Today Oil, Tomorrow Water
by Mary Shepard, WAMM

We can live without oil. Alternative supplies of cheaper and cleaner energy abound. But water is a different thing, and for corporate profiteers, the fact that every living plant and being requires water to survive presents an opportunity for profit estimated to be worth a trillion dollars a year. The sale of water is already a $400 billion industry.

Of course, in order for corporations to profit from water, it first has to be privatized. Some entrepreneurs have employed a basic strategy: After pipes and pumps and sewage treatment facilities to keep municipal drinking water uncontaminated are allowed to deteriorate by legislators who refuse to fund their maintenance, private enterprise emerges to claim that they can deliver water more efficiently and cheaper than the government. In most U.S. cities, customers are not convinced. They prefer government management to private enterprise, having witnessed what has happened when some communities have turned over their underfunded, failing schools to private companies with disastrous results. No mechanism is established to hold “free enterprise” accountable.

Three transnational corporations through four companies are working this theft of our water. The worst, according to the British Environmental Agency, is Britain’s own Thames Water, the biggest polluter of any corporation in England. According to Public Citizen, it has a record of preferring to pay fines for raw sewage discharges over stopping the practice. The German conglomerate RWE AG, which owns Thames, is planning to purchase American Water Works, a U.S. corporation with operations in 29 states. RWE AG’s plan is to place all of its U.S. operations under Thames’ supervision. Vivendi Universal and Suez are two other corporations working at the privatization of water, but you may find it difficult to identify them because they operate under subsidiaries with names such as U.S. Filter and United Water. United Water billed the city of Atlanta for work it never did. They have been served notice that their contract may be canceled. Houston canceled a contract with United Water, which has now sued the city.

Of course, the privatization of water and water-related services is happening around the globe, not just in Europe and North America. Helping to speed the process of privatizing water, the World Bank has required countries to privatize water as a condition for getting loans. It has also launched a public relations campaign to promote the idea that water is a commodity, not a human right. Urgent requests of the United Nations to declare access to clean water as a human right have been stalled. NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization define water as a tradable good, service, or investment, which subjects water to conditions of “free” trade for exporting or importing water across national boundaries.

Less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s water supply is fresh according to the National Radio Project. Industrial development, computer chip manufacturing, corporate agriculture, and city sewage systems all contribute to the water pollution that makes much of our water unfit to drink. The World Bank admits that by the year 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population won’t have enough drinkable water.

Concern about the safety of water has given rise to another water privatization scheme—one that has been quite successful in the U.S.: bottled water. For example, Nestle USA now owns rights to water from a Michigan aquifer, which they bottle with the label “Ice Mountain.” The water is bottled at the rate of up to 560 million gallons per year, extracted from an aquifer that feeds the Muskegon River watershed, and in turn, Lake Michigan. Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation are fighting in court and with a Nestle boycott to preserve the public’s right to Michigan’s water.
Regardless of where the water comes from, the public is being conned into thinking bottled water is safer than tap water. This is nothing but a lie. Tap water supplied by a government agency of any size must be tested continually. It must meet very strict nationally agreed-to standards. On the other hand there is no standard regulation of bottled water. When you are told you are drinking “natural spring water,” it may not be true.

Thankfully Nestle (which also own Perrier) isn’t using Lake Michigan water—water that is not at all safe to drink due to the careless way we have allowed our precious resource, the Great Lakes, to be polluted. Our Great Lakes could be cleaned up. The upper Midwest as a whole, and Minnesota in particular, would then have the potential of being the Saudi Arabia of water.

Will the Mideast of oil be replaced by the Midwest of water? Will we be subjected to warring nations with “national interests” that lie under our soil? Think about it as you luxuriate in your next shower.

Water Privatization Resources

Food First
Institute for Food and Development Policy
398 60th Street
Oakland, CA 94608
510-654-4400 phone
510-654-4551 fax
foodfirst@foodfirst.org
www.foodfirst.org

Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE)
215 Lexington Ave., Ste. 1001
New York, NY 10016
212-726-9161 phone
212-726-9160 fax
www.gracelinks.org/water.html

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
2105 First Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN 55404-2505
612-870-0453 phone
612-870-4846 fax
iatp@iatp.org
www.iatp.org
www.waterobservatory.org

Public Citizen
1600 20th St. NW
Washington, DC. 20009
202-588-1000 phone
www.citizen.org

World Water Council
Les Docks de la Joliette, Atrium 10.3
10 Place de la Joliette
13002 Marseille, France
+33 (4) 91 99 41 00 phone
+33 (4) 91 99 41 01 fax
wwc@worldwatercouncil.org