Blue Gold by Barlow and Clarke
Ref: Barlow & Clarke (2002). Blue Gold: The fight to stop the corporate theft of the worlds water. The New Press.
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Summary
Is Water a Need or a Right?
All living ecosystems are sustained by water and the hydrological cycle. The Social, Political, and economic impacts of water scarcity are rapidly becoming a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts springing up around the globe. A handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are now aggressively taking over the management of public water services, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third World’s desperate search for solutions. the hard political questions about water: Who owns it? Should anyone own it? If water is privatized, who will buy it for Nature? How will it be made available to the poor? Who gave transnational corporations the right to buy whole water systems? Who will protect water resources if they are taken over by the private sector? What is the role of government in the stewardship of water? How do those in water-rich countries share with those in water-poor countries? Who is the custodian of Nature’s lifeblood? How do ordinary citizens become involved in the discussion?
We believe that fresh water belongs to the earth and all species and that no one has the right to appropriate it for personal profit. Water is part of the world’s heritage and must be preserved in the public domain for all time and protected by strong local, national, and international law. At stake is the whole notion of “the commons,” the idea that through our public institutions we recognize shared humanity and natural resources to be preserved for future generations. we must abandon the specious notion that we can carelessly abuse the world’s precious water sources because, somehow, technology will come to the rescue.
The reality of shrinking fresh water supplies, the pollution of existing sources, and the growing demand for water; it is inevitable that conflicts will arise over access.
Humans have to stop thinking that there is an endless supply of water that can be used to attend to our every need and desire.
The rule of nature is straightforward. Extractions cannot exceed recharge.
TREATY INITIATIVE THE TREATY INITIATIVE TO SHARE AND PROTECT THE GLOBAL WATER COMMONS We proclaim these truths to be universal and indivisible: That the intrinsic value of the Earth’s fresh water precedes its utility and commercial value, and therefore must be respected and safeguarded by all political, commercial, and social institutions, That the Earth’s fresh water belongs to the Earth and all species, and therefore must not be treated as a private commodity to be bought, sold, and traded for profit. That the global fresh water supply is a shared legacy, a public trust, and a fundamental human right, and therefore, a collective responsibility, And, Whereas, the world’s finite supply of available fresh water is being polluted, diverted, and depleted so quickly that millions of people and species Whereas governments around the world have failed to protect their precious fresh water legacies, Therefore, the nations of the world declare the Earth’s fresh water supply to be a global commons, to be protected and nurtured by all peoples, communities, and governments of all levels and further declare that fresh water will not be allowed to be privatized, commodified, traded, or exported for commercial purposes and must immediately be exempted from all existing and future international and bilateral trade and investment agreements. The parties to this treaty — to include signatory nation-states and Indigenous peoples — further agree to administer the Earth’s fresh water supply as a trust. The signatories acknowledge the sovereign right and responsibility of every nation and homeland to oversee the fresh water resources within their borders and determine how they are managed and shared. Governments all over the world must take immediate action to declare that the waters in their territories are a public good and enact strong regulatory structures to protect them. However, because the world’s fresh water supply is a global commons, it cannot be sold by any institution, government, individual, or corporation for profit. — Written by Maude Barlow and Jeremy Rifkin and unanimously endorsed by the 800 delegates from 35 countries at the summit Water for People and Nature, Vancouver, July 8, 2001.
One of the prime driving forces behind transnational corporations and the expansion of the global economy has been the “growth imperative,” and in recent years, people have begun to recognize that this principle is on a collision course with Nature itself.
There is mounting evidence that we are depleting aquifers at a totally unsustainable rate but we keep on mining groundwater supplies because we won’t stop polluting surface water. And we know that our irrigation practices are not only leading to desertification of land, but destroying water tables as well.
We continue to create conditions that force small farmers to abandon their land and head for overcrowded cities. We implement global trade policies that reward ecologically unsustainable production methods of goods and food. We favor governments that generate low consumer prices by cutting back on domestic regulation of agriculture, food production, chemical use, and industrial dumping. In fact, almost everything we do in modern industrialized society is guaranteed to deepen the global fresh water crisis.
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Hydrologic Cycle
Evapotranspiration (ET): Water evaporates from a plant, earth surface, swamp, river, lake, or the sea.
Cloud Condensation & Precipitation: Water that evaporates from the oceans and water systems of the continents goes into the atmosphere, creating a protective envelope around the planet. It turns into saturated water steams, which create clouds, and when those clouds cool, rain is formed. Raindrops fall on the earth’s surface and soak into the ground, where they become groundwater.
Precipitation (P): Water falls back down to earth.
If the drop of water falls back onto a forest, lake, blade of grass, meadow, or field, it can cooperate with Nature and return to the hydrological cycle because it can be easily absorbed into soil or forest.
Water that falls onto pavement and buildings in urban areas is not absorbed into the soil and instead it heads out to sea. This means that less water exists in the ground and rivers and less evaporates from land. Landlocked countries will receive less rain because the water that should have stayed there (absorbed into the soil or rivers or lakes) has fled out to the ocean.
“The water cycle can be balanced if the volume of water flowing [from] the rivers [on] the continents into oceans equals the volume of water evaporated from the oceans, which comes back to the continents through frontal systems.”
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Earth’s Water Supply
The total amount of water on earth is approximately 1.4 billion km3 (about 330 million mi3).
Available fresh water amounts to less than one-half of one percent of all the water on earth. The rest is sea water, frozen in the polar ice, or water stored in the ground that is inaccessible to us.
The amount of fresh water on earth, however, is approximately 36 million km3 (about 8.6 million mi3), a mere 2.6% of the total. Of this, only 11 million km3 (about 2.6 million mi3), or 0.77%, counts as part of the water cycle in that it circulates comparatively quickly. However, fresh water is renewable only by rainfall. So in the end, humans can rely only on the 34,000 km3 (about 8,000 mi3) of rain that annually form the “runoff” that goes back to the oceans via rivers and groundwater. This is the only water considered “available” for human consumption because it can be harvested without depleting finite water sources.
