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World Water Forum (AFRICA ACTION)
AFRICA ACTION
Africa Policy E-Journal
March 17, 2003 (030317)
Africa: World Water Forum
(Reposted from sources cited below)
This posting contains excerpts from the official press release
announcing the World Water Forum now taking place in Kyoto, Japan;
a longer background article and critique from a civil society
perspective, by Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians; and links
for additional sources on issues of water and water privatization.
Another posting today contains brief excerpts from The Water
Barons, an extensive report on water privatization around the
world, including South Africa and the United States, from the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
+++++++++++++++++end summary/introduction+++++++++++++++++++++++
March 10, 2003
Official Press Release (excerpts)
The 3rd World Water Forum Opens March 16th
Crucial Water Issues to be addressed
http://www.world.water-forum3.com
The most important international water meeting ever opens in Kyoto,
Japan on March 16th to address life and death issues. These range
from helping the 2.7 billion people who will face water scarcity by
2025 and preventing the 5 million annual deaths from water-related
diseases, to growing dangers of accelerating conflicts over water
and saving the world's lakes, rivers and wetlands. ...
Over the next 20 years, the average supply of water per person is
expected to drop by one-third, according to the World Water
Assessment Programme, issued by the UN earlier this month. ...
Some 10,000 government officials, representatives of international
organizations such as the World Bank, and UN organizations such as
UNESCO and UNEP, along with water experts, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and the media are slated to attend the
meeting, many more than the number of participants at the 2nd World
Water Forum (The Hague, 2000).
...
Nowadays, 800 million people are going hungry because they cannot
afford to buy food. More than 1.2 billion people currently lack
access to safe water and 3 billion have inadequate sanitation. This
leads to diseases that kill more than 5 million people each year,
more than 2 million of them children under the age of five who
succumb to diarrhea-related illnesses.
Poor residents have few options but to live in squalid, unsafe
environments. In addition, the circumstances of these poor
communities contribute to environmental deterioration, through
water pollution and floods in neighboring areas caused by blocked
drainage systems.
The 40 worst water-famished countries in the world, in many of
which people live on just two gallons a day for all uses, can never
escape poverty and achieve sustainable development without first
addressing their water scarcity, global water experts say.
This amount is far less than the 50-liter (13.2 gallons) per day
level that the United Nations says constitutes the absolute minimum
for water needs. The daily per capita water requirements include 5
liters for drinking, 20 for sanitation and hygiene, 15 for bathing
and 10 for food preparation, per person.
"Only about 60 percent of the 680 million people in Sub-Sahara
Africa have access to safe water supplies," says Professor Albert
Wright, Chairman of the African Water Task Force and Co-chairman of
the UN's Task Force on the Millennium Goals for Water. "Incredibly,
people in 13 countries, nine of them in Africa, must try and live
on an average of less than 10 liters (2.6 gallons) per day, a truly
desperate situation. Poverty and lack of water is inextricably
linked for these people (in countries such as The Gambia, Haiti,
Djibouti, Somalia, Mali, Cambodia, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania,
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Albania and Bhutan)." In this context, one of
the eight United Nations Millennium Goals (MDGs) from September
2000 to "Ensure environmental sustainability," mentions as one
major objective "to reduce by half the proportion of people without
sustainable access to safe drinking water" by 2015. (on MDG see:
www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html)
Rich and poor nations both need better water management -- The
newly developed international Water Poverty Index (WPI), by the
UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, finds that some of the world's
richest nations such as the United States and Japan fare poorly in
water ranking because they consume more than they need and still
deal inadequately with pollution. At the same time, some developing
countries score in the top ten, because they either have a great
deal of water or have good plans in place in how to use it.
The Water Poverty Index, developed by a team of 31 researchers in
consultation with more than 100 water professionals from around the
world, grades 147 countries according to five different measures –
resources, access, capacity, use and environmental impact -- to
show where the best and worst water situations exist.
According to the WPI, the top 10 water-richest nations in the world
are, in descending order: Finland, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Guyana,
Suriname, Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The 10
countries lowest on the Water Poverty Index are all in the
developing world -- Haiti, Niger, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Malawi,
Djibouti, Chad, Benin, Rwanda, and Burundi. ...
The 3rd World Water Forum: A Civil Society Backgrounder
by Maude Barlow, Council of Canadians
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water
From March 16-22 of this year, an estimated 8,000 people from all
over the world will gather in Kyoto, Japan, to attend the 3rd
World Water Forum. There, decisions will be made about the future
of the world's freshwater resources that will affect every living
being on the planet. This memo is offered as a brief history of
the events and players instrumental in the lead-up to this forum
and is a critique of the private sector interests that have
developed around the control of water.
