09.25.08
WATER AND THE THIRST FOR PROFIT
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======== WATER AND THE THIRST FOR PROFIT =====================================
Chris Williams reviews a documentary film on the global water crisis and its
causes.
September 25, 2008
WATER IS quite literally the essence of life. All animal and plant processes
occur in cells swimming in water, and humans are 70 percent made of the
stuff. Without food, we can survive for weeks. Without water, we die within
days.
On a planet where two-thirds of the surface is covered in water, one would
think access to clean, safe and sufficient amounts of water couldn’t possibly
be a problem. Yet 1.1 billion people don’t have such access, and 5,000
children die every single day from completely preventable diseases associated
with drinking contaminated, filthy water.
This is the subject of the new award-winning documentary /FLOW (For Love of
Water)/ by Irena Salina.
Of the water on earth, less than 3 percent is fresh water, and, of this,
two-thirds is (currently) frozen in glaciers and the polar ice caps. Much of
the rest is trapped in the soil or in deep underground aquifers. This leaves
us with access to around 0.01 percent of all the available water on the
planet for irrigation (70 percent), industry (20 percent) and us (10
percent).
Still, even with a population of 6 billion, access to water could easily be
provided for everyone–if there was democratically controlled international
planning that took into account the real needs of urban and rural
populations, regardless of income.
The UN calculates that $30 billion would be enough to assure every person on
the planet access to clean water to drink. That represents about 5 percent of
annual global military spending, with the U.S. accounting for about half.
Apparently, it is far more profitable under free-market capitalism–and hence
more desirable–to build weapons to kill other human beings than to provide
them with clean water for a fraction of the cost. Only under a system whose
prime directive is profit could this make any sense.
In inspiring and engaging clips and interviews with activists, /FLOW/
documents the grassroots resistance to the raging torrent of water
deregulation and privatization that has swept around the world as a result of
neoliberalism.
/FLOW/ addresses a number of themes surrounding our most essential resource.
In addition to the privatization of water in various countries of the Global
South, the film also exposes some of the myths surrounding bottled water,
such as the fact that 25 percent of it is tap water, and one company was even
getting their supply next door to a Super Fund site!
The documentary also touches on the growing chemical contamination of
groundwater supplies. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t
regulate 51 different chemicals, including the herbicide Atrazine–which is
banned throughout the European Union for its links to gender changes and low
sperm counts in amphibians and fish, but is one of the most commonly used
chemicals on U.S. farms.
The film gives statistics on the millions of people made landless or
relocated to marginal land in Africa and Asia to make way for vast and
inefficient (but highly profitable) International Monetary Fund- and World
Bank-sponsored dam projects.
In the U.S., the film throws a spotlight on the fight in Mecosta County,
Mich., to stop Nestle–owners of several of the most commonly seen brands of
bottled water–from stealing the water from under their homes in order to
bottle it and sell it back to them and us at wildly inflated prices.
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/FLOW/ IS at its strongest and most engaging when revealing not just the
depredations caused by the behemoth multinational water companies such as
Thames Water, Suez, Vivendi and Coca-Cola in India, but documenting the
heroic and sometimes victorious struggles by some of the most downtrodden and
oppressed.
Footage of Bolivian army troops getting chased off the streets by rioting
workers and peasants in the infamous Water Wars of the late 1990s and
interviews with the Bolivian union leader Oscar Olivera form the backdrop to
the government being forced to renationalize its water and send Bechtel
packing.
In South Africa, there is the burgeoning movement to reconnect water and
electricity supplies to those who can’t pay. In India, where a community is
being poisoned to death by the new bottling plant set up by Coke, the
multinational was forced to close after two years of mass demonstrations.
Interviews with the physicist and social justice activist Vandana Shiva, as
well as interviews with grassroots engineers and politicians who are
providing clean and extremely cheap water and irrigation, showcase some of
the solutions possible when people’s needs are placed before profit.