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Water Sources
Groundwater: Most of the earth’s fresh water is stored underground, just below the surface or deeper down and it is 60x greater in volume than the water that lies on the earth’s surface. There are many types of groundwater.
Meteoric Water: moving groundwater that circulates as part of the water cycle, feeding above-ground rivers and lakes.
Aquifers: underground water reservoirs, which are relatively stable because they are secured in bodies of rock. Many of them are closed systems — that is, they are not fed by meteoric water at all. Wells and boreholes drilled into aquifers are fairly secure sources of water because they tap into these large reservoirs.
Confined Aquifer: covered by a layer of rock or other sediment through which water cannot escape upward.
Unconfined Aquifer: groundwater that goes right up to the level of the water table and a pipe can therefore be drilled down into the aquifer without going through rock or hard sediment.
Lakes
20 ka- 12 ka: Formation of the Great Lakes from glacial meltwater; they contain 20% of the world’s freshwater, making them the largest fresh water system on earth. So vast and deep are these lakes that only the top 75 centimeters (about 30 inches) — one percent of the total water volume — is renewed each year.
Wetlands
Wetlands act as erosion control barriers and provided homes for fish and amphibians and resting grounds for migrating birds. They are an essential part of the habitat of 95% of all commercially harvested fish on the continent and a sanctuary for over half its endangered bird species.
Wetlands also act like sponges, soaking up excess rain and snow melt that would otherwise cause flooding, and they function like kidneys, filtering out dirt, pesticides, and fertilizers before the unwanted runoff reaches lakes and rivers. Once the water is purified, marshes and swamps serve as fresh water storage areas.
Forests
Forests play a vital role in protecting and purifying sources of fresh water. They absorb pollutants before they run off into lakes and rivers, and like wetlands, they prevent flooding, particularly in southern countries subject to widely fluctuating cycles of drought and heavy rains.
Rivers
The Amazon river flows 6,500 km (about 4,000 mi) from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean, contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water discharge into the oceans, and creates the habitat for 3,000 species of fish alone — more than any other river in the world. During the dry season, the forests around the river are relatively dry, but when the rains come (lasting about five to seven months every year), the river may rise to levels of up to 30’ (about 9m). With no buffer, such a huge volume of water would wash the soil from the Amazon’s banks into the river, leaving the land devastated. But the plants and trees of the Amazonian rainforest can provide erosion control because they are adapted to living submerged or half-submerged for a good part of the year.
Flooded forests intercept about 15% of the region’s rainfall and act as a protective sponge, absorbing the huge volumes of seasonal rain. He says that removing these forests would lead to as much as 4,000 m3 per hA (about 56,000 ft3 per acre) per year directly hitting the ground and causing massive erosion of the soil into the Amazon River.
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—Water Issues—
The “drying out” of the earth will cause drought; massive global warming, with its attendant extremes in weather; less protection from the atmosphere; increased solar radiation; decreased biodiversity; the melting of polar ice caps; submersion of vast territories; and massive continental desertification.
Global deforestation, destruction of wetlands, the dumping of pesticides and fertilizers into waterways, and global warming are all taking a terrible toll on the earth’s fragile water systems.
The effect of urbanization, industrial agriculture, deforestation, paving, infrastructure building, and dam construction are drastically changing water resource availability.
Responsible management of the environment by governments through laws and regulations is frequently viewed as a liability that decreases international competitiveness.
Water Resource Extraction
Draining bulk water from lake and river basins disrupts ecosystems, damages natural habitat, reduces biodiversity, and dries up aquifers and underground water systems.
In the northern hemisphere, we have harnessed and tamed three-quarters of the flow from the world’s major rivers to power our cities.
Water & Urbanization
It is generally accepted that water consumption in urban centers breaks down at 65 to 70% industrial, 20 to 25% institutional, and 10% domestic.
As the earth’s surface is paved over — denuded of forests and meadows, and drained of natural springs and creeks — less P is staying in river basins and continental watersheds, where it is needed, and more is heading out to sea, where it becomes salty.
An estimated 1.5 billion people (about one-quarter of the world’s total population) now depend on groundwater for their drinking water.
Extensive wetlands are natural barriers acting as buffers against severe weather and protecting the shorelines from waves have been mercilessly removed for industry and urbanization.
The single biggest threat to fresh water species is pollution from thousands and thousands of factories, industrial farms, and cities that pour or leak pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides (including nitrates and phosphates), bacteria, medical waste, chemicals, and radioactive wastes into our water. There, they add excess organic matter and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which create algae, which in turn, rob the water of its oxygen. They also contribute disease-carrying pathogens such as cryptosporidium and sediment that smothers habitats.
In the Southern Hemisphere over 50% of municipal water and 60 to 75% of irrigation water is lost because of leaky pipes and related problems
Dams
Dams are built for several reasons: to provide hydroelectricity; to facilitate navigation; to create reservoirs for cities and agricultural irrigation; and to control flooding.
Scientists with the World Conservation Union reported to the UN-sponsored World Commission on Dams: “We conclude that . . . dam projects are the major cause of imperilment and loss of freshwater biodiversity.”
Water & Industry
It takes 400,000 liters (105,000 US gal) of water to make one car.
Oil extraction requires nine barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil.
Water & Agriculture
Globally, there are now about 230 million hA (about 570 million acres) of land under irrigation.
Humans obtain 40% of their food from irrigated land.
Irrigation for crop production claims 65 to 70% of all water used by humans. While some of this water use is for small farms, particularly in the Third World, increasing amounts are being used for industrial farming, which notoriously overuses and wastes water. These corporate farming practices are subsidized by the governments of industrialized countries and their taxpayers, and this creates a strong disincentive for farm operations to move to conservation practices such as drip irrigation.
