola company for pollution.

In a notice to the Coca-Cola company on Friday, October 12, the Kerala State Pollution Control Board has asked the company to show cause as to why a criminal case should not be filed against it for polluting the environment.

The Coca-Cola company has two weeks to respond.

The action by the state government comes directly as a result of a longstanding demand of the campaign that the Coca-Cola company must also be held criminally liable for the damages it has caused in the community of Plachimada in India.

Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Plachimada, one of its largest in India, has been shut down since March 2004 as a result of community opposition to the plant. The community has accused the Coca-Cola bottling plant of creating severe water shortages and polluting the water and the soil – directly as a result of its operations in the area.

“We are encouraged by the action of the government to hold Coca-Cola criminally liable for the damages it has caused in Plachimada,” said R. Ajayan, convener of the Plachimada Solidarity Committee who was key in getting the government to take action. “We are confident that Coca-Cola will be prosecuted for the crimes it has committed in India.”

In typical fashion, the Coca-Cola company has dismissed the notice, describing it as “unwarranted and arbitrary.” The company’s spokesperson, Mr. Ameer Shahul, has claimed that the plant was a “zero-discharge” plant during its operation and that all studies carried out in the last four years had found no traces of pollution.

The facts, however, suggest otherwise.

The primary reason that the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Plachimada remains shut down is because it is unable to obtain the “consent to operate” permit from the Kerala State Pollution Control Board because of widespread pollution found by the regulatory agency.

On August 19, 2005, the Kerala State Pollution Control Board ordered the Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd. bottling plant in south India to “stop production of all kinds of products with immediate effect.” The Pollution Control Board noted that the company has yet to explain the large amounts of cadmium in its sludge, which is contaminating the groundwater, making it unfit for human consumption.

In addition, tests by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as well as Outlook magazine have both confirmed the pollution by Coca-Cola company in Plachimada.

In October 2003, the Central Pollution Control Board of India also confirmed high levels of heavy metals in Coca-Cola’s sludge, which the company was distributing to farmers as “fertilizer”.

Coca-Cola’s contention that the plant was a zero-discharge facility contradicts the government as well as independent studies.

“We are glad that the Coca-Cola fiasco in India is taking its natural course of finding the company criminally liable for the damages it has caused,” said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an international campaigning organization.

“We also strongly feel that the Coca-Cola company should be further held criminally liable for the complete distortion of facts it is making today,” Srivastava continued.

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. October 11, 2007.

Thanks to global warming, pollution, population growth, and privatization, we are teetering on the edge of a global crisis.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, “Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”

We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations — from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.

But times have changed. “In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference,” Rachel Carson wrote.

As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.

We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can’t match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.

The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.

What’s gone wrong?

As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe’s resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions.

Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don’t have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world’s supply by over 50 percent.

The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide — much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops.

This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.

Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. “Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water’s ability to recharge,” wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water.

The Ogallala aquifer — the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota — is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, “California’s Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today,” add Clarke and Barlow.

Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities.

The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa.

As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in “economic liberalism,” which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public.

In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: “Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.”

It has oft been expressed that the next resource wars will not be over oil — or energy at all — but over water. As the idea of neoliberalism, proliferated by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, spread, the public sector has become dangerously privatized. And it may not be the wealth of nations on the line — but the wealth of corporations.

A senior executive at a subsidiary of Vivendi, the world’s largest water controller summed it up, “Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is an equally powerful ingredient for profitable manufacturing companies.”

But when private companies control water resources, people’s needs for survival are pushed aside in place of the bottom line. In Africa, an estimated 5 million people die each year for lack of safe drinking water. And yet Africa, with its many cash-strapped countries, is targeted by multinationals that force governments to turn over their public water systems in exchange for promises of debt relief.

When corporations control water, rates go up, services go down, and those who can’t afford to pay are forced to drink unsafe water, risking their lives. This has happened across the world — in South Africa, in Bolivia, in the United States.

This same philosophy of corporate control drives the construction of dams, which have displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide. In India alone, over 4,000 dams have submerged 37,500 square kilometers of land and forced 42 million people from their homes.

Multinationals looking to cash in on the water business have also made giant inroads in selling bottled water in richer countries. Expensive marketing campaigns convince people that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Then, companies like Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal tap water and others like Nestle pilfer spring water from rural communities and resell it at huge profits.

