[PEN-L:36230] (no subject)

["Michael Hoover" <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

"We hold these truths to be self evident.  That all men are created unequal, and that the capitalist class is endowed with ceratin natural rights; that among these rights are the right to hoard, exploit, and market life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and employment"

The Independent
23 March 2003

Activists rage against global 'water wars'

By Peter Popham in Rome

Campaigners met in Florence this weekend to condemn the notion that
water is a resource to be bought, sold and monopolised by wealthy
nations and corporations.

Disgusted with a World Water Forum in Kyoto that they say is "one
more celebration of market forces, capital and private investment,"
1,000 campaigners and activists streamed into Florence to flesh out
their vision of water as "the basic common good".

They have descended on the medieval castle in the city centre taken
over last November by tens of thousands of participants at the
European Social Forum.

The organisers say the forum showed that, "despite efforts over the
past decade to discredit and marginalise alternative movements, their
voices are part of a credible process".

Florence is a symbolic setting for the inauguration of the People's
World Water Forum. Exactly 500 years ago, during a war between
Florence and Pisa, Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci planned to
divert the River Arno from Pisa, hastening that city's defeat.

That was an early water war. But speakers at the forum voiced their
fear that the world is now heading for an endless succession of such
wars to control access to "blue gold". They believe that participants
at the official Water Forum in Kyoto, also taking place this week,
are committed to the control of water by governments and corporations
- at the permanent expense of the Third World poor.

One speaker at the forum, Riccardo Petrella, a professor of political
economy at Leuven University in Belgium, defined water as "the basic
element of solidarity. Sharing water is not something you do for
others to make yourself feel good - it's something that shows you
have things in common with that person. You don't assert that
solidarity until you see yourself as part of the same biological and
territorial unit."

The oppositional, bipolar perspective of the Cold War, he said, has
been replaced by a growing sense of the inevitability of war. "They
say that water will be the next object of conquest by the year 2020,
when the world's population reaches eight billion," he said. "But
water is not 'blue gold'. Water is just water, the greatest common
good. We don't have to believe in the World Bank's scheme of
permanent belligerency."

The forum's goal is to implant the notion of "a right to water for
all - a global good - as a principle recognised universally", and to
fight against "all forms of privatisation and merchandisation of
water". They want to see the setting up of a World Water Authority
with judicial, legislative and sanction powers - not the "purely
technocratic approach of the disputes settlement body of the World
Trade Organisation".

The forum's goals were unwittingly endorsed by research published
this week showing that tap water in Italy's major cities is as good
or better than the mineral water on which millions of euros are spent
every year.