Massive groundwater overpumping and aquifer depletion are now serious problems in most of the world’s most intensive agricultural areas and they are reaching critical levels in many of the world’s large cities.
Where water resources have already thinned out, people have often turned to irrigation as a solution. This may appear to be a good decision, but the long-term effects of many kinds of irrigation are startling.
All water contains some salt, and irrigation water that is not properly drained leaves a salt residue. This salt then builds up, eventually making the soil unusable for farming.
Factory Farming: large-scale farms now mass-produce animals, confining them in crowded feedlots and factory-style barns. These operations create a staggering amount of manure — more than 130x the amount of human waste produced in the United States. Texas alone creates an estimated 280 billion lbs (127 billion kg) of manure annually — 40 lbs (18 kg) per Texan. In factory-farm operations throughout North America, millions of gal of liquefied animal feces are stored in open lagoons that emit over 400 different volatile, dangerous compounds into the atmosphere. These “sew-erless cities” generate so much surplus manure that it cannot be stored or disposed of safely. Some large hog farms produce volumes of untreated hog manure equivalent to the human waste of a city of 360,000 people.
Excessive N: Massive quantities of N are injected into the environment in the mass production of food. Intensive farming uses such high concentrations of N fertilizers that the practice has destabilized Nature’s N balance and fouled water sources. In its natural state, N is an innocuous molecule that makes up 79% of the air we breathe. As the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy explains, before human dominance of the world’s ecosystems, the primary sources of N were biologically natural and the earth adapted to recycling the chemical efficiently. Little excess N existed. But the massive use of N fertilizers and other manufactured sources of N has pushed twice as much of the chemical into the environment as was found there before these inputs were used.
Hypoxia: The doubling of N in water and soil cycles has had a profound impact on the world’s ecosystems. Excess N in water lowers the level of O, which in turn affects the metabolism and growth of O-dependent species. This leads to a condition called hypoxia.
Salinity has affected a fifth of the world’s agricultural land, and each year it forces farmers to abandon a million hA (about 2.5 million acres) of farmland.
Water & Pollution
With rainfall, toxic and carcinogenic substances in farm chemicals are washed through the soil and into surface and underground water systems, polluting and poisoning the water supply.
Helicobacter pylori, usually caused by slime build-up in water pipes; the bacterium causes stomach ulcers and cancer and is particularly prevalent in unchlorinated well water and water supplies in developing countries.
Hg poisoning can cause blindness, reproductive failure, and brain damage.
Plastic bags, manufactured by the trillions every year, require 1,000 years to decompose on land and 450 years to decompose in water.
50-70% of all drugs pass through us; prescription pills leak chemicals and hormones into our public water systems, affecting people for whom they were not meant.
Biomedical Oxygen Demand (BOD): The rate at which O is used up by algae; used to measure pollution. The entire process is called hypertrophication, or “galloping eutrophication.”
Pollutants enter groundwater in many ways; leaky gasoline tanks and municipal sewage lagoons, municipal landfills, feedlot effluent, mine tailings, septic tank ruptures, oil spills, pesticide runoff, and even road salt are all sources of groundwater pollutants. They form leachate, which is carried into groundwater when it rains.
Some of these heavy pollutants are extremely powerful. For example, a standard 200 liter (53-US-gal) drum of the oily industrial solvent trichloroethylene would need to be diluted with 60 billion liters (about 16 billion US gal) of water to make it harmless. Another lethal heavy pollutant is methyl tertiary butyl (MTBE), a methanol-based gasoline additive. Although it is known that a few drops of MTBE can contaminate a mid-sized aquifer, this chemical has been found leaking into over ten thousand wells throughout the state of California.
Treated Waste can be lethal; while treatment will remove fecal coliform bacteria, the best-known variety of which is the deadly E. coli, it does not remove the toxic chemicals contained in wastewater.
“Just one drop of oil can render 25 liters [6.6 US gallons] of water unsafe for drinking. One gram [0.04 ounces] of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a substance used in everything from cosmetics to pesticides, is enough to make one billion liters [about a quarter of a billion US gallons] of water unfit for freshwater life.”
Desalination produces a lethal by-product: for every gallon of sea water processed, only one-third becomes fresh water. The remaining two-thirds is a highly saline brine that, when dumped back into the ocean at high temperatures, is a major source of marine pollution.
Water & Ecology
Bioaccumulation: An increasingly higher concentration of chemicals move up the food chain.
12% of all animal species, including 41% of all recognized fish species, live in the less than one percent of the earth’s surface that is fresh water.
National Geographic reports that one billion lbs (about half a billion kg) of industrial weed and bug killers are used throughout the United States every year, and most of it runs off into the country’s water systems. Because of pollutants like this, nearly 40% of U.S. rivers and streams are too dangerous for fishing, swimming, or drinking, and fish and other water-dwelling wildlife have become living toxic-waste carriers. 37% of fresh water fish are at risk of extinction, 64% of crayfish and 40% of amphibians are imperiled, and 67% of fresh water mussels are extinct or vulnerable to extinction.
Humans must see ourselves as one species among many, whose existence, like that of all species, depends on our living within the rules of the natural world.
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Environmental Organizations
Worldwatch Institute
World Resources Institute
UN Environment Programme
International Rivers Network
Greenpeace
Clean Water Network
Sierra Club
Friends of the Earth International
The International Joint Commission: oversees the Canada-U.S. management of the Great Lakes.
The Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security: a highly respected think tank on water issues based in California.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council to the UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
The UN Development Programme (UNDP)
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
The World Health Organization (WHO)
UNICEF
The International Monetary Fund (IMF): The multilateral lending vehicle for the central banks of governments.
World Bank: Operates mainly as the multilateral lending vehicle for the private banks.
