Water Incorporated

By Maude Barlow, Earth Island Journal. Posted March 5, 2002.

We would like to believe that there is an infinite supply of fresh water on the planet, but that assumption is tragically false. Available fresh water amounts to less than half of one percent of all the water on Earth. The rest is seawater or polar ice. Fresh water is renewable only by rainfall.

Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years - more than twice the rate of human population growth. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people on Earth already lack access to fresh drinking water. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand for fresh water will rise by 56 percent and as many as two-thirds of the world's population will be living with serious water shortages or absolute water scarcity.

Around the world, the most common tactic to meet increased water demand has been to divert rivers and to build environmentally destructive dams. The number of large dams worldwide has climbed from just over 5,000 in 1950 to 38,000 today. Only 2 percent of US rivers and wetlands remain free-flowing and undeveloped, while the country has lost more than half of its original wetlands.

In the US, 37 percent of freshwater fish are at risk of extinction, 40 percent of amphibians are imperiled and 67 percent of freshwater mussels are extinct or vulnerable to extinction.

More than 30 countries already face water stress and scarcity. The Earth's water system can support, at most, only one more doubling of demand, estimated to occur in less than 30 years. The US National Intelligence Council, a group that reports to the CIA, warns that water will become the main resource-scarcity problem by 2015 and that the instability created by water shortages "will increasingly affect the national security of the United States."

Fortune Magazine notes that "water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th." Who owns water and how much they are able to charge for it will become the question of the century. The privatization of water is already a $400-billion-a-year business. Multinational corporations hope to increase profits from water commodification even further by using international trade and investment agreements to control its flow and supply. One Canadian water company, Global Water Corp., puts it best: "Water has moved from being an endless commodity that may be taken for granted to a rationed necessity that may be taken by force."

Over the last few decades, multinational corporations have profited from the provision of water through the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which used these economic restructuring programs to give corporations access to the water systems of developing countries. Today, corporations are using a new generation of trade and investment agreements to gain ownership over the world's ever-dwindling water supplies so that they will become the suppliers of last resort.

The FTAA: At Your Service In the past, governments unanimously believed that access to basic human services such as water, healthcare and education should not be included in trade agreements because these were essential components of citizenship. However, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) began the process of eroding these basic human rights. Today, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is poised to take this process to a whole new level.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas is the formal name given to the massive expansion of NAFTA ["NAFTA for the Americas," Summer 2001]. The FTAA would impose NAFTA's failed model of privatization and deregulation on 34 nations in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean, creating the world's largest free-trade zone with a population of 800 million and a combined GDP of $11 trillion.

The FTAA's "services agreement" grants private corporations sweeping new authority to overrule government regulations. Under the FTAA, all public services - schools, hospitals, prisons - would be forced to open up for competition from foreign for-profit service corporations. This agreement would forbid any federal government or local government from giving preferential funding to domestic providers of sewer or water services.

The FTAA would increase the number of towns and cities forced into privatizing their water systems and would reduce the ability of governments to ensure that the privatized systems work to protect the environment, consumers and workers.

As the water crisis intensifies, governments worldwide - under pressure from multinational corporations - are advocating the commodification and mass transport of water. Proponents of water privatization say that a market system is the only way to distribute water to the world's thirsty. But experience shows that selling water on the open market does not address the needs of poor, underserved people.

On the contrary, privatized water is delivered to those who can pay for it, such as wealthy cities and individuals, agriculture and industries. As one resident of New Mexico's high desert observed after his community's water was diverted for use by the high-tech industry: "Water flows uphill to money."

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