October 2002 Move Over Oil, Water’s the Next Big Thing The Satya Interview with Tony Clarke

 

Tony Clarke is co-author with Maude Barlow of the ground-breaking book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (The New Press, 2002), which documents how a small number of corporations are quickly gaining control over the global water supply and selling it for enormous profit. He is also the director of the Polaris Institute of Canada, and chairs the committee on corporations for the International Forum on Globalization. Catherine Clyne spoke with Tony Clarke who took some time to explain this complicated issue to Satya readers.

What got you interested in the issue of water privatization?
It’s one of those things that creeps up on you. Travelling around the world and seeing the increasing scarcity of water that people are facing, coupled with growing awareness of the role that corporations are playing in privatization, has really awakened my awareness.

What are some of the things that have shocked you into awareness—the “a-ha!” moments?
Travelling in India and seeing what a people so dependent on water face all around them: the Ganges River and other major waterways are polluted; and Coca-Cola is everywhere, draining the water resources for the production of Coke and now for its bottled water line, Dasani. In one instance, a whole lake in a tribal area has been handed over to Coca-Cola to use.

I think the real awakening for me, in terms of the political struggle, was to see the situation in Bolivia, where the people, faced with the privatization of water services, took to the streets. It grew day by day and finally they forced a general strike in Cochabamba, a city of about 500,000. They were able to shut the economy down, with the end result that Bechtel corporation, which had obtained the right to buy out the water system, was suddenly being pushed out of the city and out of the country altogether. It gave us all a sense of just how important water is in people’s lives and the extent to which people are prepared to fight for it.

Can you explain what water privatization actually means?
Water is considered a commodity to be bought and sold, and a whole industry has been built up in which corporations provide water services on a for-profit basis. These corporations, many of them based in Europe, are now expanding their operations into all parts of the world, which means that if local and municipal governments are cash-strapped, they’d be open to selling off their water services. In effect, water services are being transferred from public control into private hands, and instead of water being made available to everybody at a uniform rate, it is privatized and rates can go up very quickly.

What are some of the problems about this that Blue Gold addresses?
We try to point out that insofar as oil was understood to be the “black gold” of the 20th century, water is likely to become the “blue gold” of the 21st century because of the shortages and the increasing value that will be put on it. One billion people around the world currently have no access to clean water. By 2025, demand will outstrip supply by more than double. A couple of years ago, one of the vice presidents of the World Bank, which has played a big role in the privatization of water services, made an interesting statement that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.

This is a serious situation, and is in part a real ecological problem. The hydrological cycle—when rain falls to the earth, moves into the ground system, into the rivers and streams, then evaporates into the air and returns again—that cycle, upon which the entire planet depends, is in very real danger. It’s in danger because of the massive expansion of urbanization and of industrialization—urbanization, meaning the paving over of the natural earth’s surface, and industrialization, which demands enormous amounts of water.

With privatization, are there any benefits for the consumers?
The argument that’s often made is that the private sector is more efficient and so forth. But in Blue Gold, by examining exactly what has happened with privatization, we show that it isn’t more efficient, and in many cases the public system has worked quite well. The problem is that many local governments are faced with a shortage of capital and by selling their water system, they are able to get a short-term injection of cash that’s useful for other purposes. A classic example is Santiago, Chile: the water system there was serving the people very well and there was no need to change it at all, but the government in Santiago needed the cash and sold the water system to Vivendi.

In Blue Gold you refer to a “cartel” that is gaining control over the world’s water. Can you explain this and tell us what you think the future of privatization looks like?
In that case we were talking about water supply. There is a whole new breed of entrepreneurs developing—“water-hunters”—who look for supplies of water that can either be bought or leased for bulk export. This is a growing enterprise everywhere. In water-rich areas there’s a lot of surveying of sources—whether they be major underground aquifers that haven’t been fully tapped, or river systems, lakes and so forth—to look at the possibility of getting control over the water so that it can be put in supertankers or in pipeline or canal systems, and exported from one location to another.

