Busting the Water Cartel

A Report From Inside the Activist Coalition at the World
Water Forum

By Holly Wren Spaulding, Special to CorpWatch

March 27, 2003

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=6109

Kyoto - The conveners of the third World Water Forum, the
World Water Council and Global Water Partnership, tried hard
last week to sell the idea that there is a consensus behind
their control, distribution and conservation of the world's
water. But efforts to turn the Forum into a thinly veiled
commercial for corporate solutions to the global water
crisis backfired. Instead, many delegates were convinced by
arguments put forward citizens' groups framing the water
debate as a human rights issue.

The third meeting of the World Water Forum (WWF), held from
March 16th to 22nd in Kyoto, Japan, comes at a time when
there is growing alarm over the scarcity of water worldwide
-- a crisis that is only expected to get worse. It also
comes as there are fierce battles being fought over who
should control this precious resource. One vision, put
forward by major corporations trying to make a buck on water
services, and their governmental allies, is that water is a
valuable commodity to be controlled by the market. The
other, sees water as a basic human and environmental right,
to be protected by communities and people around the globe.

The Water Barons Control the Show, or Do They? The schmooze
fest between high-ranking government ministers from around
the world, and the emerging water cartel including industry
giants such as Suez and Vivendi of France, and the German-
British conglomerate RWE-Thames, was also a preview of what
to expect at the upcoming WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico this
September. However, the Water Forum's primary goal was to
promote the privatization of water resources, especially by
endorsing public-private partnerships in both the north and
the south.

The aggressive corporate campaign for control the world's
water has activists concerned. The World Water Forum is
"greenwashing, poor washing, and hope dashing," noted
Anuradha Mittal of Food First, an Oakland, California-based
policy group. Mittal and other activists were appalled by
workshops like "How Will the Poor Become Customers?"

Mittal was part of a broad coalition of over 30
organizations from some 27 different countries which came
together to challenge the drumbeat towards privatization at
the World Water Forum. Summit organizers like to portray the
WWF as an international body with a mandate to protect water
resources. But human rights advocates charge that it is
really an exclusive club accountable only to the demands of
the market.

With room for dialogue blocked by the Forum process,
activists decided to speak out at a panel of top executives
from the leading water companies. The grand stage had been
prepared with bamboo arrangements and massive video screens
for the corporate presentation, but the twenty men on stage
received a different kind of attention than the enthusiastic
response they expected.

Grassroots activists took control of the discussion from the
floor. Apart from telling the "suits" to go to hell,
speakers told story after story of the daily crises caused
by water privatization in their countries. Among them was
Briggs Mokolo of South Africa who is fighting to defend poor
families whose water is cut off by private service
providers. A Mexican activist from Cancun brought a plastic
bottle of brackish tap water, which was dark brown and
smelled of gasoline, to pass around the panel for
inspection.

Meanwhile, Indigenous rights activists questioned the
premise of treating water as a profit-making commodity. For
example, Tom Goldtooth, of the Indigenous Environmental
Network said it is up communities around the world to
safeguard water resources for future generations. As one
native woman put it, "I am the Colombia River."

For every power point presentation on the success of a
corporate water concession, there were those at the World
Water Forum, like Maria Selva Ortiz from Uruguay, who gave
testimony on the impacts such contracts have on people on
the ground. In fact, says Ortiz "very often civil society
has to rise up and revolt, " as has been the experience of
rural and urban communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Among the strategies used by corporations in the global
water grab, is to seize control of groundwater. According to
Ian Johnson of the World Bank, groundwater mining has "very
low or zero social costs in terms of exploitation." What
Johnson didn't know was that that five members of the
audience from were US-Canadian Great Lakes region where
pitched battles are being waged over groundwater.
Representing communities fighting Nestl's water bottling
operations, they brought up the social and environmental
costs that Johnson so sweepingly dismissed.

A Tsunami of Opposition The corporate agenda became more
explicit as the weeklong summit progressed, catalyzing
opposition around report entitled "Financing Water For All."
Chaired by Michel Camdessus, former Managing Director of the
International Monetary Fund, this document spurred what
turned out to be one of the most heated confrontations of
the week.

Trade unionists, members of International Rivers Network,
and the Indigenous Network, joined other grassroots
activists and policy advocates to operate homemade "Lie
Meters" throughout Camdessus' presentation of the report.
These make shift meters indicated the level of deceit on a
color-coded scale, with red being the highest alert. Others
held up large painted clouds with the words "Agua es Vida"
(Water is Life) and "El Agua es del Pueblo"(Water Belongs to
the People) blazoned on them. Speaking from the floor,
Bolivian Human Rights activist Pablo Solon rejected the
report's recommendations.

"We are not against this paragraph or that paragraph of the
Camdessus Report. We are against the heart of the Camdessus
Report, because the heart of the report is that it does not
have a heart," Solon charged. He pointed out that water
privatization policies, like the ones advocated by the
Camdessus Report, have lead to riots and even deaths in
Bolivia.

"You are not happy with taking us to war over oil. You want
to take us to war over water too," observed an Argentinian
trade unionist. Noted Indian scholar and activist Vandana
Shiva drew applause when she pointed out that "People do not
drink money, we drink water." Shortly thereafter, two large
banners appeared on stage, one reading "World Water Council
Mafia" and the other, "No Profits from Water." On cue, about
100 civil society participants walked out by way of the
stage, blocking the presenters behind their expansive desks.

They passed Expo Center with banners, chants and "Water is
Life" headbands finally meeting up with a larger march
outside organized by Japanese activists.

In one final act of resistance, Canadian water activists and
policy analysts Tony Clark and Maude Barlow were among a
group of campaigners who crashed the "members only" meeting
held by the World Water Council. They announced that more
than two hundred organizations had signed on to the Water is
Life Alternative Vision Statement. The statement is meant to
counter the World Water Forum's vision of water as a
commodity and source of profits.

Meanwhile, in the days following the World Water Forum
grassroots activists have returned to their local struggles
from El Salvador to Ghana, Detroit and New Zealand, from
Tanzania, Nicaragua and India to the Netherlands. They vowed
to continue developing alternatives to the models offered by
the Water Barons. As Vandana Shiva noted, "For every really
terrible thing they give us, we must come up with something
really beautiful."

[Holly Wren Spaulding is a member of the Sweetwater Alliance,
a group fighting a Nestle water bottling operation in
Michigan.]