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD): provides loans to governments and is in the position to impose conditions like the privatization of public water systems.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD): provides loans for both public and private sector investments in central and eastern Europe, has also provided a lot of cash that has helped the cause of the major water enterprises.
World Trade Organization (WTO): has a mandate to work progressively towards eliminating all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers. It does so by creating and enforcing an extensive body of international trade rules, including the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and a battery of other trade agreements that have been negotiated with its 142 member states.
US Agency for International Development (USAID): Provides “development assistance” to other countries:
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Water & Climate Change
Only one-fifth of the planet is still covered with sustainable forests, stated the report, and few of those are protected by governments. Worse, the assault on those that are left is relentless. Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s executive director, was direct in his prognosis: “Short of a miraculous transformation in the attitude of people and governments, the Earth’s remaining closed-canopy forests and associated biodiversity are destined to disappear in the coming decades.”
With higher temperatures, there is more energy driving the Earth’s climatic systems, which in turn causes more violent weather events. Severe storms, floods, droughts, dust storms, sea surges, crumbling coastlines, salt water intrusion of groundwater, failing crops, dying forests, the inundation of low-lying islands, and the spread of endemic diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and schistosomiasis is in the cards if the consumption of fossil fuels is not phased out.
According to the highly respected Hadley Centre, an environmental think tank in the United Kingdom, sea-level rise will result in about 40 to 50% of the world’s coastal wetlands being lost by 2080.
As global warming raises the surface temperature of the earth, the soil water needed to sustain the fresh water cycle evaporates more readily. Surface water (the water in lakes and rivers) also evaporates more and the snowpacks needed to replenish fresh water supplies become smaller and fewer. That is, when snow melts unseasonably, it evaporates instead of melting into the streams that feed lakes. And these lakes pose some problems of their own when they no longer freeze over. Water evaporates at a far slower rate when it is under ice cover, leaving more water behind to seep into the ground. When there is less freezing, more of that water is lost to the atmosphere. Similarly, as glaciers left over from the Ice Age melt, the river systems they feed will lose water. In Canada, the glacier that is feeding Alberta’s Bow River is melting so quickly that in 50 years, there will not likely be any water left in the river except for the occasional flash flood.
Global warming also has a negative impact on the residence time of a lake. No water is static, but a given water molecule will stay in a particular area for a certain period of time. Residence time, as naturalist E.C. Pielou explains, is the average length of time that any particular water molecule remains in a lake; it is calculated by dividing the volume of water in the lake by the rate at which water leaves it. In northwestern Canada, climate change is already dramatically affecting the residence time of a number of lakes. In one study, rainfall in the area decreased by almost 1,000 to 650 mm (about 39 to 26 in) every year, while above-average temperatures speeded up evaporation from the lakes. As a result, the residence time in just one of the lakes studied increased from 5 to 18 years over 15 years. This means that the lake is taking almost 4x as long to renew itself as it did only several years ago.
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—International Water Issues—
North Americans use 1,280 m3 (about 45,000 ft3) of water per person every year; Europeans use 694; Asians use 535; South Americans use 311; and Africans use 186.
Ten years from now, India will have an extra 250 million people and Pakistan’s population will almost double, to 210 million. In five of the world’s “hot spots” of water dispute — the Aral Sea region, the Ganges, the Jordan, the Nile, and the Tigris-Euphrates — the populations of the nations within each basin are projected to climb by between 45 and 75% by 2025. By that year, China will see a population increase greater than the entire population of the United States, and the world will house an additional 2.6 billion people — a 57% increase over today’s level of 6.1.
According to the UN, 31 countries in the world are currently facing water stress and scarcity. Over one billion people have no access to clean drinking water and almost three billion have no access to sanitation services. By the year 2025, the world will contain 2.6 billion more people than it holds today, but as many as two-thirds of those people will be living in conditions of serious water shortage, and one-third will be living with absolute water scarcity. Demand for water will exceed availability by 56%.
China, the United States, India, and Pakistan — account for more than half the irrigated land in the world, and all are experiencing increasing problems with drought, desertification, topsoil erosion, and water shortages.
Half the people on this planet lack basic sanitation services. Every time they take a drink of water, they are ingesting what Anne Platt of the Worldwatch Institute calls water-borne killers. So it is not surprising that 80% of all disease in the poor countries of the South is spread by consuming unsafe water. The statistics are sobering: 90% of the Third World’s wastewater is still discharged untreated into local rivers and streams; water-borne pathogens and pollution kill 25 million people every year; every eight seconds, a child dies from drinking contaminated water; and every year, diarrhea kills nearly three million children, a full quarter of the deaths in this age group. The declining quality of the world’s water has also caused malaria, cholera, and typhoid to occur more frequently in many places where they had been all but wiped out.
India
India is home to the most polluted water in Asia, outside of China.
Nearly 200 million liters (about 53 million US gal) of untreated sewage pour into the Yamuna River from Delhi’s sewage system every day. The river is now considered to be irreparably damaged.
India that has the highest volume of annual groundwater overdraft of any nation in the world. In most parts of the country, water mining is taking place at twice the rate of natural recharge, causing aquifer water tables to drop by 3’ to 10’ (about 1 to 3 m) per year. Especially hard hit are the Punjab and Haryana states, India’s breadbasket, and the northwestern state of Gujarat, where 90% of the wells have experienced a serious decline in water level. In the state of Tamil Nadu, groundwater tables have fallen as much as 99’ (about 3m) in 30 years, and many aquifers have run dry. In the state of Rajasthan, the water system of the city of Jodhpur literally exploded when the water table beneath the city was drained dry. And in the Punjab and in the country of Bangladesh, the drop in the water table is even greater than China’s, even though those places experience flooding every year. According to the International Water Management Institute, a quarter of India’s grain harvest could be lost in the near future because of aquifer depletion.