The Backdrop
The world is running out of fresh water. Humanity is polluting,
diverting and depleting the finite wellspring of life at a
startling rate. Our per capita use of water is doubling every 20
years, at more than twice the rate of human population growth. A
legacy of factory farming, flood irrigation, the construction of
massive dams, toxic dumping, wetland and forest destruction and
urban and industrial pollution has damaged the earth's surface
water so badly that we are now mining the underground water
reserves far faster than nature can replenish them.
Quite simply, unless we dramatically change our ways, between
one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe
fresh water shortages within the next quarter century. The global
fresh water crisis looms as one of the greatest threats ever to the
survival of our planet.
Tragically, this global call for action comes in an era guided by
the free-market principles of what has been called the "Washington
Consensus." This includes an unprecedented assault on the commons.
Everything is now for sale, even those areas of life, such as
social services and natural resources, that were once considered
the common heritage of humanity. Faced with the suddenly
well-documented fresh water crisis, governments and international
institutions are advocating the privatization and commodification
of water. Price water, they say in chorus; put it up for sale and
let the market determine its future.
At the same time, governments are signing away their control over
domestic water supplies to regional trade agreements like NAFTA
and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These global trade
institutions effectively give transnational corporations
unprecedented access to the fresh water resources of signatory
countries. Already, corporations have started to sue governments
in order to gain access to domestic water sources and, armed with
the protection of these international trade agreements, are
setting their sights on the commercialization of water.
The Corporate Players
There are ten major corporate players now delivering freshwater
services for profit. Between them, the two biggest - Vivendi and
Suez of France - deliver private water and wastewater services to
over 200 million customers in 150 countries, and are in a race,
along with the others such as Bouygues SAUR, RWE-Thames Water and
Bechtel-United Utilities, to expand to every corner of the globe.
The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing
world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for
water, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, little transparency
in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption.
They are aggressively accelerating their operations in Third World
countries where debt-struck governments are forced to abandon
public water services and hand over control of local water
supplies to private interests. Based on the market policy known as
"full cost recovery," the water companies are able to impose rate
hikes that are devastating to millions of poor people who cannot
afford privatized water.
A new type of water consortium has emerged in Germany which may be
a prototype for the future. Companies such as AquaMundo put
together giant investment pools using overseas government aid,
private bank investments and public utilities funds in the
recipient country. Then, in an arrangement called "cross-border
leasing," they hire local contractors to run the water services.
Some keep their money in tax havens, thus allowing them to avoid
paying national taxes; this lets them offer a "deal" to local
cash-strapped municipalities.
Transnational water companies have become so powerful that they now
share in decision making with governments in international
meetings. United under the banner of the corporate lobby group,
Business Action for Sustainable Development, the water companies
played a pivotal role at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, last
August 26-September 4. There, with governments and the United
Nations, they launched a "new" strategy for the delivery of
efficient water and sanitation services to the world's poor which
accelerates public-private partnerships, guaranteeing the
companies a steady profit from public funds.
Water for profit takes a number of other forms. The bottled water
industry is growing at an annual rate of 20 percent. Last year,
nearly 100 billion litres of bottled water were sold around the
world - most of it in non-reusable plastic containers, bringing in
profits of $22 billion to this highly-polluting industry. Fierce
disputes, especially in the Third World, are being waged between
local communities and companies like CocaCola and Nestle,
aggressively seeking new supplies of "boutique water." As one
company explains, water is now "a rationed necessity that may be
taken by force."
Corporations are now involved in the construction of massive
pipelines to carry freshwater long distances for commercial sale
while others are constructing supertankers and giant sealed water
bags to transport vast amounts of water across the ocean to paying
customers. The mass movement of bulk water could have catalytic
environmental impacts. Nevertheless, the World Bank says that,
"One way or another, water will soon be moved around the world as
oil is now."
The Institutional Players
Private water companies are aided and abetted by a number of
powerful international institutions with whom they work closely.
The main source of financing of private water services in the
Third World comes from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which
demands private water services in exchange for debt relief, the
World Bank, which can withhold project funds unless a country
cooperates, and a myriad of regional banks, such as the European
Investment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian
Development Bank, and the African Development Bank.
The World Bank serves the interests of water companies through the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which
provides loans to governments and can impose conditions in
exchange for money, and the International Finance Corporation,
which provides direct capital funding.
The World Trade Organization is another powerful institution that
promotes the commodification of water. The WTO is mandated to
remove tariff and non-tariff barriers to the free flow of goods,
including water, across national borders and is negotiating free
trade in water services through the General Agreement on Trade in
Services (GATS). The big water corporations have strategically
positioned themselves to play an effective role in the WTO through
two powerful lobby groups - the U.S. Coalition of Service
Industries and the European Forum on Services.
The United Nations has also been working closely with the big water
corporations. In July, 2000, the UN announced a "Global Compact"
with a number of global transnational companies, including Suez.
