Maude Barlow - Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Contents

Chapter 1
Where Has All the Water Gone?

Chapter 2
Setting the Stage for Corporate Control of Water

Chapter 3
The Water Hunters Move In

Chapter 4
The Water Warriors Fight Back

Chapter 5
The Future of Water

Chapter 6
Is Canadas Water for Sale?

To all the water warriors. You amaze me.

The rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things thatare in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task,if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in the days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

J.R.R. Tolkien

Acknowledgments

Too many people have been incredibly helpful to me in the writing of this book to name them all here. I reference them either in the body of the book or in the Sources and Further Reading section at the end. With all my heart I thank the many activists, academics and friends in the global water justice movement who have advised and counseled me and passed on great research and important stories.

I would especially like to thank all the wonderful people with whom I work at the Council of Canadians and the Blue Planet Project who share my passion for this work on a daily basis. In particular, Anil Naidoo, Susan Howatt, Steven Shrybman, Melanie ODell, Meera Karunananthan, Brent Patterson, Brant Thompson, Stuart Trew and Wenonah Hauter were enormously supportive of this project.

As well, I wish to acknowledge and thank both the Canada Council for the Arts for its generous support for this book and the Lannan Foundation, which honored me with the 200506 Cultural Freedom Fellowship and a generous grant for my ongoing work.

I have been twice blessed with editors Joel Ariaratnam of The New Press and Susan Renouf of McClelland & Stewart who loved the book from day one and have made it infinitely better than I could have done alone. I am also grateful to Heather Sangster, my copyeditor, and to Elizabeth Kribs at McClelland & Stewart who shepherded this book through a breathtakingly tight schedule.

Finally, I thank my husband, Andrew, who is never-endingly supportive of my work and my passion for the right to water. He and our grandchildren Maddy, Ellie, Angus and Max keep me grounded and give me hope.

Introduction

Water may also be good for the heart

Antoine de Saint-Exupry, The Little Prince

Suddenly it is so clear: the world is running out of fresh water.

Those were the opening words of my 2002 book, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the Worlds Water (co-written with Tony Clarke), which warned that a mighty contest over the worlds dwindling freshwater supplies was brewing. Water would become the oil of the twenty-first century, we wrote, and a water cartel would develop that would attempt to lay claim to the worlds freshwater resources for profit. This would lead to a backlash in communities around the world, we predicted, as well as the growth of a new movement to claim water as part of the global commons.

In the five years since Blue Gold was first published, that contest has blown wide open. On one side are powerful private interests, transnational water and food corporations, most First World governments and most of the major international institutionsincluding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Water Council and parts of the United Nations ( UN ). For these forces, water is a commodity to be sold and traded on the open market. They have established an elaborate infrastructure to promote the private control of water, and they work in close tandem with one another. Their story is told here.

On the other side is a large global water justice movement made up of environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous and womens groups, small farmers, peasants and thousands of grassroots communities fighting for control of their local water sources. Members of this movement believe that water is the common heritage of all humans and other species, as well as a public trust that must not be appropriated for personal profit or denied to anyone because of inability to pay. Although they lack the financial clout of the water cartel, these groups have found one another through innovative networking and have become a formidable political force on the global scene. Their story is told here as well.

Flush with a number of important recent successes, the global water justice movement has now come together around a common goal: to have water declared, once and for all, a human right, and to have this acknowledgment enshrined at all levels of government, from local ordinances, to nation-state constitutions, to a full UN covenant. The fact that water is not at present a recognized human right has allowed decision-making over water policy to shift from the UN and governments toward global institutions and private interests that favor the big water companies and their commodification of the worlds water. This has left untold millions with no legal or moral foundation on which to base their claim that they have the right to enough water for life. Simply put: life requires access to clean water; to deny the right to water is to deny the right to life. The fight for the right to water is an idea whose time has come. It has become the rallying cry of the water justice movement. This story, by no means over, is also told in these pages.

On a personal note, I have been privileged to be an integral part of this incredible struggle, which has taken me to every continent and into remote and often wretchedly poor communities around the globe. It has also taken me deep inside the global institutions and halls of power, where I, along with many others, have confronted the water cartels determined efforts to control global water policy far into the future.

These journeys have meant so much to me. I offer them to you here in the hope that they will move and inspire you to become a water warrior with us.

Chapter 1

Where Has All the Water Gone?

The Laws of Ecology

All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last.

Ernest Callenbach

Three scenarios collude toward disaster.

Scenario one: The world is running out of freshwater. It is not just a question of finding the money to hook up the two billion people living in water-stressed regions of our world. Humanity is polluting, diverting and depleting the Earths finite water resources at a dangerous and steadily increasing rate. The abuse and displacement of water is the ground-level equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions, and likely as great a cause of climate change.

Scenario two: Every day more and more people are living without access to clean water. As the ecological crisis deepens, so too does the human crisis. More children are killed by dirty water than by war, malaria, HIV / AIDS and traffic accidents combined. The global water crisis has become a most powerful symbol of the growing inequality in our world. While the wealthy enjoy boutique water at any time, millions of poor people have access only to contaminated water from local rivers and wells.

Scenario three: A powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize control of every aspect of water for its own profit. Corporations deliver drinking water and take away wastewater; corporations put massive amounts of water in plastic bottles and sell it to us as at exorbitant prices; corporations are building sophisticated new technologies to recycle our dirty water and sell it back to us; corporations extract and move water by huge pipelines from watersheds and aquifers to sell to big cities and industries; corporations buy, store and trade water on the open market, like running shoes. Most importantly, corporations want governments to deregulate the water sector and allow the market to set water policy. Every day, they get closer to that goal. Scenario three deepens the crises now unfolding in scenarios one and two.