Under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to secure revenues to pay down their debt load, the Government of India has been selling water rights to global water corporations, including Suez and Vivendi, and to major industries requiring heavy water use for their production operations.
China
In China, 80% of the major rivers are so degraded that they no longer support fish. The Yangtze River is contaminated with 40 million tons of industrial waste and raw sewage every day, and the water in the Yellow River is so polluted that it cannot be used even for irrigation. China’s rivers are laced with intensive concentrations of human waste.
China has almost one-quarter of the world’s population but only 6 percent of its fresh water.
Water tables on the North China Plain — China’s breadbasket — are dropping 1.5 m (about 5’) a year, and northern China now has eight regions of aquifer overdraft. Four hundred of the country’s six hundred northern cities are already facing severe water shortages, as is over half of China’s population.
The Three Gorges Dam will displace 1,100,000 people.
Africa
90% of wastewater produced in the Third World is still discharged, untreated, into local rivers and streams. Africa’s Lake Victoria is imperiled by the dumping of millions of liters of raw sewage and industrial waste from the cities of surrounding Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
South Africa, the only country in the world where people’s right to water is actually written into the national constitution.
Lake Chad, one of the last large water bodies in the center of Africa, has shrunk by more than 90% since 1960, and irrigation is acknowledged as the main culprit.
Most African countries start with a limited water supply, which is then stretched even further by drought, population growth, and pollution.
The Nubian Aquifer is one of the world’s most extensive: Already, over one billion m3 (about 35 billion ft3) of water a year are being mined; when fully operational, the volume of water pumped from the aquifer will be 40 billion m3 (about 1,400 billion ft3) a year — equal to the flow of any great river.
In Lusaka, Zambia, low-income families spend, on average, half their household income on water.
Middle East
40% of Israel’s groundwater supply originates in occupied territories.
The acknowledged worst case is the infamous Aral Sea, a basin shared by Afghanistan, Iran, and five countries of the former Soviet Union. An inland saltwater lake, it was once the world’s fourth largest lake, fed by two powerful rivers, the Amu and the Syr. Years ago, the central planners of the former Soviet Union decided to irrigate the central plains of Asia and the deserts of Uzbek and Kazakh with water diverted from the rivers that feed the Aral Sea, in order to grow cotton for export. They created a vast system of mechanized agriculture based on intense irrigation and heavy use of pesticides and herbicides. For a while, the plan worked economically. Between 1940 and 1980, the Soviet Union became the world’s second-largest cotton producer. But the experiment has been catastrophic for long-term prosperity, for the environment, and for the people of the region. The Aral Sea has lost 80 percent of its volume and what is left is ten times saltier than it was. Its surrounding wetlands have shrunk by 85 percent. Almost all fish and waterfowl species have been decimated and the fisheries have collapsed entirely. Without the moderating influence of the sea, temperatures in the region have become more extreme and the season for growing food has shortened. Each year, winds pick up 40 to 150 million tons of a toxic salt-mixture from the dry sea bed and dump it on the surrounding farmlands. Millions of “ecological refugees” have fled the area. Those who stay face soaring cancer rates, partly as a result of heavy use of pesticides. In addition, a now-deserted island in the sea was once used for biological weapons testing and research by the Soviets. Because of the receding waters, the island will soon meet the mainland, and the germs and containments will be linked to the mainland. In a magazine article published in 1987, government water planners pronounced the sea nearly dead: “May the Aral Sea die in a beautiful manner,” they wrote. “It is useless.”
North America
It is estimated that the pulp and paper industry is responsible for fully half of all the waste dumped into Canada’s waters.
The Ogallala aquifer is probably the world’s most famous underground body of water. It is the largest single water-bearing unit in North America, covering more than half a million km2 (about 190,000 mi2) of the American High Plains regions. It stretches from the Texas panhandle to South Dakota and is believed to contain about 4 trillion tons of water — 20% more water than Lake Huron in the Great Lakes. Although it is made up of fossil water — water locked deep underground for thousands of years with few sources of replenishment — it is being mined mercilessly by over 200,000 wells irrigating 3.3 million hA (about 8.2 million acres) of farmland — one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States. At a withdrawal rate of 50 million liters (about 13 million US gal) a minute, water in the Ogallala aquifer is being depleted 14x faster than Nature can restore it. Since 1991, each year the water table in the aquifer has dropped by at least a meter (about three feet) — a huge amount when multiplied by the aquifer’s area. By some estimates, more than half of its water is already gone.
The American government, who give out US$28 billion a year in crop subsidies and tax breaks to farmers of CA who follow these damaging practices. The farmers can’t resist; it’s called “farming the government.” The more bad practices they use, the more water they waste, the more money they get. In California, farmers rarely pay more than 20% of the real cost of irrigated water. So instead of planting crops that would be more appropriate to a semi-arid region, they grow crops like cotton. They also grow alfalfa, which is fed to beef cattle. It takes at least 15,000 tons of water to produce a ton of beef and nearly that much to produce a ton of cotton. To produce wheat or soybeans requires only 2% as much water. But the American government continues to subsidize these crops, paying farmers to waste water and erode the soil.
The American government — like other governments around the world — will have to stop subsidizing industrial, resource-depleting agriculture and support sustainable, smaller-scale farming and encourage the cultivation of more drought-resistant crops.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than half the wells in the United States are contaminated with pesticides and nitrates. Pesticides and chemicals such as perchloroethylene, or “perc”; PCBs; and dioxins accumulate in the body fat of animals, fish, and humans and are linked to cancer.
In one horrific example of the effect of synthetic fertilizers on water systems, many of the nitrates spread on farm fields all over the American Midwest do not stay there, but leach instead into the Mississippi River through streams and tributary rivers. The sum total of all the N runoff then moves down the river and heads out to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created a “dead zone” of 18,000 km2 (about 6,900 mi2) — about the size of New Jersey — where no life can survive.