As the film makes clear, the aisles and aisles of bottled water available in
the West illustrate just one thing–convincing people that tap water is dirty
and that only bottled water is safe and tasty can be highly lucrative. Water
is an industry worth $400 billion per year, coming in third behind oil and
electricity. However, in sharp contrast to publicly-owned water supplies,
bottled water doesn’t have to be clean or from some shrinking glacier to be
poured into a bottle and sold for $2 a pop, since there is little to no
regulation.
According to an interview in the film with a former researcher from the
National Resources Defense Council, scientific tests of more than 1,000
bottles of 103 brands of water show that about a third of the bottles
contained synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria and arsenic.
Furthermore, the huge quantities of energy, water and other resources that go
into making the non-biodegradable plastic bottles–almost none of which will
ever be recycled even if you dutifully place them in the correct recycling
bin, let alone the resource and pollution issues related to transporting
bottles by the tens of millions all over the world–are yet another
illustration of the enormous waste and pollution inherent to capitalism.
For those seeking to “be healthy” and opt out of tap water (and have the
money to do so), it is important to recognize that without clean,
publicly-provided and regulated tap water, many of the approximately 116,000
man-made chemical contaminants that leach into the water supply can and are
inhaled directly into the lungs and absorbed through the skin whenever you
shower.
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OVERALL, /FLOW/ is well worth seeing as it exposes, in an unequivocal manner,
the inadequacies and inequalities that are an inevitable feature of a
privatized system driven solely by the need to make profit. However, partly
due to trying to cover so many aspects of the water crisis, and partly out of
political differences, there are some weaknesses to the film.
The film concentrates on privatization of water in the Global South and, in
an essentially modern-day rerun of the colonial-era idea known as “full cost
recovery” this means restricted or non-existent access to clean water for the
poor that only a for-profit water supply system could dream up and justify.
However, it would have been useful to comment on recent water privatization
developments in the developed world as well because otherwise it can feel as
if /all/ of the people in the developed world are benefiting from the huge
extraction of wealth occurring in the South by Western multinationals.
Leaving things to the market has been just as big a disaster wherever on the
planet it’s sunk its ideological talons into the public sector and ripped off
the juiciest morsels. Over the last 30 years, deregulators of all political
stripes have gorged themselves in an orgy of profit-taking.
In entirely predictable fashion, the newly privatized public utilities in the
West, such as water, electricity and health care, have seen profit rates soar
as maintenance and service has fallen and prices have gone through the roof.
In the U.S., one only needs to reflect on the Enron-inspired gangsterism that
caused the energy crisis in California to see how poorly private companies
take on the role of electricity distribution.
In Britain, where privatization of the water supply occurred under Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, profits have doubled even as leaks by Thames
Water have reached such proportions that they lose in a day an amount greater
than the entire daily supply required by a major British city. Yet, the
pre-tax profits of the 10 British water companies rose by 147 percent between
1990/91 and 1997/98, even as water quality and reliability declined.
As a water campaigner in the film asks, “Nobody sells air, what gives them
the right to sell water?” As with all essential resources, the government
should be charged with managing them for the public good as a service to the
citizens that elect them, not as something to be spun off to the lowest
bidder.
The government could and should provide for essential services such as water,
sanitation, electricity, health care and mass transit for all. If the U.S.
government can effectively nationalize the mortgage and insurance industries,
it can run other more vital services free of charge.
Experiments in privatization have proven so disastrous around the world that
two countries, Holland and Uruguay, have made it illegal for any aspect of
the water and sanitation system to be privately owned. This is a campaign
that we need to take up.
More importantly, activists will see an alternative vision of how real change
is made from the examples of direct action and organized mass resistance in
India, Bolivia and South Africa in this film. One of the most inspiring
quotes from /FLOW/ comes from an older Indian Gandhian activist. “Never has
there or will there be a technology,” he says, slapping his legs, “that can
beat these–the People’s March.”
“We will fight, we will win–the 21st century will be the people’s century.”
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Review: Movies
/FLOW (For Love of Water)/ [1], a documentary by Irena Salina.
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[1] http://socialistworker.org//www.flowthefilm.com/
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0