The water crisis may be growing, but so is resistance to privatization as communities are fighting back against the corporate control of the world’s most vital resource.

How we can fix it

We need water to survive, not just as individuals, but as communities. Author John Thorson put it perfectly when he said, “Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other.”

Just ask the people of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They’ve experienced water wars for the last hundred years that have pitted neighbor against neighbor and tribal member against farmer.

Native American tribes in the region — the Klamath, Hoopa, Karuk, and Yaruk — with priority rights to water, have struggled with farmers over limited water resources. Nature has been unable to deliver as much water as the government has promised to farmers and tribal members, as well as downstream fishermen. With not enough water in the river, either crops have failed or fish have died, creating community strife and economic hardship.

But in the last year, things have begun to change. These groups have formed a coalition to save the river they all depend on for survival. They are sitting at the same table and finally beginning to hear from each other about the needs of farmers, the value of subsistence economies, the history of families on the river, the ceremony that comes with the salmon runs, the rights of nature.

Together, this unlikely alliance is taking on PacifiCorp, one of the largest multinational power companies, whose out-of-date dams are threatening the ecosystem and the economy of the region.

And just over the peak of Mount Shasta another community and tribe are battling to save their spring water from Nestle, which hopes to tap the community’s greatest asset for its own wealth.

The people of the small town of McCloud and the Winnemem Wintu tribe are fighting back, and they are not alone. Across the country a backlash to the bottled-water business is gaining steam. Fancy restaurants like California’s Chez Panisse, Incanto, and Poggio and New York’s Del Posto have gotten on board. San Francisco has also led the way among municipalities that are beginning to cancel their bottled water contracts, understanding the great harm the industry does to the environment and communities.

It is not just bottled water that has posed a problem, but private companies buying out municipal water systems and then raising rates and lowering services. One the best examples is Stockton, Calif., which went private in the largest “public-private partnership” in the West. Since 2001 the people of Stockton have been fighting for control of their water against a multinational consortium.

The case gained international attention when it was featured in the film and book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The public finally won out in July, when the city council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract and send the corporation packing.

The citizen groups that have been working to defend their communities are being supported by many national and international groups pushing back against corporate control and empowering people — groups like Tony Clarke’s Polaris Institute in Canada, which has focused on public education and research around issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water security and bottled water.

In the United States, Corporate Accountability International is encouraging people to drink tap water over bottled water with their “Think Outside the Bottle Campaign.” They are working to educate the public, as well as city governments and businesses, with great success.

And today, on the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, Food & Water Watch, is sponsoring a National Call-In Day for action on clean water to urge representatives to support the creation of a clean water trust fund, “which is a long-term, sustainable, and reliable source of funding to upgrade and improve our public water systems.” The organization has been working to protect public water systems from private takeover and to help fund municipal water so that all residents have clean, safe and affordable water.

The movement extends across the country and the world as people are also rebelling against the corporate takeover of their municipal water systems — in California, in Ghana, in Brazil, in Canada, in France, in Indonesia — and the list goes on.

Opposition to corporate control is rooted in the belief that water is part of the commons. Everyone should have access to clean water, regardless of their level of income or their country’s international standing.

In order to ensure that all people have access to clean, affordable water, we need to make some changes.

Some see technology as the necessary fix — or at least a step in the right direction. As the BBC reports:

New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help. Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful. Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used — and drunk — several times over. Desalinization makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine. But many warn against relying on a “techno-fix” to solve our problems.

Water experts argue that we need to reduce consumption on individual and community levels. Author Tony Clarke advises working with those closest to the problems, such as helping farmers to develop a more sustainable agriculture system. And the same goes for industry. Looking to the folks who have been on the land longest, like indigenous and traditional cultures, will also help us learn how an ecosystem works.

And experts say that we also need to start developing a comprehensive water policy that goes from the regional to international level. The World Bank and United Nations have the capability to change the designation of water from a human need to a human right, ensuring that corporations can’t exploit this resource for economic gain, as Clarke and Barlow advocate for in Blue Gold.

Governments should be investing in their people, in conservation and in the infrastructure that we depend on to access clean, affordable water.

It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. “We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?” wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. “And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?”

How to Address Humanity’s Global Crises? Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy

By Vandana Shiva*, AlterNet, October 1, 2007

Editor’s note: the following remarks were made this September at a conference on “Confronting the Global Triple Crisis — Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction,” in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization’s website.

Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You’ve seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can’t use it. They’re locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it’s still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.

The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it’s only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we’re talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.

And where did this start? All this feels so timeless, but it started with humanity getting at the fossil fuel, which was never supposed to be touched… But that model carries on. And globalization now is industrializing every activity of every human being’s life across the planet. For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.

And so while on the one hand, when we talk climate change, we’re talking about reducing emissions, the entire economic model is based on increasing emissions. It is based on increasing emissions by destroying small-scale peasant farming and introducing large-scale industrial agriculture. It’s increasing emissions by making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.

Everything today is being made where it can be made most cheaply, which means where sources can be exploited the fastest and workers can be exploited the highest. And at one level, that’s what’s being reflected in China’s double-digit growth and India’s nine percent growth. It’s basically converting our resources into commodities, to be sold around the world.

But that conversion requires the wastage of human beings on a scale we’ve never seen. In India right now, the relocation of industry for example; industry like steel that’s shutting down in Europe and America, is relocating to India. Automobile companies that are shutting down in the West are moving to India; they’re talking about making 50 million cars in India annually. Only four percent of India will ever own them. The rest will either be exported or that four percent will have eight cars rather than two. Already my landlord has five in a family of three. Those cars need minerals, they need steel, they need iron ore mining, they need aluminum, they need bauxite mining. And every inch of the land in India is today serving a global, fossil fuel economy that’s on fast forward.

It needs land; land grab is the biggest resource crisis. Land you can’t create, you can only exhaust. But peasants are saying we will not move. That’s what they said in Nandigram, 25 were shot dead and they refuse to move. In Dhandri, where women were raped and attacked and refused to move. In place after place, the tribals, the peasants in India are saying this our land, this is our mother, and this is where we will be. And when the money for compensation becomes bigger and bigger– I love this action– the Nandigram peasants sent a letter to the chief ministers to say, “How much is your mother for sale. How much will you take for her? Because this land is our mother.”

And the globalization of agriculture has really become genocidal. It’s hugely responsible for increasing greenhouse gases, whether it’s from the nitrogen fertilizers of the fossil fuel in the mechanical energy that’s used, or in the long distance transport and food miles. But on the ground it’s killing people. Long before it will kill us through climate change, it’s killing people, physically killing people.

150,000 farmers have been pushed to end their lives in India because of Monsanto seed monopolies. Monsanto was collecting 2,400 rupees as royalty for a kilogram of Bt cotton seed that they were selling for 3,200 rupees. They’re in the courts right now; we’ve challenged them, we’ve joined one of the state governments. They’re saying we have a right to this monopoly and we’re saying our country has never given you this right. They assume they got it in the United States and therefore they have it everywhere, whether the law allows it or not.

Or Cargill, wanting to grab India’s wheat market, having signed an agreement through the Bush Administration with…Right here in this city, decisions about agriculture are being made here, in Washington. A two-year old agriculture agreement. So Cargill eventually got India’s wheat markets opened up. And the international wheat price is $400; Indian farmers are getting $200. And this double price is ultimately a subsidy that we are giving in addition to the subsidy your farm bill is providing to these corporations.

Retail: India is a huge, huge land of bazaars, of huts, of markets. Every street is a market. Hawkers come down in the morning, get us our vegetables to our doorstep. Of course, that’s not very good for Wal-Mart so they’re manipulating zoning laws, shutting down hawkers, shutting down businesses in town, so that we will have a Wal-Mart model. But that means 100 million people out of retail and we don’t know how much more carbon emissions, while Wal-Mart talks about going green…

So here you have globalization adding to emissions and it needs to be a continued part of our work. And you’ve got false solutions that were laid out by Jerry [Mander]. But the false solution that I think we need to pay particular attention to is the dominant solution in terms of carbon trading. Because at the philosophical level, at the world-view level, it’s the second privatization of the atmospheric commons. The first privatization was putting the pollution into the atmosphere beyond the earth’s recycling capacity. Now with carbon trading, the rights to the earth’s carbon cycling capacity are gravitating exactly into the arms of the polluters. The environmental principal used to be the polluter must pay. Carbon trading is transforming that into the polluter gets paid.

