Fixing Our Water Crisis Can't Be Done by the Corporations that Are Exacerbating It

By Jeff Conant, AlterNet. Posted April 2, 2009.

In fact, none of these is the main story, because the World Water Forum itself is no longer the main story. The World Bank has spent 200 million dollars over fifteen years on privatization policies -- the same policies promoted by the World Water Council -- and by their own admission, these policies have failed.

Two of the world's largest private water operators, Suez and Veolia, the major shareholders of the World Water Council, have received the lion's share of World Bank investments in water and sanitation, and, in their pursuit of full cost recovery around the world, have raised water tariffs and delivered poor service from Atlanta to Argentina.

During the same years that these companies aggressively promoted private sector investment, public financing for water hit an all-time low, leaving millions high and dry. The development model that promotes infinite growth on a finite resource base, that has constructed large dams on 60 percent of the world's rivers and displaced upwards of 40 million people, that has shifted massive amounts of natural resources from the "developing countries" to the "developed countries," is, of necessity, coming to a crashing end. As Oscar Olivera, trade unionist and spokesman for the Bolivian Coordinadora del Agua y La Vida said, "What we are talking about today is a challenge to a whole concept of development, and to the imposition of structures that deny our rights and control our access to basic resources."

"They've run out of money, and the only plan they have is to put a tariff on the poor," said Maude Barlow. "They are bankrupt morally and ideologically, and they are bankrupt in their ideas. They have nothing left to do but take from the rest of us."

"For the water justice movement," said Filipina activist Mary Ann Manahan of Focus on the Global South, "these are the best and the worst of times. The worst because the crisis is so grave; and the best because we now see the clear need for real, structural change."

Perhaps this is the main story: the failure not only of a triennial meeting of corporate water policy advocates, but of an entire development model.

At a press conference convened by the directors of the World Water Forum two weeks ago, I asked, "What gives the forum its legitimacy?" The answer: "It is the world's biggest water event." There we have it: what gives the water forum its legitimacy is, apparently, its size. To be specific, it's bigness. But, as Arundhati Roy and others have said, the age of big is over. This is the century of the small.

Perhaps, then, this is the main story: the initiative of community groups, public water managers, unions, consumer and human rights advocates, small NGO's, indigenous peoples, women's organizations, health promoters, and civil society to build water justice from the ground up.

As Doctor V. Suresh, Director of the Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies in Chennai, India asked, "When we were approached by the World Bank Water and Sanitation Project we said, well, with such help we will have technical support for water management, and we already have the construction skills -- but will we have the right knowledge of what water is?"

As Omar Fernandez, a Bolivian Senator and the Director of the National Organization of Irrigators, said, "It is the diversity of peoples in our nation that build the basis for managing water." As Steve Bloomfield of Public Services International, a global organization with 620 affiliated unions in 160 countries, representing 20 million workers told me, "If anyone has the experience to address the world water crisis, it is public sector workers -- we are the greatest single body of experience that exists in this field, and we should be given the opportunity to put that experience to the test."

On the last day of the Forum I spoke at length with a reporter from Agence France Press who had come to look for stories of appropriate technology and small-scale, community-driven development -- of rainwater catchment and ecological sanitation and village-level water purification and the revival of traditional water management strategies. He didn't find them. So I pointed him to Rajendra Singh, of Rajasthan, India, whose work with villagers over three decades brought seven rivers back to life. "We learned to value traditional knowledge," says Rajendra, "where knowledge is shared for the good of all people and not for the good of some people to keep others down. Knowledge of the land's contours, of the land's capacity to hold water, and of the people's capacity to manage it -- geo-cultural knowledge. So, we have revived seven rivers in Rajasthan with the participation of people who were thought of as poor, as illiterate -- and this not only brought the rivers back; it has brought back the meaning to their lives."

See more stories tagged with: water, water privatization, water crisis, water shortage, maude barlow, world water forum

Jeff Conant is the International Research and Communications Coordinator for Food and Water Watch.

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