Are any of the water-rich countries starting to create laws to safeguard their water supply?
Here in Canada there’s been quite a debate about this, but the problem is that the federal government has made no major move to put an ironclad ban on the export of water. One of the reasons for this is that they would run right smack into the international trade regimes in NAFTA or the WTO. In both cases, water is considered an economic good and once you put a ban on the export of water in bulk form, you are violating their basic trade rules, and therefore inviting either economic sanctions or major lawsuits—in other words being sued directly by corporations through NAFTA.

This may be somewhat rhetorical, but how does someone own something that occurs naturally and is absolutely necessary for our survival, and has been, until now, relatively free?
This is the fundamental question of the book: access to water is a universal right, and it’s very important we keep in mind that not just people, but nature, as well, needs it for survival. So the struggle that’s going on is a battle between the right to private property versus the right to maintain some universally shared things on which there should be no private property claims or private profits made. We all need water to survive, a good 65 to 75 percent of our bodies are made up of water, and you can’t get any more personal than that.

What do you propose will come out of the international water treaty which opens Blue Gold?
It’s an organizing tool around which people can rally. People need to recognize that there needs to be a strongly supported international treaty, so we’re trying to get the various movements in countries that are engaged in water issues to take up the idea of a Water Commons Treaty, and to get governments to advocate this at an international level through the UN. This process is a counterweight to that being pursued by the private water corporations that are trying to make sure that it’s only through institutions like the WTO that decisions will be made regarding the governance of water around the world.

A handful of activists have been warning about this for years. Are the American people waking up to it?
Well, it’s not just a question of Americans, but I would say yes, I think there is an awakening going on in parts of the U.S. where acute shortages of water have been building up. But it takes time for this awareness to gel. One of the fundamental problems that we face is that we take water for granted. In North America we live, for the most part, in a relatively water-rich area of the world. We’ve never—or in very few cases—had to go to war or seen war take place over water.

There is a bit of a skirmish taking shape right now between the state of Texas and Mexico. It has to do with the Rio Grande and with Texas claiming that the northern parts of Mexico have a water debt to the state. So as these struggles begin to emerge, there’s going to be a growing awareness of how important water is and, therefore, how important it is for us to pay more attention to it.

With global warming and climate changes that are taking place, I also think that in North America there are going to be acute water shortages and their impacts upon parts of the U.S. will provoke moves by the U.S. to lay claims to water resources in Canada. This is not a new story; two major projects have been on the horizon for some time now. One is the North American Water and Power Authority, an initiative by a number of California entrepreneurs to gain access to water resources in British Columbia. They’re proposing to channel three northern river systems into a huge crater in the Rocky Mountains, which would serve as a reservoir, then rechannel it through a pipeline down into Washington state and on to the midwestern states. A similar one is focusing on northern Quebec, and the idea once again is to redirect the river flows into a canal scheme that would take that water into the sunbelt states of the U.S. This is the Grand Canal Scheme, and as far as I know, Bechtel still owns the blueprints to this.

This parallels oil on many levels. People around the world scratch their heads and ask why the U.S. doesn’t implement conservation measures for oil. It looks like the same thing is playing out with water. With the two schemes just mentioned, it seems the U.S. plans to continue business as usual with our consumption, rather than ask people to conserve water. If we run out, we’ll just take Canada’s and Mexico’s water. It’s hard to imagine, but the stakes are a lot higher with water. What’s it going to take for the U.S. to learn that water is a limited resource that we share with the rest of the planet?
Certainly one would like to see the government of the U.S.—and Canada as well—recognize that we are running out of water around the world. But fundamentally there needs to be a whole new look at our patterns of consumption. First of all, our relation to consumption and conservation cannot be simply addressed at an individual and household level. Households amount to only ten percent of the total demand on water. It’s true that we can take five- or seven-minute showers and reduce our water consumption, we can also reduce the flushing of toilets and things like that—but these individual reductions won’t make a dent. The real demand comes from the massive irrigation systems that are used for the transnational food system that we have today, and secondly, from the increasing demand by high-tech industries. Unless we are very cognitive of this and start to put pressure on where the real demand is coming from, it seems we won’t really affect the consumption level a great deal.

