Fw: Art: water privatisation by Patrick Bond and Karen Bakker

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Margaret <margaret@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: iww-news@xxxxxxx <iww-news@xxxxxxx>
Date: Saturday, August 25, 2001 8:58 AM
Subject: AUT: Art: water privatisation


>Blue Planet targets commodification of world's water
>by Patrick Bond and Karen Bakker
>
>The July 5-8 "Blue Planet" conference in Vancouver opened with a call by
>Maude Barlow to promote "a global water revolution. This is the first of
>many international civil society meetings to take back control of our
>water." The host Council of Canadians, a 100,000-member citizens' group,
>was joined by several hundred representatives of indigenous peoples,
>Third World communities, anti-globalization activists, radical youth,
>public-sector trade unions, environmentalists, anti-dam campaigners,
>World Bank watchers, and consumer groups.
>
>Barlow, the Council chairperson, was in the news in April for helping
>turn out "Maude's Mobs" of middle-class Canadians to the Quebec City
>protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. For several years,
>she and Tony Clarke of Polaris Institute have fused citizens'-rights
>respectability with surprisingly radical rhetoric against the ravaging
>of Canada by corporations and pocketed politicians. Barlow and Clarke
>recently supported local activists in Vancouver as they fought off a
>privatised wastewater treatment plant.
>
>In contrast to previous criticisms that the Council has been excessively
>nationalist, this conference recreated the internationalist spirit of
>the Porto Alegre World Social Forum. Aiming directly at next year's
>tenth anniversary of the UN Conference on Environment and Development,
>Blue Planet took on corporate globalization more generally, posing
>routes that lead from multi-faceted resistance to alternative
>conceptions of water management.
>
>The trends in virtually all countries are towards the commodification
>and privatization of water. Blue Planet promotes a radical manifesto and
>global treaty as seminal documents in the international fight-back. The
>manifesto stresses the essential nature of water to life and to social
>and ecosystem integrity, and identifies cultural resonances and the
>sense of the sacred associated with water in various spiritual
>traditions. Aboriginal communities played a key role in framing the
>debate during the conference.
>
>Getting governments to sign up to the treaty, it is hoped, will be a
>rallying cry and political tool for the movement. The documents provide
>a broad-based way of arguing for water as a human right, and will have
>universal applicability in sites of struggle around the world.
>
>Indeed, five scales of water struggle are, in the process, being fused:
>local communities, national governments, world water policy fora, sites
>of global rule such as Free Trade Agreements and the Bretton Woods
>Institutions, and the more general takeover of water by multinational
>corporations.
>
>Solidarity with campaigns underway in a variety of Third World settings
>represented at the conference--Ghana, India, Bolivia, Mexico, South
>Africa, Guatemala, Colombia, Tanzania, Slovakia, Honduras, Philippines,
>Mozambique, Indonesia, as well as First Nations within North
>America-received serious attention.
>
>The concerns included damage from mega-dams and cross-catchment water
>transfers, despoilation of groundwater and aquifers, municipal water
>privatisation, tariff price hikes and "water poverty," agribusiness
>abuse of water in the wake of the irrigation-guzzling green revolution,
>global warming/drying, worsening droughts and floods, scarcity and
>wastage, and the extension of corporate bill-of-rights protections to
>water via the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and Free
>Trade Agreement of the Americas.Canada is a poignant host for some of these
>issues. The week before the
>conference, Mike Harris--conservative leader of Canada's main province,
>Ontario--was a witness at a judicial hearing on the seven deaths and
>thousands of poisonings at the town of Walkerton last year.
>
>He was explicitly asked whether his "ideology" of privatisation was to
>blame, given that testing the town's water for E.coli was outsourced to
>a local firm. It failed to do so and attempted a cover-up. Harris was in
>full denial mode too, but Canadians got the point.
>
>Other local struggles include anti-dam fights in Quebec and British
>Columbia, resistance to bulk sales of water to the US, and campaigns to
>bring services to indigenous peoples who suffer Third World water
>poverty in one of the world's richest countries.
>
>Water can become a locus of the anti-globalization movement, some
>speakers contended, for several reasons. Water struggles tend to bridge
>traditional red/green divides, link North and South in solidarity,
>endorse the notion of a global Commons that mustn't be privatised, focus
>on the public (especially municipal government) character of service
>delivery, involve the expansion of the service through expanded labour
>and jobs, and offer a way to practice local self-management and
>sustainable consumption.
>
>Thus if water becomes a public good protected from the market, it also
>serves a progressive political trend towards an expansive eco-social
>localism, unlike the establishment's faddish "communitarianism" which
>leads inexorably to gated-community protections.