The average Canadian household consumes 500,000 liters of water every year (about 130,000 US gallons); each toilet — and many homes have more than one — uses 18 liters of water per flush (about five US gallons). And enormous amounts of water are lost through leakage in municipal infrastructure in countries all over the world.
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Water, Politics, and Economics
'Washington Consensus': a model of economics rooted in the belief that liberal market economics constitute the one and only economic choice for the whole world. Key to this “consensus” is the commodification of “the commons.” Everything is for sale, even those areas of life, such as social services and natural resources, that were once considered the common heritage of humanity.
In this age of economic globalization, the primary role of the state is to provide a secure place and climate for profitable transnational investment and competition.
Water Privatization: generally, occurs in one of three forms:
Corporate Owned: Complete sell-off by governments of public water delivery and treatment systems to corporations, as has happened in the United Kingdom.
Public- Private Partnership: Water Corporations are granted concessions or leases by governments to take over the delivery of the service and carry the cost of operating and maintain the system, while collecting all the revenues for the water service and keeping the surplus as a profit; France. This is the most common.
A corporation is contracted by the government to manage water services for an administrative fee, but is not able to take over the collection of revenues, let alone reap profits from surpluses.
Due to substantial cuts in corporate taxes almost everywhere, for example, many local governments no longer have the tax revenues necessary to cover their operations, let alone public services. As a result, governments and public institutions find themselves plagued by crippling debt and deficit problems. To make matters worse, deteriorating water infrastructure like leaky pipes has become a major problem in both industrialized and nonindustrialized countries — especially in inner cities where government spending on public works has been drastically curtailed.
Once privatization schemes are implemented, public controls diminish substantially — even though the public has paid for financial guarantees. Most privatized water systems involve long-term concession contracts lasting between 20 and 30 years, and these contracts are extremely difficult to cancel, even if unsatisfactory performance can be demonstrated.
Standpoint: an ethical framework that informs one’s purpose and one’s work. “Where you stand and where you look, tell you what is in the foreground, what is in the background, what is big and what is small.” A standpoint brings a sense of priority, a sense of proportion, and a sense of obligation. Having the courage to find a place to stand, and if necessary, fight for what you believe, is required before any person or movement can effect real social change. The tragedy of most modern governments is that they have embraced economic globalization, which denies the standpoint of community or environmental stewardship in favor of the sole standpoint of profit.-Dr. Franklin.
The root of the problem in Buenos Aires was the fact that a private corporation, whose main goal was to increase profit, was delivering a service that should have been provided by the government on a nonprofit basis. No matter how responsibly a transnational carries out its business, such commercial enterprises are simply not designed, first and foremost, to serve the public interest. Nor are they organized as sustainable enterprises to conserve resources. Since maximizing profits often means encouraging increased consumption, private water delivery enterprises will not work to reduce consumption. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly abandoning their responsibility as guardians of “the commons” — the resources essential to the common good that belong to one and all.
A public water system would not need to have sharply increased water rates due to reduced consumption levels, because it would not have been driven by the imperative to maximize profits.
Jones Act: In the United States, shipment of goods from one U.S. port to another is subject to a Jones Act provision which insists on the use of U.S. vessels crewed by U.S. sailors.
Alien Tort Claims Act: allows foreigners to sue U.S. companies for damages caused abroad.
Under GATT rules, water — defined as “natural or artificial waters and aerated waters” — is understood to be a tradable commodity. And Article XI of the GATT rules specifically prohibits the use of export controls for any purpose and eliminates quantitative restrictions on imports and exports. This means that if a water-rich country placed a ban or even a quota on the export of bulk water for sound environmental reasons, that decision could be challenged under the WTO as a trade-restrictive measure and a violation of international trade rules.
According to Article XX of the GATT rules, member countries can still adopt laws “necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health . . . relating to the conservation of exhaustible natural resources if such measures are made effective in conjunction with restrictions on domestic production or consumption.”
The rules themselves are a set of legally binding constraints, designed to restrict the limits a government can put on the rights of private sector service providers to sell those services.
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World Water Market
Tier 1: Composed of the two largest water titans in the world, making up 70% of the market:
Vivendi Universal (France): Operates in 90 countries.
Suez (France): Operates in 130 countries.
Tier 2: Four corporations or consortiums with water service operations that are (or have been) best positioned to challenge the market monopoly of the two titans:
Bouygues-SAUR
RWE-Thames Water
Bechtel-United Utilities
Enron-Azurix
Tier 3: Three British companies and one U.S.-based enterprise:
Severn Trent
Anglian Water
The Kelda Group
American Water Works Company
They all see themselves as multi-utility providers, their range of expertise as water corporations generally covering four types of services: (1) water and wastewater services; (2) water treatment facilities; (3) water-related construction and engineering; and (4) innovative technologies such as desalination of sea water.
The big bottled-water industry — still largely unregulated — is growing at a furious pace. The industry now rakes in $46 billion worth of profit every year, up from $22 billion just three years ago. On average, every European now consumes over one hundred liters of bottled water annually and pays 1,100x more than he or she would for tap water. A massive amount of plastic — 1.5 million tons a year — is now used to supply this industry, and most of it ends up in landfill and waterways where it leaks toxins into the ground and water.
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Water Solutions
Water belongs to the earth and to all species.
Equal access to water is absolutely central to both life and justice.
Water should be left where it is whenever possible.
While there may be an obligation to share water (and food) in times of crisis, it is not a desirable long-term solution.
Importing water is not a desirable long-term solution for either the ecosystems or the peoples of water-scarce regions of the world. Since water is essential to life, no one should become dependent on foreign supplies that could be cut off for political or environmental reasons.
The only strategy for conserving water that has proved successful in time of scarcity is the renewal and rejuvenation of common property rights so that patterns of use are governed by Nature’s limits of renewability and the social limits of water equity.
