Water/Fish

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. April 25, 2007.

The Bush administration is helping multinationals buy U.S. municipal water systems, putting our most important resource in the hands of corporations with no public accountability. All across the United States, municipal water systems are being bought up by multinational corporations, turning one of our last remaining public commons and our most vital resource into a commodity

David Hall
d.j.hall@gre.ac.uk

07 August 2002
This paper was funded by Public Services International (PSI)

On 21st March 2002 there was a private meeting of “Partnering for Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation”- a group of businessmen, including representatives from Ondeo, RWE-Thames, and Severn Trent, civil servants and others. They discussed the development of business opportunities in water and sanitation in South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda: although the organisation was created to develop innovative approaches in water and sanitation “directed at the poor” , the poor were not mentioned at the meeting. It was the group’s sixth meeting, and they agreed to adopt a new name: “Partners in Africa for Water and Sanitation (PAWS)”.

At the end, a document was circulated, prepared by a USA consultancy called Padco, entitled “A Review of Reports by Private-Sector-Participation Skeptics”, consisting largely of a critique of some PSIRU reports on water privatisation. Its stated purpose was to help persuade South African municipalities that privatisation of water is not a bad idea.

This is a response both to the context of the paper as well as its contents:
• the context of international, state-financed support for water privatisation in South Africa
• the context of secret reports avoiding public scrutiny, and the suppression of public criticisms of privatisation.
• the weakness of the arguments in the paper itself.

Martha Steigman

Adapted from an article that originally appeared in Alternatives Journal: Canadian Environmental
Ideas and Action, 29:4 (2003). <http://www.alternativesjournal.ca>

In Esgenoopetitj - also known as Burnt Church - a Mi’kmaq village on New Brunswick’s
Miramichi Bay, the Marshall decision was greeted with high hopes and much celebration. With
few options for work in the area, the chance to catch enough lobsters to feed the family and sell
a few on the side was big news. But for Burnt Church First Nation the ruling meant much more
than a modest economic opportunity. It meant that finally Canada recognized their right to live
according to Mi’kmaq culture and traditions, including their right to fish.

Karen Bakker
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The 1989 privatization of the water supply sector in England and Wales is a much-cited model of market environmentalism — the introduction of market institutions to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation.
Yet, more than a decade after privatization, the application of market mechanisms to water supply management is much more limited than had been expected.

Drawing on recent geographical research on commodities, this article analyzes the reasons for this retrenchment of the market environmentalist project. I make three related claims: resource commodification is a contested, partial, and transient process; commodification is distinct from privatization; and fresh water is a particularly uncooperative commodity.

Karen Bakker, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
Alternatives, Spring 2003

The question of whether water should be treated as a commons or a commodity has a long history. In contemporary discussions, this question often occurs in the context of debates over the sharing of responsibility for water supply between the state, the private sector, and citizens. These are pressing issues, given that private corporations are playing an increasingly important role as builders, owners and operators of water supply systems.

This article outlines key challenges and opportunities facing governments in water management. Policies that address water, essential to life, must address the question: ‘who benefits?’ Choices made by past governments have led to the current state of Canada’s water infrastructure. We share the experiences of a number of American cities and take a closer look at the experience of privatization as it played out in the city of Hamilton, Ontario through a public private partnership (P3). A range of public financing alternatives is offered.

By Paul Moist, President, Canadian Union of Public Employees