Bitscape

I get many emails telling me I'm too negative. It's hard for me to disagree. Though what I want to be is just negative enough: neither striken by paralysis nor buoyed up by cheap hope. That's a tough one. --Jeff Wells

Dec 21. Solstice Night Reflections.

Privatization of Water

This article does a good job of summarizing the beginning of the war over water. Multinational corporations, not satisfied with having appropriated virtually every other resource vital to human existence, would now claim this most basic one.

Make no mistake: They want you and I to have to pay them for every sip. They will try to spin it and say they are graciously "providing" this to us (as if without their benevolence, water would not exist at all), but once they have taken over and all the alternatives have conveiently been eliminated or made illegal, we will have to effectively become their slaves for the "privilege" of quenching our thirst. In the Dark Future, this will seem as "normal" as paying banks for the "privilige" of a piece of ground on which to sleep.

Does this sound alarmist or exaggerated? Residents of South Africa and Bolivia have already gotten a taste.

In Durban, South Africa, one privatization project turned deadly. South Africa initiated one of five water privatization programs in 1999. According to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), the plan was "the brainchild of private water companies and World Bank economists."

As many as 10 million South Africans had their water cut off at one time or another since 1994, forcing thousands of poor Africans to seek water from polluted rivers and lakes. Drinking contaminated water led to South Africa's worst outbreak of cholera. Thousands of people got the disease and 300 died.

David Hemson of South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council told CPI the privatization plan "was the direct cause of the cholera epidemic, there is no doubt about that."

In Bolivia, in perhaps the most infamous of the ongoing "water wars," Aquas del Tunari, a consortium of multinationals including Bechtel, was awarded a $200 million dollar water project with an initial direct investment of $15,635. The 40-year concession gave them a monopoly on all water in the poverty-stricken community of Cochabamba. In order to achieve its guaranteed 15 percent return on investment, the company insisted that privately drilled wells -- in the poorest part of the poorest country in the Americas -- be metered and the community cooperatives that relied on them be charged.

The new water company dismissed concerns about rising costs, estimating that fees would be hiked by no more than 40 percent. But prices for many rose 300 percent. When struggling Cochabambans received water bills equaling 30 percent of their salaries, they rioted. During the fighting that ensued, the government cut power to local media outlets and used live ammunition against the protesters, killing five.

The militarized response, instead of quelling the disturbance, brought even more Bolivians into the mobilization. After weeks of intense protests, Aguas del Tunari announced it would pull out of Bolivia, leaving its water system (and $35 million in debt) to the government. Bechtel then turned around and sued Bolivia for $25 million dollars in "lost profits" under the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, a closed-door tribunal run by the World Bank.

What can we learn from this? That when a community of people becomes really committed, victory is achievable. But it requires more than just going to the ballot box every four years to cast a symbolic vote of approval for the puppet on the left vs the puppet on the right. These people had the courage (or desperation) to go up against government soldiers who shot at them, and still they persisted. They won, but the price was steep. (It still didn't explain by what right the World Bank somehow manages to run closed-door tribunals against ostensibly sovereign nations.)

This stuff has also started happening in places closer than you might think.

The largest privatization in the U.S. was in Atlanta and Hauter describes it as "a complete failure. The way that the company achieved its efficiency -- and this is true whether its Atlanta or Jakarta -- is that they fire staff. Roughly half in Atlanta. At that point they are no longer able to really maintain the pipes and provide potable water, so you had a relatively wealthy city like Atlanta having brown water days -- people having to boil their water and not being able to do laundry."

"They pollute, they don't conserve water -- you cannot make money conserving the product you sell, obviously, so it's not in their interest to reclaim water, to set up good infrastructure. In the end companies have to cut corners somewhere in order to make enough money for investors -- there's just no other way. The public sector doesn't have to turn a profit and the private sector does. So in the end, somewhere, something's got to give, either the quality of the product or the safety of the water coming into people's homes or the ability of poor people to access it or all three."

So, where does this leave us? Are we to play the role of helpless bystanders? In one of the comments, the author of the piece suggests the following:

Raising awareness can help stop the process before it really gets going. The privatizers are, believe it or not, on the ropes after all these disasters.

So, tell a friend and stay engaged on the issue.

Thought it may seem like doing nothing, awareness is the first step. Before you can address the problem, you have to know it exists. Maybe if enough of us stand together, the megacorps will have to think twice before making further encroachments upon life. It's worth a shot, isn't it?