Blue Gold
Blue Gold
Blue Gold
by Maude Barlow
National Chairperson, Council of Canadians
Chair, International Forum on Globalization (IFG) Committee
on the Globalization of Water
Introduction
THE CRISIS
A Finite Resource
Eventually, some dry areas will not be able to serve both the
needs of farming and those of the ballooning cities. If these
regions are to meet everyday water requirements, they might
have to permanently import all or most of their food. This
raises the prospect that lack of water will make some
countries chronically dependent on others, or on the
international community at large.
ENDANGERING SPECIES
The story is the same all over the world. All but one of
England's 33 major rivers are suffering; some are now less
than a third of their average depth. The Thames is
threatening to run dry and already larger ships are having to
restrict their movements to high tides. Development has cut
off the Rhine River in Europe from 90 percent of its original
flood plains, and the native salmon run has nearly
disappeared. Over the last 25 years, the Danube's phosphate
and nitrate concentrations have increased six-fold and four-
fold, respectively, causing great harm to the region's tourism
and fisheries. According to the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), 80 percent of China's major rivers are so
degraded they no longer support fish. The building of
Egypt's Aswan Dam in 1970 caused the number of
commercially harvested fish to drop by almost two-thirds.
UNEQUAL ACCESS
PROHIBITING PRESERVATION
Both Suez and Vivendi are vying for the lucrative U.S. market,
estimated to be the world's largest with annual revenues at
$90 billion. New U.S. Iaws have opened the way to greater
private sector involvement in the U.S. water supply and
treatment business. Until now, this sector has been almost
exclusively controlled by small public-sector operators. Now
these companies are poised to promote the massive
privatization of the American water market. In 1999, Suez
paid $1 billion for United Water Resources and bought two
major water treatment chemical producers, Nalco and
Calgon, for $4.5 billion. In the same year, Vivendi purchased
U.S. Filter Corp. for more than $6 billion in cash, giving the
new company a projected revenue of $12 billion in annual
sales. Vivendi also owns 42 percent of Air and Water
Technologies (AWT).
WATER WAR
The question is: where will the water come from? The
Southwest Network for Economic Justice and the Campaign
for Responsible Technology explains "In an arena of such
limited resources, a struggle ensues between those who have
traditionally enjoyed these resources and those newcomers
who look at these resources with covetous eyes."
The water privateers are now also setting their sights on the
mass export of bulk water by diversion, by pipelines and by
supertanker. Modified tanker deliveries already take place in
certain regions that are willing to pay top dollar for water on
an emergency basis. Barges carry loads of freshwater to
islands in the Bahamas and tankers deliver water to Japan,
Taiwan, and Korea. Turkey is preparing to sell its water by
shipping it on converted oil tankers and through pipeline
from the Manavgat River to Cyprus, Malta, Libya, Israel,
Greece and Egypt.
Nowhere are dreams for the trade in water as big as they are
in North America. Every few years, plans to divert massive
amounts of Canadian water to water-scarce areas of the
United States, Asia and the Middle East by tanker, pipeline,
or rerouting of the natural river systems, are raised only to
be shut down by public protest. One of the largest proposed
diversion projects was called the GRAND Canal-the Great
Recycling and Northern Development Canal. It originally
called for the building of a dike across James Bay at the
mouth of Hudson Bay (both of which now flow north) to
create a giant freshwater reservoir out of James Bay and the
twenty rivers flowing into it. A massive series of dikes, canals,
dams, power plants and locks would divert this water at a
rate of 62,000 gallons a second down a 167-mile canal to
Georgian Bay, where it would be flushed through the Great
Lakes and taken to the U.S. Sun Belt.
There are some who say that bulk export of water is too
expensive to be economically viable and suggest that the
future lies with desalination. However, the World Bank points
out that the world has already tapped all its low-cost, easily
accessible water reserves; the financial and environmental
costs of tapping new supplies, however they are developed,
will be two to three times more than those of existing
investments and the demand will be there even if the
sources are expensive.
For the first time, Southern California cities and farmers were
no longer prevented from buying water directly from
Northern California farmers, hoarding it and selling it on the
open market. Large-scale operators helped themselves to
huge amounts of water and stored it with the Drought Water
Bank until the price was right to sell. A small handful of
sellers walked away with huge profits, while other farmers
found their wells run dry for the first time in their lives. The
results were disastrous; the water table dropped and the land
sank in some places.
The first NAFTA Chapter t 1 case on water was filed in the fall
of t998. Sun Belt Water Inc. of Santa Barbara, California, sued
the Canadian government because the company lost a
contract to export water to California when the Canadian
province of British Columbia banned the export of bulk water
in t991. Sun Belt alleges that the ban contravenes NAFTA and
is seeking $10 billion in damages. "Because of NAFTA, we are
now stakeholders in the national water policy in Canada,"
declared Sun Belt's CEO Jack Lindsay.
All of these corporate-friendly provisions-and more-are
contained in the FTAA, currently being negotiated by 34
countries of the Americas and the Caribbean. Although it is
based on the NAFTA model, the FTAA goes far beyond
NAFTA in its scope and power.
Furthermore, the GATS has not even adopted the weak GATT
Article XX exception relating to conservation, thus expressing
an undeniable and deliberate intent to subordinate
conservation goals to those of trade liberalization. As
Canadian trade expert Steven Shrybman notes in his March
2001 legal opinion on the GATS "At risk is the public
ownership of water resources, public sector water services,
and the authority of governments to regulate corporate
activity for environmental, conservation or public health
reasons."
The World Bank says that it will subsidize water for the poor.
Anyone familiar with the problems of welfare, particularly in
the Third World, knows that such charity is punitive at best,
and more often nonexistent. Water as a fundamental human
right is guaranteed in the UN International Covenant on
Human Rights. Water welfare is not what the architects of
that great declaration had in mind.
To deal with the first, the global poverty gap, there are
several immediate actions governments could take. These
include cancelling the Third World debt, increasing foreign
aid budgets to their previous standards (.7 percent of GDP),
and implementing a "Tobin tax" ( a small, worldwide tariff)
on financial speculation that would pay for water
infrastructure and universal water services.
To deal with the issue of water as a human right, countries
must adopt constitutions such as that of South Africa, which
guarantees water first for people, second for nature and third
for the economy. Every South African is guaranteed enough
free water for basic needs; only then is there consideration of
pricing.
I) Water belongs to the earth and all species. Water, like air,
is necessary for all life. Without water, humans and other
beings would die and the earth's systems would shut down.
Modern society has lost its reverence for water's sacred place
in the cycle of life as well as its centrality to the realm of the
spirit. This loss of reverence for water has allowed humans to
abuse it. Only by redefining our relationship to water and
recognizing its essential and sacred place in nature can we
begin to right the wrongs we have done.