The New Water
Order
Maude Barlow
Speaks on the Privatization of
Water
by Holly Wren Spaulding
What is the big deal over water these days? More and more people around the world are confronting this question. Right here in Michigan, a controversial water bottling scheme in Mecosta County has resulted in increased public debate on the subject, as well as a lawsuit, and a variety of "direct actions," including a blockade of the bottling plant by activists calling for an end to what they call "water theft."Maude Barlow is an internationally renowned activist and author of eleven books and numerous reports relating to water and economic globalization.
In Mid-September she joined water activists from around South Africa and the rest of the world to call for an end to the corporatization of water at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. With water scarcity and pollution of freshwater reserves on the rise, water was at the top of the agenda in Johannesburg. On September 12 she spoke to audiences of activists and students in Ann Arbor and Mount Pleasant, urging them to make the connection between the growing movement against Ice Mountain/Perrier/Nestle Water North America, and other struggles against water privatization happening all over the world.
Blockade of the Ice Mountain plant in Mecosta County, Michigan
The New Water Order
The meetings in Johannesburg were what many have come to expect of such global gatherings. There were the delegates&emdash;mainly representing the corporate world&emdash;as well as bankers, trade ministers, a few heads of state. And then there were the people: the grassroots organizers from communities where people have lost the control of their water to transnational corporations seeking to cash in on what Fortune Magazine has called "the wealth of nations."As usual, security was high in Johannesburg, and not just because large numbers of that city's‚ poor are angry over being excluded from the summit. Meanwhile, activists made sure that the summit's "officialdom" didn't forget about the true state of affairs, which they feared might have otherwise been obscured by the gala event being staged by the summit organizers.
Although Barlow is most at home with ordinary people, agitating for democratic change, she did have a delegate's pass to the summit, which she described as "one of the most cynical and awful things I have ever seen in my life."
For example, one entered the Water Dome, site of some of the "official" activities, though a lavish shopping mall draped in advertisements and products that no ordinary person could ever afford, not least of the all the inhabitants of townships just outside the summit's wall's where some of the world's poorest people are suffering 85-90% unemployment.
The official water world, with it's swank meeting spaces, displays of water everywhere, billboards for DeBeers diamonds declaring that "Water is forever," and a Coca Cola sponsored U.N. conference on water, was, according to Barlow "beyond words."
"It had the feeling of a grand trade show, including dressed up Zulu Warriors&emdash;incredible&emdash;and dancing women who were supposed to be the Nile." And it all contrasted so harshly with the fact that ten million South Africans have had their water services cut off since post Apartheid privatization of the utilities took place, "It was just obscene.'
Barlow described visiting the township of Orange Farm where people lived among rats in corrugated steel shacks, but there were state of the art water meters to control the trickle of water that came to them for a fee each month. When they ceased being able to pay the rising costs for the service, they were cut off.
The Indian physicist and activist, Vandana Shiva said on the BBC that the whole W.S.S.D. affair was "a corporate high-jack," which did not help the cause of sustainability but was instead a "betrayal" of the plans and proposals that were envisioned at the Earth Summit ten years ago.
In a recent article Barlow wrote that "Privatization means that the management of water resources is based on the principles of scarcity and profit maximization rather than long-term sustainability."
Michigan's Water for Sale?
To understand what this means in local terms one need only look at the 400,00 square foot Ice Mountain plant in rural Mecosta County. Hovering like a fortress on what was once a working family farm, it is here that water which has traveled twelve miles from a private hunting reserve within the Muskegon River watershed, arrives by way of stainless steel pipes laid in the wake of a deforested corridor. It is treated with biocides, and injected into thousands of non-recyclable plastic bottles. Every day palettes full of shrink wrapped bottles of are loaded onto trucks for distribution."No one is talking about this water going to people in need. This is boutique water," Barlow said.
Most of this water leaves the Great Lakes basin, never to return, resulting in an "export and diversion" of Great Lakes water. According to Jim Olson, attorney for the citizens group challenging the project in state court, water should be preserved in the public trust, but this project violates that.
Schemes like the one in central Michigan are symptomatic of the global trend toward "water for profit," and the role of bigger and bigger business as a means of capitalizing on water scarcity.
"In the U.S., the water shortages are already here. You already have deep drought, and watersheds drying up." Barlow likened the earth to an apple that is beginning to shrivel up for lack of moisture. Addressing the group of around 150 students and concerned citizens at C.M.U. she said, "We are facing probably the greatest ecological threat to our survival … You have nothing more important to do than to take care of the water heritage."
Barlow wanted to come to Michigan because she believes that those who are following this issue in this state are "on the cusp of the most important issue of our time."
"In the end, if you don't have the local resistance you are going to lose. This is where people experience their lives. It is not an esoteric thing."
Barlow has experience with a proposed water bottling venture in Newfoundland. She said that if this is deemed the most appropriate and desirable form of economic development, then people should seriously think about doing it for themselves. However, she is concerned about the fact that under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, operations of the sort risk opening up the province or the state to unfettered exploitation by ever more competing firms.
She is firm that people can come up with better ways of going about business than simply letting a big water company come in and take over. The bottling must be regulated, locally controlled, environmentally safe, and it should not pump out more than the watershed can sustain. A strong recycling program could defray some of the environmental costs of all those discarded bottles that are now languishing in the watershed.
According to her publication Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply, "In 2000 over eight billion gallons of water was bottled and traded globally; over 90% in non-renewable plastic."
Asked what the role of alert, motivated citizens is in this movement, Barlow said "direct action is an enormously important element in the work we have to do. We have to continue to have the on-the-ground resistance, and we have to connect up the international and local struggles."
She emphasized that the work needs to be on all fronts. Nationally, there needs to be water protecting legislation, or more often than not, legislation needs to be written. Barlow advocates that citizens hold governments accountable, and that they establish protection plans based on watershed management and conservation.
At the international level, people need to be confronting water privatization, or what she calls "water theft." She explained that much of her own activism with her group Council of Canadians which has over 100,000 members is a response to the fact that we are experiencing an unprecedented "assault on everything we grew up believing belonged to the common heritage&emdash;water, genes, the salmon before they are caught, the rain before it falls."
"To my mind, groups like Sweetwater Alliance are the visionaries. They are the ones that are seeing the problem before anyone else sees them. They the canary in the mine shaft. They are the ones people should be listening to, and also deeply grateful to."
Holly Wren Spaulding is a writer and activist. She lives in Leelanau County.