[Sir Nicholas] Stern, who did the Stern Review, has clearly said it is an allocation of a full set of property rights to the atmosphere. And PricewaterhouseCoopers — who was very notorious in trying to privatize, with the World Bank’s help, Delhi’s water supply, and we defeated them two years ago in that project — has said that trade in carbon emissions is equated with the transfer of similar rights such as copyrights, patents, licensing rights, commercial and industrial standards.

One of the things we have always said in [the International Forum on Globalization] is that the enclosures of the commons is one of the deep crises of resource depletion. Once resources move out of common management and public care, they will get further degraded. And if you really look at the clean development mechanism, it’s all about dirty industry; it’s about HCFC plants being accelerated, new plants being set up in China and India. The biggest recipients of CDM credits in China and India are plants that are depleting the ozone layer. Sponge iron plants coming up in the tribal belts of India, in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. And clean seems to have become such a confusing word. We would have thought that we know what clean is. And suddenly, everything dirty is clean.

Including nuclear. Nuclear, not just as nuclear power, but nuclear as strategic use of nuclear power. I don’t know how many of you have followed that the United States signed an agreement with India. Now it isn’t really that United States signed an agreement with India because you did not sign that agreement and I did not sign that agreement. Our Prime Minister came at the same time that they handed over our agriculture. Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart, who sit on the board of the agriculture agreement, they also signed this nuclear agreement.

Which has led to the Hyde Act; section 103 of the Hyde Act calls for securing India’s full and active participation in U.S. efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran if it proceeds with its nuclear program. Iran has been mentioned 15 times in a bilateral agreement.

So the nuclear agreement with India is definitely not about clean energy; it is about something bigger. And in India, right now while I’m here, we are having the biggest democratic mobilization against this agreement. First of all because Parliament did not clear it and second, because we don’t want to be a client state of the empire — we want our non-alignment defended — and thirdly we don’t want $100 billion market created for the defense industry in the United States. After all, you are going to have a big mobilization tomorrow against the war. And we don’t want to be a part of U.S.’s wars without end. We are, after all, the land of Gandhi, the land of nonviolence, the land of peace, the land of ahimsa.

We have to begin with solutions where we are, while we defend our democratic rights. I work primarily on agriculture. The globalized, industrialized agriculture is a very big part of the pollution that we are dealing with, a very big part of the crisis we are facing. But ecological, bio-diverse, local agriculture is part of the solution. Both in reducing emissions, in increasing absorption of carbon, and most importantly, providing the adaptive capacity to deal with climate chaos. This year in Navdanya, the movement I started for seed saving, we started saving seeds that can deal with the drought, that can deal with the floods. We’ve been saving seeds that can deal with the cyclones and hurricanes and distributed those seeds after the tsunami. Those seeds are available, they merely have to be saved and distributed rapidly enough before Monsanto comes up with yet another false solution; that without genetic engineering and seed patents we will not be able to respond to climate change …

I just want to end by saying that we have basically two options. We have the option of letting the remaining resources of the planet be fought over viciously through militarized power or we can move rapidly to the ability to rebuild our ecosystems, share the limited resources the planet can provide us, and create good lives while doing it. But to do that, we’ll have to get out of many reductionisms.

The first reductionism being the reductionism of energy. We’ve suddenly moved to thinking of energy as something we can consume, not as something we generate. And I think that generative concept of energy — we call it shakti in India — is something we have to reclaim, because the solution to pollution and wasted people is bringing people back — deep into the equation of how we produce things, how we work the land, how we shape community, and how we exercise our democratic rights and rebuild our freedoms.

And of course, we’ll have to get out of the mindsets that treat the laws manufactured by the market as immutable and unchanging. And the three concepts that are constantly referred to as something that can’t be touched are: economic growth. You can’t make any change that will touch the nine percent growth in India, the ten percent growth in China. You cannot interfere in the unregulated market — even though every step of trade liberalization is an interference in the market, every step of creating an opportunity for Cargill and Monsanto, is an interference in the market. And the third false sacred, is unbridled consumerism …

The problem of climate chaos to me and the problem of appropriating the resources of those who need those resources for ecological security and economic security, is ultimately a question of ethics and justice. And that issue of ethics and justice can only be addressed if we recognize some very basic facts and reorient our practices of what we eat, what we do on our farms, our homes, our towns, our planet.