There is no source of life comparable to water within the ecosystem, apart from soil and air.
Treat Water as part of the commons.
Water must be conserved for all time.
Polluted water must be reclaimed.
Rigorous laws must be passed and enforced to control water pollution from agriculture, municipal discharge, and industrial contaminants — the leading causes of water degradation.
Water is best protected in natural watersheds.
Live within naturally formed “bioregions,” or watersheds.
Bioregionalism: Living within the ecological constraints of a region.
Thinking in terms of watersheds, not political or bureaucratic boundaries, will lead to more collaborative protection and decision making.
Water is a public trust, to be guarded by all levels of government.
Each level of government must protect its water trust:
Municipal level: urban centers should no longer divert water resources from rural areas to service their own needs.
Municipal and regional levels: watershed cooperation should be carried out to protect larger river and lake systems.
National and international legislation should apply the rule of law to transnational corporations and end abusive corporate practices.
Water Pricing
The focus must be placed on those who use water most and who thereby remove the benefits of this common good from the community in the form of profits.
The full cost of water extraction and distribution, including the cost to the environment, has not been factored into the commercial equation. And this cost must be taken into account and legislation must be brought forward that reflects that accounting.
To be both effective and just, any serious consideration of water pricing must take into account three factors:
The global poverty gap
Water as a human right
Water in (and for) Nature.
If water is sold, it must be through a fair pricing system based on ability to pay, guaranteed free water for basic necessities, and a just tax system. Then, the revenues raised from this fair pricing system must be made available to remedy water problems in any part of the world and to work toward ensuring universal access to water. Specifically, monies raised through fair pricing would help make the following improvements: ensure that a basic amount of water and basic sanitation are guaranteed to every person on earth regardless of ability to pay; protect the environment and restore watersheds; enforce clean water standards; and repair faulty infrastructure, which is currently the cause of great amounts of water wastage.
There are several immediate actions governments could take. These include canceling Third World debt; bringing foreign aid budgets back up to their previous standards (0.7% of GDP); and implementing a “Tobin Tax” on financial speculation that would pay for water infrastructure and universal water services.
Water pricing, whereby industry pressures governments for subsidies and circumvents city utility equipment to directly pump water, thus paying much less than residential water users; water mining, whereby companies gain rights to deplete aquifers while driving up the access costs to smaller users such as family farmers; water ranching, whereby industry buys up water rights of ranches and farmers; and waste dumping, whereby industry contaminates the local water sources and leaves the community with polluted water or a costly cleanup bill.
If governments need to price water in order to preserve it from careless waste, the practice must be done within a public system in which the proceeds go not to shareholders or corporate CEOs, but to water reclamation and infrastructure repair, and universally accessible water supply.
Access to an adequate supply of clean water is a basic human right.
The best advocates for water are local communities and citizens.
Implement a “local sources first” policy
The public must participate as an equal partner with government to protect water.
Fair water-pricing system: that communities themselves determine local water needs; that any pricing take place only after basic water needs for all are met; that all households and organizations, public and private, be required to make lump sum payments to a community water fund, the amount to be determined on the basis of resources; that the unit price of water per household or organization rise steeply after a certain threshold of sustainability has been exceeded; and that water use beyond the limits the community has set be subject to punitive sanctions.
Economic globalization policies are not water-sustainable.
Economic globalization undermines local communities by allowing for easy mobility of capital and the theft of local resources.
Liberalized trade and investment enables some countries to live beyond their ecological and water resource means while others abuse their limited water sources to grow crops for export.
There is a growing call to give water true economic value by pricing it on a cost-recovery basis.
To truly deal with the global water poverty gap, wealthy nations must share their financial resources not to promote non-sustainable water systems whose main purpose is to garner huge profits for large transnational corporations, but to establish sustainable water systems.
The water crisis cannot be viewed in isolation from other major environmental issues such as clearcutting of forests and human-induced climate change. The destruction of waterways due to clearcutting severely harms fish habitat. Climate change will cause (and is already causing) more extreme weather conditions: floods will be higher, storms will be more severe, and droughts will be more persistent — the pressure on existing fresh water supplies will be magnified.
Water, like air, belongs to the earth and to all species, no one has the right to appropriate it or profit from it at someone else’s expense. It is a public trust that must be protected by all levels of government and by communities everywhere. This means that water should not be privatized, commodified, traded, or exported in bulk for commercial purposes.
Water should also be exempted from all existing and future international and bilateral trade and investment agreements, and governments must ban the commercial trade in large-scale water projects.
Legislation to ban or at least strongly regulate factory farms is urgent. Legislation is also needed at all levels to ban or control the use of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, chemical nitrates, and fertilizers.
Rejection of large-scale dams and diversions. Rivers that once flowed to the sea must be freed again to enrich watersheds, create habitat for aquatic life, and sustain the rich spawning grounds where fresh water meets seawater.
Fix or Replace existing water infrastructure
Drip systems that replace flood systems deliver water directly to individual root plants, eliminating evaporation — thus cutting down on salt build-up and saving water and energy. Drip irrigation is 95% efficient, in that almost all the water goes directly to the plant, compared with traditional irrigation, which loses up to 80% of its water in evaporation or runoff.
Priority on improving aging and broken water-delivery infrastructure.
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Water Constitution
Promote “Water Lifeline Constitutions.”
Declare water a public trust to be guarded for all time by our elected leaders.
Every person in the world should be guaranteed a “water lifeline” of at least 25 liters (about 6.5 US gallons) of free clean water each day as an inalienable political and social right. This must be guaranteed by national and international law and made possible by a combination of three measures: strict water preservation practices, enforced by legislation; taxing those who benefit from excessive water use, such as agribusiness, mining firms, and high-tech water guzzlers; and pricing careless or unduly high-water use.
Establish local “Water Governance Councils.”
Local Water Governance Councils could monitor and protect local water supplies, observe local farming practices, and report on polluting industries.
