World Water Forum Not the Place to Solve Global Water Crisis
30/03/2006
- Opinión
Water flooded Mexico City the week of March 16-22, causing major traffic
jams, provoking street confrontations, and filling the pages of local and
international newspapers. Yet nothing got wet.
The long-awaited Fourth World Water Forum brought over 10,000 participants
and hundreds of journalists to town to discuss what organizers hoped would
be the mostly technical issues of a shared human concern. The event is
organized every three years by the World Water Council, which groups 300
organizations including industry representatives, government ministries,
international institutions, and development banks.
However, the technical discussions were quickly eclipsed by a clash of
worldviews. From the outset, forum officials expressed their view that
water cannot be valued properly until it is assigned a market price that
reflects costs, and that private participation is necessary for investment
in infrastructure. This is the vision pushed by the World Bank and others
since they created the Water Council in the mid-nineties. The accompanying
water trade fair offered a glimpse of what's at stake for the burgeoning
water industry, worth about $400 billion dollars a year.
Meanwhile, members of the urban popular movement, small farmers'
organizations, and indigenous peoples asserted that access to water is a
right and a public good.
This clash has happened at previous forums. The Third Forum in Japan saw
numerous dissenting voices and protest actions, which is the reason that
security and access were tightened up at the Mexico City Forum. But a major
change occurred between the Third and Fourth Forums. What was once a sound
of alarm from environmental groups who warned of the risks of privatization
has grown into a worldwide grassroots protest movement.
In a tidal shift that wasn't entirely clear until Mexico City, public
opinion has moved against private-sector management and reclaimed water as
a basic human right to be managed outside the market, by the people. In the
Water War of Cochabamba, Bolivia, residents fought the private concession
for water distribution—and won. Private contracts throughout the developing
world have been cancelled when irate users or disappointed governments
noted that rates were raised while promised investment—especially in non-
profitable poor areas—never materialized. In Latin America, the most
unequal region of the world, private concessions have exacerbated
inequities in access to water by focusing services in lucrative urban zones
and ignoring areas where the need is worst.
In a remarkable demonstration of how water issues have filtered into public
consciousness, on March 16 thousands of people marched through Mexico City
with signs reading “Public Water Forever,” “Life, not Profits,” and “You
Can't Buy What Has Never Been for Sale: Land and Water are Sacred.” It
marked the first time an essentially environmental issue had mobilized so
many people to protest.
The decline of the privatizing model for water and sanitation systems was
obvious in the defensive posture of the pro-business forum organizers. On
the linguistic battleground, the word “privatization”—once the darling of
economic reformers—has been routed from the official discourse on water.
Promoters now speak of the role of the private sector in cooperating in
financing and establishing “mixed investment.”
But although the World Bank and transnational corporations recognized their
public image problem and sought to avoid being portrayed as privatizers,
their proposals for water management emphasized market measures and private
investment, in marked contrast to the community-management solutions
proposed in the alternative forum.
In fact, moving between the two forums, contrasts were the order of the day.
In the alternative forum, a representative from the Colombian trade union
representing Coca Cola workers assassinated by paramilitary forces for
union activities joined a spokesperson for Indian villages protesting the
drying up of their water sources by Coke bottling plants to demand a global
boycott of the transnational. At the official forum, Coke was a major
sponsor and all the beverages provided to thirsty participants bore its
famous trademark. Throughout the week, international leaders in suits vied
for the front pages with indigenous women, municipal workers, and
environmentalists.
The World Water Council is a non-elected organization with no public
mandate and no formal decision-making authority. Despite its claims to be a
multi-stakeholder arena, the Fourth Forum established physical, economic,
and bureaucratic barriers to limit the participation of critical voices; it
imposed labyrinthine rules for press participation; and sought to sideline
countries opposed to the final declaration (Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay,
and Cuba).
The final declaration itself was an exercise in futility. Most
organizations had assumed that at least the Forum would pronounce in favor
of elevating access to water to a basic human right, as already included in
the UN Convention on Economic and Social Rights and stated in the WWF
president's foreword.
This did not happen. The final, highly diluted declaration merely
“underlines the need to include water and sanitation as priorities in
national processes …” Behind-the-scene comments indicate that this was the
result of heavy lobbying by the industry federation, AguaFed. If water were
recognized as a basic right, private companies could ostensibly be held in
violation for cutting off privatized water to poor users in arrears—
currently a standard practice.
No one disputes the seriousness of the water crisis. Two billion people in
the world without access to drinking water, 3.35 billion without basic
sanitation services, two million children dead a year of water-related
illnesses, prolonged drought, aquifer depletion, and polluted rivers—
together create a bleak outlook for the future. However, the Fourth Forum
offered little to alleviate the crisis. Even studies presented at the Forum
revealed a lack of consensus on the efficacy of private sector involvement
and a long list of problems. The declaration merely announced the formation
of a data bank on “best practices” and affirmed previous agreements.
The United Nations, the international financial institutions, and national
governments should leave the World Water Forum, and it should be left to
continue its activities as primarily a trade and industry fair and industry
adviser. The UN should strengthen its own programs with the active
participation of member states and develop broad mechanisms for civil
society participation and sharing community-based best practices. Civil
society should be aided in developing forums to exchange experiences and
build alternatives.
The privatization model for water use and distribution has failed to
deliver. It's time to make room for new, more democratic, alternatives.
---------
Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations
Center, online at www.irc-online.org.
Source: Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC)
americas.irc-online.org
americas.irc-online.org
https://www.alainet.org/fr/node/114746
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