We need to reinvent our eating and drinking, our moving and working, in our local ecosystems and local cultures. Enriching our lives by lowering our consumption, without impoverishing others. And above all, we need to subject the laws that govern production and consumption to the laws of Gaia; the laws of the planet. The laws of a planet that can give forever in abundance for our needs if we do not allow the narrow minded, mechanistic, reductionist, greed based system of industrialism, capitalism, globalization to make us imagine that to be inhuman is the definition of being human.

*Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books, including “Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy.” Shiva is a founding director of International Forum on Globalization.

World’s Water Supply at Risk: Conversation with Maude Barlow

By Kevin Danaher and Shannon Biggs and Jason Mark, PoliPoint Press

Republished from AlterNet, September 26, 2007

The following conversation with Maude Barlow is an excerpt from the new book Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, 2007) by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. You can read more about the book here.

Maude Barlow is possibly the world’s leading expert on water struggles. She is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, that country’s largest citizen’s advocacy group, with members and chapters across Canada. She is a director with the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco research and education institution opposed to corporate globalization. In 2005, she received the prestigious “Right Livelihood Award,” given by the Swedish Parliament and widely referred to as “The Alternative Nobel.” She has received honorary doctorates from six universities and has authored or co-authored 15 books, including Too Close For Comfort: Canada’s Future Within Fortress North America; and Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (with Tony Clarke). Her most recent book is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water.

Q: What are the greatest threats to local water supplies?

Maude Barlow: First of all, we are creating an ecological crisis by not taking care of our water supplies. Surface waters are being polluted, and we are mining our groundwater at unsustainable rates. At the very time when corporations are privatizing everything, our governments are allowing corporations to move in and take over the ownership of essential resources like water.

So we have a double whammy: Our governments are allowing corporations to pollute our water, and then they are signing contracts with corporations to bring in clean-up technology and make billions of dollars cleaning it up. The very sector of society that is polluting our water is turning around and selling our water back to us. And this is going to be more and more of an issue in the future. We’ll be increasingly drinking water that has been polluted by corporations, then cleaned up by corporations, then bottled and sold to us by corporations.

Q: What are some success stories of people protecting their water?

MB: The people of Uruguay held a plebiscite and got enough votes for a referendum in the national election in October 2004 in which they called for a constitutional amendment saying that water is a human right, and they won. The government was forced to change its constitution, and Uruguay became the first country in the world to vote on whether people have a human right to water, and the private companies were forced out.

There have been quite a few successful fight-backs across North America. The city of Atlanta allowed a private company to come in to run its water system, and the city kicked them out two and a half years into a 20-year contract. They said, “Get out. You lied. The water coming out of the taps is brown, and you raised the price. Get out.” We kept private water companies from taking over the water systems in Toronto and Vancouver. There’s a big movement in the heart of France, led by Danielle Mitterand, the widow of the former French president, Francois Mitterand. She is leading this fight to bring water under public control, and many city mayors of some good-sized towns and cities — not yet Paris — are backing her. So even in the belly of the beast, there are some exciting movements.

Q: What about the struggle against Coca-Cola in India?

MB: When you dig deep into Coca-Cola’s practices, you see it’s really a bad company. They are using military satellite imagery to find clean sources of groundwater and then going in — often in poor tribal communities — and setting up a plant and just helping themselves to the water until the water is gone. I call it water mining. We’re working with folks in the state of Kerala, India, who have taken the Coca-Cola company all the way to their Supreme Court to fight the way Coke comes in and sucks up massive amounts of groundwater, pollutes it with sweeteners and chemical additives, and then makes huge profits selling this nonnutritious drink to the public. The Supreme Court of India has ruled largely in the people’s favor. Yet Coke is still fighting; they refuse to give up. But these grassroots activists don’t give up, either. It’s been a real successful fight-back against Coca-Cola.

Q: Does it seem to you that the United States and Canada are more, or less, water-conscious than people in other nations?

MB: Individually, we are terrible water-guzzlers. We use a great deal of water per capita through our industrial practices, agriculture, mining, and, in my country, through oil extraction from tar sands. We take a little better care of our groundwater than many Third World countries because we citizens have a little more control; the corporations tend to be from our countries, and we can exert greater influence on them. There is serious pollution — I’m not suggesting there isn’t — but we don’t see the kind of blatant pollution you see in many poor countries. In some countries, the water is foul due to the combination of absolutely no sanitation systems, people using river systems as toilets, to bathe in, to cook in, their garbage dumps, their sewage dumps, everything goes into those open waterways where there’s no purification or any kind of water reclamation. As industrial growth and the industrial model moves into the Third World, it’s bringing massive pollution.

