On Tap at the WTO: Private Water

Hong Kong -- Activists gathered here say that no issue highlights the tension between the human values they advocate and the economic logic of the legion of corporate globalizers that have descended on this city more clearly than water.

Water is viewed as one of the last "profit centers" by the international financial institutions and trade can impact whether it becomes a commodity or stays in public hands -- 90 percent of the world's water supplies remain in the public trust. Most notably water's on the table with the privatization of municipal water systems being aggressively pushed under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), a wide-ranging treaty that covers a host of services, both public and private.

Vandana Shiva, the scientist and global justice activist, argued this week that "we need to recognize that 90 percent of humanity lives on water as commons today." She lambasted a recent World Bank report urging poor countries to privatize their water systems, saying, "It actually talks about one major threat to water markets being community rights to water, and says these must be dismantled. As if there's something wrong with the commons, as if it's a primitive stage of human existence."

According to the United Nations, 1.3 billion people in the world lack access to clean water and worldwide demand is doubling every 20 years -- twice the rate of population growth. By the year 2025, demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip global supply by 56 percent. The issue gets scant attention, but analysts say that while the advanced nations are likely to wean themselves of their addiction to oil, water is the finite resource that will drive this century's wars just as fossil fuels did the last century's.

Maude Barlowe is the Director of the Council of Canadians, an NGO deep in the fight. She told me the water privatizers are driven not only by profit, but also by a deeper ideology. "There are those of us who believe that water is a public good and should be protected in legislation at all levels as something that must be kept out of the market system. And there are those who've gone to the other side, and that would include the World Bank, the regional development banks, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO and most of the big first world countries. And they say that the only way to avoid the global shortage of water that's already here for some places but coming for the whole world is to privatize water, commodify it, put it on the open market for sale to the highest bidder and have it guided by the same rules that govern the trade in running shoes."

Pushing the agenda here in Hong Kong are a small number of multinationals that dominate the growing water market. Two French titans, Vivendi Universal and Suez, dominate the group. According to a report by the Canadian NGO Polaris Institute in conjunction with Barlowe's Council of Canadians, the two -- often called the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry -- control over 70 percent of the existing world market in water services.

RWE, a German electricity and waste management company, may soon challenge their market share. After purchasing two key water companies, RWE has positioned itself to expand. The U.S. construction giant Bechtel, now notorious for its no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq, is also a growing player.

Under the GATS treaty being pushed in Hong Kong, any government in the WTO would be required to give foreign investors like these mammoth water corporations equal treatment with domestic investors like local government-owned utilities. Governments would have to prove that any legislation or regulation related to public water service is "necessary" and "the least trade restrictive of all possible measures."