Fight for “National Water Protection Acts.”
A Water Lifeline Constitution guaranteeing every citizen access to clean water and sanitation services
Water Pricing, including establishing strict conditions on the pricing of water based on equity, universality, higher fees for agribusiness and industry, and sanctions against water abuse.
Water Conservation including regulatory frameworks to protect watersheds.
Drinking Water Testing and Standards.
Water Standards for Industry and Agribusiness.
Water-Friendly Technology, including alternative sources of power like solar energy.
Charging companies high rate structures for water extraction.
Oppose the commercial trade in water.
Governments must enact laws that ban the commercial export of bulk water by tanker, water bags, and diversion.
Water as a good, a service, and an investment must be exempted from all existing free trade agreements, including the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and all Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) between nations.
Support the anti-dam movement.
Confront the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Challenge the Lords of Water.
Legislation must also put an end to water-access preference and subsidized water rates for corporations.
Address Global Equity.
Promote the “Water Commons Treaty Initiative.”
Support a “Global Water Convention.”
Adopt the Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons.
Integrate the right to water into the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other existing charters and conventions dealing with the rights of women, children, and Indigenous peoples.
Establish adequate forms of water management on a global scale.
Draft a body of international law that would enforce the principles of the Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons.
Set global targets for access to water for all persons.
Coordinate nation-state laws to protect, preserve, and reclaim water.
Create new legally binding environmental treaties to protect the world’s water from pollution and exploitation.
Bring together parliamentarians from all countries to settle water disputes through the principles of equitable distribution and “peace through water equity.”
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Chronology
Mar, 2003: The Third World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan; the World Water Council held the largest gathering ever on the issue of the future of the world’s water.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
5 June, 2001: In response to reports that 44% of the Ghanaian population have no access to water services, the coalition issued the “Accra Declaration on the Right to Water”. The coalition itself is committed to a program of action that includes a broad-based campaign to ensure all Ghanaians have universal access to water by 2010; constitutional guarantees for people’s right to water; public ownership, control, and management of water services; and promotion of alternative solutions to problems of public management efficiency.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
2001: for the first time in recorded history, the Rio Grande ceased to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
2000: Vivendi and Suez were ranked 91st and 118th, respectively, in the Global Fortune 500. Between them, they own, or have controlling interests in, water companies in over 130 countries on all five continents, and combined, they currently distribute water services to more than a hundred million people around the world.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1999: Coke launches Dasani to challenge Pepsi’s Aquafina.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1999: Hundreds of residents of the capital city, Dhaka, attacked a power supply office, barricaded roads, and burned vehicles in the spring of that year to protest the scarcity of running water.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
Mar, 1999: The US Based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that In contrast to the market image of “pure spring water” that is projected by the industry, bottled water is not always safer than tap water and some is less so. The report found that one-third of the 103 brands of bottled water it studied contained levels of contamination, including traces of arsenic and E. coli. One-quarter of all bottled water is actually taken from the tap, though it is further processed and purified to some degree, said the NRDC study, and in many countries, bottled water itself is subject to less rigorous testing and lower purity standards than tap water. “One brand of ‘spring water,’” reported the NRDC, “ . . . actually came from a well in an industrial facility’s parking lot, near a hazardous waste dump. And periodically was contaminated with industrial chemicals at levels above FDA standards.”-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1997: Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced plans to open a major water market among the users of the Colorado River. The new system would allow interstate sales of Colorado River water between Arizona, Nevada, and California.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1997: Malaysia, which supplies about half of Singapore’s water, threatened to cut off that supply after Singapore criticized its government policies.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1994: Pepsi begins bottling and marketing Aquafina.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1994: 326 groups and coalitions in 44 countries endorsed the Manibeli Declaration Calling for a Moratorium on World Bank Funding of Large Dams, named for the heroic resistance of the people of the village of Manibeli in India’s Narmada Valley. This declaration called for an immediate moratorium on all World Bank funding of large dams until the Bank carries out the following measures: establish a fund to provide reparations to displaced people; guarantee no forced resettlement in countries without the capacity to ensure full livelihood and human rights protection; agree to evaluate all existing large dams and their environmental and social costs; integrate all World Bank projects into locally approved comprehensive river basin management plans; and allow for independent monitoring and auditing of all projects.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1994: Nelson Mandela elected as president of South Africa.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1993: British Columbia government bans bulk water exports.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1992: U.S. Congress passed a bill allowing farmers, for the first time in U.S. history, to sell their water rights to cities.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1991: A Chinese ship dumped its sewage into a bay in Lima, Peru, and within three weeks, cholera had spread up and down the coast, causing acute diarrhea, severe dehydration, and sometimes death. In the first year alone, nearly three thousand Peruvians died. Over the next two years, this one outbreak gradually contaminated the water supply of all but two countries in Latin America, infecting five hundred thousand people.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1988: The zebra mussel is introduced into the Caspian Sea by a ship’s ballast.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
1988: 1988 San Francisco Declaration of the International Rivers Network: The Position of Citizens’ Organizations on Large Dams and Water Resource Management. This declaration sets conditions for the construction of any dam, including: transparency of process; exploration of more environmentally sound alternatives; environmental, social, and economic impact assessments; accountability to the local people who have the right of veto; full financial compensation to displaced persons; ecosystem protection; protection of local food supplies; guarantee of local health protection; and the inclusion of environmental and social costs in any economic forecasts.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
2500 BCE: The earliest recorded dam was built in Egypt and was made of earth, as all dams were until concrete was invented.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
20 ka- 12 ka: Formation of the Great Lakes from glacial meltwater; they contain 20% of the world’s freshwater, making them the largest fresh water system on earth. So vast and deep are these lakes that only the top 75 centimeters (about 30 inches) — one percent of the total water volume — is renewed each year.-Blue Gold by Marlow.
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