>
> It is only by confronting issues of more general concern to the movement
>against corporate globalization that the water struggles will come to
>fruition. Targets thus emerge in the form of the World Bank/IMF,
>utilities undergoing commercialization, big government aid agencies,
>powerful water multinationals like Suez and Vivendi which dominate the
>global market in water supply provision, Free Trade Agreements and
>neoliberal advocacy agencies.
>
>Key enemies of Blue Planet include the pro-privatisation World Water
>Council (a platform for major water firms); the Global Water Partnership
>(initiated by senior World Bank staff); Business Partners for
>Development (an industry/World Bank promoter of privatization); the GATS
>as a lever for water companies to invade Third World countries; and
>other advocates of the Dublin Principles and Hague Declaration, which
>advance the proposition that water is mainly an economic good.
>
>These players will be key targets of protesters at the World Bank/IMF
>meeting in Washington in early October and at the Rio+10 conference in
>Johannesburg in September 2002, as well as at related meetings in Bonn
>later this year and follow-ups at Kyoto in 2003 and Montreal in 2006.
>
>In contrast, groups and events promoting water decommodification include
>the P-7 Declaration on Water authored by Vandana Shiva, the Cochabamba
>Declaration emanating from the Coordinada struggle of low-income
>residents against water-privatiser Bechtel in Bolivia, and the Global
>Water Contract of the Group of Lisbon social democrats.
>
>But even if the main contradiction between North and South in this
>sector, is that the former already have water infrastructure networks in
>place, and the latter must still expand access to more than a billion
>people without potable water and decent sanitation, the process of
>commodification is similar.
>
>Those with the networks--including residents of most Third World cities'
>elite neighbourhoods--will have to begin addressing overconsumption;
>those without must address the need for provision of a free lifeline
>supply of water for, at minimum, subsistence purposes. (Not just a
>matter for households, in which women would benefit most, this might
>also include small-scale irrigation in the context of radical land and
>agricultural reform.)
>
>Here, perhaps, the only real cleavage emerged. For most of the world,
>the human right to a subsistence water supply must ultimately occur on a
>free "lifeline" basis.
>
>This demand has led, for example, South African campaigners in the SA
>Municipal Workers Union and Rural Development Services Network to only
>partially endorse the African National Congress electoral promise late
>last year to give a free 6,000 litres a month to each family--half what
>campaigners insist upon. (In early July the promise was meant to come
>into effect, though it did only for a tiny minority of consumers, not
>for the poor rural women who need it most, for example.)
>
>But a free lifeline supply would not mean the right to lifestyles which
>in the wealthy North, are insensitive to real--not just
>socially-constructed--water scarcity. Such scarcity comes from
>pollution-intensive industrial practices, water-wasting domestic
>appliances, and more fundamentally from poorly-located urban areas such
>as Johannesburg, far from natural bodies of fresh water. But scarcity is
>also a reflection of aquifer degradation, which is common in most urban
>areas.
>
>Commented Barlow, "When we have a famine somewhere, our response is not,
>`Oh goody, customers for life!', yet that is exactly the way the
>scarcity argument is playing out when it comes to water." Or, as Shiva
>put it on the first night of the conference, "Sustainable development is
>capitalism's way of turning the threat of ecological crisis into an
>opportunity."
>
>Capitalism has colonised the life world so thoroughly that the alleged
>ability of private companies to fix system leaks and provide more
>efficient services has become common sense.
>
>But such conventional wisdom can be undone. Typical red/green conflicts
>pit jobs against protection of resources from extraction. Water does not
>have this feature, and so transcends the (usually false) paradox between
>equity and efficiency that plagues attempts to bring together social
>justice and environmental justice concerns.
>
>The conference was dedicated to the struggle of the Colombian anti-dam
>activist Kimy Pernia Domico, who was abducted two days before departing
>or Canada for his keynote speech. The conference closed with a vibrant
>demonstration organised by youth activists at the Colombian consulate in
>downtown Vancouver.
>
>***
>(See http://www.canadians.org for Blue Planet information.)
>
>Patrick Bond is based in Johannesburg at Wits University's Municipal
>Services Project:
>pbond@xxxxxxxxxx
>
>Karen Bakker is doing a post-doctoral study of water privatisation at the
>University of Oxford's School of
>Geography and the Environment:  karen.bakker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>www.iww.org Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the
>workers of the world, organised as a class, take possession of the means of
>production, abolish the wage system and live in harmony with the earth
>
>
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