Water For All
A Report from
the III World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre
By Holly Wren Spaulding
"When the rain falls, it falls on everybody's roof. It does not only fall on the roofs of Vivendi or Biwater or Bechtel." Rudolf Amenga-Etego was at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil to speak out against water privatization in his home country of Ghana."What rights have corporations and governments got to meet, and literally conspire, to keep the world's water to themselves for profit?" Rudy had brought the message that the corporate control of water must be stopped. No compromise. "Have they got a better right than millions of people who are looking for a drop of water to drink?"
Room after room was filled during the III World Social Forum with people concerned about the world's water crisis. Many of them had arrived in southern Brazil as representatives of grassroots water struggles throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.
Senagalese economist Yassine Fall made the point that for her, water is a feminist issue. Women use water the most for sanitation, cleaning, health care, cooking and they are disproportionately impacted when their families don't have water because of rising water rates, lack of infrastructure, or poor water quality.
She spoke out against the conception that the poor are asking for "something for nothing" when they demand clean drinking water despite their inability to pay for it. In many parts of Africa, individuals who survive on less than two dollars a day are being forced to spend as much as 20% of their household income on water.
"The UN has now declared water to be a human right, which was already obvious before," Fall said. Her iteration of this point was a rallying point shared by all.
She emphasized that all of us are paying for water: with our taxes, our work, and our compromised health when it is unavailable or polluted. Too often, people are paying with their life, and not just in Africa.
Michigan Water Struggles
Priscilla Dziubek from Sweetwater Alliance's Detroit chapter came to Brazil as part of an international water delegation. Besides fighting water bottling in central Michigan, she is working with Michigan Welfare Rights Organization against utility cut-offs in her home town. Within the last year, over 40,000 addresses have been affected by this "cost recovery" policy in inner city Detroit. Though currently publicly owned, the Water & Sewerage Department is under direction of a former employee of subsidiaries of Suez and Thames two of the world's largest private water corporations and is disconnecting those who cannot pay their bills."The same people who are always affected are the ones paying the price again," said Dziubek, "they are not being given their due rights as human beings. It is immoral to cut someone off from water." Rate increases have been frequent for many city residents who are also often dealing with substandard living conditions, dwindling public services, and joblessness.
These conditions are often associated with the so-called Third World, and those who heard the story of Detroit in Porto Alegre expressed shock that this is possible in the United States of America.
These days, the story of water in Michigan is not just one of endless shorelines and beautiful lakes and streams. It is about living in the heart of the Great Lakes basin, home to 20% of the earth's freshwater. It is also a story of how corporate welfare enables transnational Nestle Corporation to divert ground water for private profit via their Ice Mountain bottling plant in Mecosta County. Just three hours away, people living within a stone's skip from two Great Lakes cannot get a drop of water in their homes.
The state of Michigan is suffering a budget crisis, according to the new Governor, and all state programs and services are being scaled back and eliminated to save the state money. Programs which at other times have assisted low income customers when they were at risk of utility shut-offs are running out of money. One third of Detroit school kids are without water, and high numbers of elderly and disabled people are at particular risk, both for shut-offs, and for the illnesses and complications that accompany waterlessness. Dziebek and Sweetwater Alliance have been working to make the connection between corporate control of essential resources like water, and the fact that this, almost without exception, has a human and ecological cost which cannot be permitted to escalate.
A Private Future for Water?
In a workshop entitled the Global Water Grab, Maude Barlow, coauthor with Tony Clarke of Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, said that she foresees that the next stage of structural adjustment will be the swap of land, including water rights, rivers, and lakes, for debt relief.Barlow had just been in Argentina, where the people are attempting, with some brilliant success, to buck the influence of the International Monetary Fund and its tyrannical policies. The terrible possibility that in the absence of capital, not only sovereignty itself, but whole bodies of water could be hijacked by the IMF, added urgency to strategy sessions and networking on the subject of how to counter such sinister plans.
As ever, the people who are most likely to be affected by such policies are the working poor, the landless, and people from all over the Global South who are struggling for their lives.
Meanwhile, financiers and privateers will be at the III World Water Forum in Kyoto where they intend to solidify the corporate water agenda which envisions a privatized future for water. A growing number of international activists and NGOs will be there as well, in part to disrupt and in part to put forward their own agenda. And there was enthusiasm and work toward upcoming Social Water Forums in Sao Paulo and Florence, March 16-23, 2003. And Water Water, a celebration of water related activism and culture will take place in New York at the same time.
A draft of an alternative vision statement, "Water for All," was circulated by an international working group on water and groups are urged to sign on in support. The document is strongly anti-water privatization in all its forms, and is clear about the reasons why water must be available to all, regardless of ability to pay.
Toward a Future for Us
Toward the end of the Forum, Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano told a packed football stadium that we must "watch out, the water is being privatized ... these common things are not for sale, they come from the oldest memories."With eyes that have seen the opening of veins in Latin America, he said that the most commonly used word in Chiapas is Nosotros, meaning "us" or "we". This week, he said, "we are saying this to the world." While financiers and CEOs have frequent platforms for their ideas, for one week, we got to meet other activists, revolutionaries, and members of civil society to debate about and act out our vision for a better world
This movement of movements is growing. It is everywhere: vibrant, beautiful, urgent, and full of pain too. Here in the Global South, the commitment to struggle against the corporate ownership of everything, and for lives of dignity and peace, is ripe. It seeps from skin, laughter, muscles, and echoes in many languages. One hopes that it will come quickly to the north.
At the end of the week, Arundhati Roy looked out across the same stadium, at the thousands of faces and hands; at the summer evening winding down. "Another world is not only possible, she is coming, and on a quiet day, if I listen carefully, I can hear her breathing," said Roy.
The breaths are many. They are growing.