And it is through UN conferences and forums that three important
new international organizations promoting water-for-profit have
been created.
The Global Water Partnership was established in 1996 to reform
water utility systems and water resource management around the
world and is funded in part by the World Bank. The World Water
Council, also formed in 1996, sees itself as a policy think tank
whose main task is to provide decision makers with advice and
assistance on global water issues. Made up of 175 member groups,
the WWC organized the 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in March,
2000.
The World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, formed in 1998,
is composed of 21 "eminent" persons and is mandated with fostering
sustainable use of water resources.
Representatives of the global water corporations are strategically
placed at the top levels of all three of these agencies. Their
industry association, the International Private Water Association,
works closely with the World Water Council, the World Bank and the
UN.
The 2nd World Water Forum
All of the above were major players at the 2nd World Water Forum
held in The Hague in March, 2000, and are intimately involved in
preparations for the 3rd World Water Forum to be held in Japan in
March, 2003. From the beginning, the 2nd World Water Forum, which
was attended by over 5,000 people, was designed to be a showcase
for public-private partnerships and to create a "consensus" among
all the "stakeholders" that privatization and full cost recovery
are the answers for the world's water crisis. World Bank and water
corporation officials dominated the positions of power in every
session; civil society groups were not even given a place to meet.
Translation services for the myriad of non-English speaking
delegates were non-existent.
The World Water Council presented its pre-written World Water
Vision report endorsing an aggressive water-privatization agenda
to the Forum as a "fait accompli." The Vision, which also
recommended a corporate model of agriculture, was adopted by the
powers that ran the event, even though the statement was opposed
by the majority of civil society groups present.
As well, pushed by corporate representatives, the 140 governments
officials who attended the Ministerial Conference attached to the
Forum, agreed to weaken their final declaration. Instead of water
being declared a "basic human right" (which would mean that
governments were responsible for ensuring that all their citizens
have access to water on a not-for-profit basis), the government
delegates agreed only that water is a "basic human need," thereby
opening up the water market to companies on a for-profit basis.
However, it was not so simple for the organizers of the event. A
new international coalition of civil society organizations and
trade unions came together in the Hague to challenge the corporate
"consensus." The Blue Planet Project, made up of groups from many
countries, launched an "international effort to stop the
privatization of the world's fresh water" and challenged the Forum
organizers from the floor, at press conferences, and with a "NGO
Major Group Statement" to the Ministerial Conference. This
statement rejected the World Water Council's Vision, asserted that
water is a basic human right and called for the decommodification
of water.
The 3rd World Water Forum
Since The Hague, civil society groups have been growing and
consolidating their work. They met at the World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre in January, 2002, and at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, in August, 2002. With
international groups present, Japanese civil society organizations
met in March, 2002, to plan their strategy toward the 3rd World
Water Forum. There, they agreed to participate in the Forum as long
as the goal was to put forward a clear alternative vision and
strategy to the World Water Council.
This planning was further evolved at an international strategy
meeting held in Ottawa in October, 2002. Here participants agreed
that the main goals would be to split the World Water Council
"consensus" on a corporate model of water governance and to promote
a new democracy model of water governance. It was understood that
the Forum, unlike a meeting of the World Bank or the WTO, will
attract thousands of people who might actually agree with the
emerging civil society consensus around water and that it is
essential to put forward an alternative vision at the event.
The 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto will play a major role in
determining the future of the world's freshwater resources. Civil
society must be there in strength. Future generations depend on
it.
Additional Links on World Water Forum and Water Privatization
"Day of Africa" at World Water Forum
http://ap.world.water-forum3.com/themeWwf/en/themeShow.do?id=27
(includes some panel presentations)
AfricaSan Conference, 2002
http://www.sanicon.net/AfricaSan.php3
(African Sanitation and Hygiene Conference)
Citizens' Network on Essential Services
http://www.challengeglobalization.org
(extensive documentation in Water Policy Series briefings)
Webcast of World Water Forum by IDRC
http://worldwateforum.idrc.ca
Southernlinks
http://www.southernlinks.org
(includes documentation latest European Union pressure on WTO
members to privatize services).
Previous documents in Africa Policy E-Journal
http://www.africafocus.org/docs01/wat0103.php>
http://www.africafocus.org/docs01/wat0105.php>
http://www.africafocus.org/docs01/priv0110.php>
http://www.africafocus.org/docs02/wat0203.php>
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Date distributed (ymd): 030317
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +economy/development+
The Africa Action E-Journal is a free information service
provided by Africa Action, including both original
commentary and reposted documents. Africa Action provides this
information and analysis in order to promote U.S. and
international policies toward Africa that advance economic,
political and social justice and the full spectrum of
human rights.
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