We also need to recognize the likelihood that there will be demands for massive water transfers from Canada to the U.S. and that the U.S. potentially has a lot going for it with trade agreements like NAFTA—the tools have already been put in place. We need to keep in mind also that the mass transfer of water creates huge ecological problems in the water basin itself. It is sucked from aquifers and the underground water systems that exist in those areas; it really affects the biosphere and the biodiversity of the surrounding area.

Who are the major players and what measures have they taken to ensure their profits?
There are two giants that are really the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry. One is Vivendi Universal and the other is Suez, both French, and together they have a monopoly control over the privatization of water services around the world, controlling something like 70 percent of the existing market. The other big player is the German company RWE, which has recently bought up two smaller water corporations, Thames Water in the UK and American Water Works. With these two companies, RWE is challenging the control held by Vivendi and Suez.

The industry itself is considered by the Word Bank to be roughly a one trillion dollar annual industry, so we’re not talking small dollars here. In all cases a contract is involved—a direct leasing of the water, a buyout of the water system, or some other form of partnership with the government—and most of them are 25- and 30-year concessions. That amounts to a guaranteed profit for the company because of these contracted low rates and its freedom to increase the rates the consumers have to pay. There’s no industry quite like it in the world.

What’s the role of bottled water in all of this?
As water became contaminated in many places, a huge industry emerged in the sale of bottled water, and has just grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade or so. At the beginning of the 1980s, barely a billion liters of water were available in bottled form; by the year 2000, something like 80 billion liters of bottled water were being sold around the world, and is now something like a $36 billion industry. The big challenge now is coming from the two cola giants, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. They have vowed to become number one in bottled water sales in the next ten years; they’ve also said that in the next ten years bottled water will surpass cola sales around the world, so they are making a huge investment to take over the bottled water market.

The problem is that bottled water comes in two forms. There’s so-called spring water, where companies like Perrier claim rights to natural springs or underground aquifers and so forth. In the cases of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, their water is drawn from municipal water systems, so you have a major drain on the local residents’ sources of water. In addition, the bottled water sold by Coca-Cola or Pepsi is from at least 1,100 times, to as high as 2,000 times, more expensive than water from the tap. The difference is that through osmosis they purify the water and add minerals to it. Studies done by the Natural Resources Defense Council indicate quite clearly that in a number of instances, bottled water is no better than municipal tap water, and in some cases not even as good as tap water.

How are people beginning to express their disapproval?
There’s quite a movement taking place. In South Africa, for example, where water is guaranteed in the constitution to every person and every household, the problem is that water is becoming privatized. The rates are going up and people in the townships and poor areas can’t afford it. As a result, water is being cut off, and tension is really building up. People are resisting by setting up brigades to go around and re-hook up the water. When it comes to water, you’re getting at the very center of people’s existence, and the fight back is likely to be incredibly intense.

What can our readers do to learn more and take action?
I think that people really need to become aware of the water crisis around the world and in their own communities, and the ecological dimensions of that. Second, it’s important for people to recognize that if water is a universal right, the privatization of water and water services is not the answer; the answer lies in rebuilding our public services and our public control over water. It’s one of the few areas of our common life that has not been privatized in either Canada or the U.S., and my hope is that people will look very closely at where water’s being privatized in their own communities, and will rally to start to address these issues of water as a fundamental right, and make sure that water is universally available to all people.

Where we’re seeing the incredible demand upon scarce water resources in terms of bottled water, it’s more than just the question of water being drained for these purposes; we’re also talking about plastic bottles that contribute further to the contamination of the environment. I think it’s a concern that’s going to rise more and more among students on campuses for example, and I think there’s a real possibility that a lot of the youth activists in the future will start to address the issue of bottled water.

It certainly is an issue that can bring people together in solidarity. You can’t really dismiss the importance of water.
No, and it has a sacred and religious significance in a lot of countries as well, and insofar as it does, it becomes a real major focal point for what people do.

To learn more about the Polaris Institute, a Canadian-based group that works to enable citizens to fight for democratic social change, visit www.polarisinstitute.org or call (613) 237-1717.