Also, people are being driven off the land. They are moving into urban slums where there’s no water, and they create more of a problem because they are adding to the numbers in the cities that are not treating their sewage. About 90 percent of the sewage in the countries of the global south goes untreated back into waterways, rivers, and oceans. It’s a cyclical problem that intensifies as we move from rural sustainable living to urban unsustainable living.

We’re creating massive water pollution problems. It’s lower in the U.S. and Canada because we’ve got more money for clean-up and slightly better laws for industry. But water pollution is happening just about everywhere. The only societies where water is still treated sacredly are in ancient tribal societies. Many rural communities in India, China, Africa, and Latin America are still living the way that their ancestors did centuries ago; they aren’t creating significant levels of pollution.

Q: Who’s using the bulk of the water here in North America?

MB: Most of the water is used by industry and agribusiness, which is also an industry. The industrial food production system uses nitrates, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, which contaminate a lot of water. Intensive livestock operations create horrible pollution. So one of the most important things we can do is to create a more sustainable agricultural system.

Q: Are there any really tough issues that the movement needs to face that you feel we’re not confronting adequately?

MB: That’s the part of my new book that surprised me the most: the technological takeover of our planet’s water system. We have been following very closely the big utility companies like Suez and Vivendi, who run water systems on a for-profit basis. And we have been following the bottled water companies, and those have been the kind of two big ones.

And then we have been worried about major movement of water through pipelines, but we have not been keeping our eye on the whole issue of technology to clean up dirty water, whether that’s desalination, water purification, nanotechnology purification. It’s going to be the “great white hope,” and it’s all unregulated and very corporate controlled, and it doesn’t surprise me that when you look at the United Nations’ millennium development goals on water, nobody is talking about cleaning up polluted water. Because, hey, there’s gold in those hills. The more our water becomes polluted, the more precious it becomes. The more desperate people are, the more they will pay for their water, and the more money there is to be made from cleaning it up.

The fastest-growing sector of the private water industry is this high technology water clean-up section of this industry, and we must get a better handle on the whole thing. I think that what we are seeing is a cartel of water that is being created like the cartel that has been created for energy. For a long time now, when there was a find of a new field of oil or gas, some large corporation owned it even before it was out of the ground. I see them doing this now with water, and I call them water hunters. These water hunters move in with one goal: to monopolize control over a precious resource in order to make money.

Q: Are you noticing a greater receptivity to your message about the coming water crisis?

MB: Most definitely. I was in down in Lubbock, Texas, on a local radio station, and this guy called in and said, “I’m a right-wing, diehard, Republican, red meat, conservative businessman. And I think the little lady’s right. Water is different. You can’t have anyone monopolize it.” It was fascinating; he totally had my argument. We didn’t agree on anything else, but we agreed on the importance of retaining public control over this vital resource. So that is hopeful.

Further Resources:

Life and Times of Maude Barlow

Joint Declaration of the Movements in Defense of Water, Mexico City, March 19, 2006

Protest against ADB, May 2007, Kyoto, Japan

In May 2007 activists and civil society organizations (CSOs) from around the world gathered in Kyoto, Japan to protest during the Annual Governors’ Meeting (AGM) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). During the AGM, the Board of Governors, who represent ADB’s member countries, make decisions that set the direction of the Bank in terms of its policies and programs. The AGM is a venue where CSOs engage with the Bank’s Governors, officials and staff regarding contentious issues, destructive projects and unjust policies in connection to ADB’s operation in Asia and the Pacific.

On May 5, over 250 Japanese and foreign activists/campaigners joined the ‘March for Justice in North South Relations against the Asian Development Bank,’ to strongly protest the Bank’s destructive development activities in the region.

Watch a video of the march:

The ‘People’s Forum on the ADB’ that was held in the Doushisha University from May 5-6 drew some 200 Japanese and international participants. The speakers and the audience shared their experiences/views on a number of disastrous ADB-funded projects. They also discussed the role of the ADB in promoting its neo-liberal agenda that have resulted in poverty creation and
illegitimate debt. In the Forum, CSOs also tackled ADB’s bias for privatization and corporate entities, putting profits before the people, and funding projects that contribute to climate change.

At the conclusion of the 40th Annual Governors Meeting (AGM) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Japan, civil society organisations from more than 20 countries once again reiterated