23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven
Fraud
Sources:
AlterNet, March 17, 2009
Title: “Fifth World Water Forum Marked by Violence and Repression”
Author: Jeff Conant
AlterNet, March 18, 2009
Title: “An Inside Peek: Why the World Water Forum Is a Sham”
Author: Jeff Conant
Democracy Now! March 23, 2009
Title: “Water Rights Activists Blast Istanbul World Water Forum
as ‘Corporate Trade Show to Promote Privatization’”
Interviewee: Maude Barlow
KPFA, “Sunday Sedition,” March 29, 2009
Title: “Andria Lewis interviews Maude Barlow”
Student Researcher: Frances Capell
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, PhD
Sonoma State University
Water rights activists blasted the World Water Forum, held in Turkey
in late March of 2009, as a corporate trade show promoting privatization
of water. Three hundred Turkish activists gathered near the forum’s
entrance and were faced with the overwhelming force of between 2,000
and 3,000 police. The forum opened with Turkish police firing tear gas
and detaining protesters, who were shouting “Water for life, not
for profit.”
According to its website, the World Water Forum is “an open, all-inclusive,
multi-stakeholder process” where governments, NGOs, businesses
and others “create links, debate and attempt to find solutions
to achieve water security.”
However, the Forum’s main organizer, the World Water Council,
is dominated by two of the world’s largest private water corporations,
Suez and Veolia. Critics contend that the Council’s links to Suez
and Veolia, as well as the large representation of the business industry
in the Council, compromise its legitimacy. Corporate interests that
make up the World Water Council are in constant contact with the World
Bank and other financial institutions. Each Forum is set up as a quasi-United
Nations event, to the extent of issuing a Ministerial Statement at the
Forum’s close promoting global policy approaches to water and sanitation.
The Council promotes extraordinarily expensive and destructive dam
and water diversion projects as well as policies such as Public-Private
Partnerships (PPP’s) that put water services under private ownership.
PPPs in Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, the US, and other countries
have resulted in huge price hikes, water pollution, depletion and cut-offs
which, in the language of the water justice movement, “deny people
the right to water.” Despite these and other harmful impacts, the
Istanbul Water Consensus aims to secure the commitment of local authorities
to similar water policies. This year’s forum issued a communiqué
that describes access to water as a “basic human need” rather
than a human right, despite efforts by dissenting Latin American countries,
France and Spain to introduce the right to water. They were reportedly
blocked by Egypt, Brazil and the United States. In the minutiae of political
verbiage, this apparently slight difference in terminology can have
a profound significance. If water is defined as a “need” rather
than a “right,” it becomes a commodity subject to trade and
implies no obligation on the parts of governments to ensure access to
it. If it is a human right, on the other hand, mandatory government
policy is activated to assure unconditional access to everyone.
Activists from the People’s Water Forum—an alternative formation
representing rural poor, the environment and organized labor— slammed
the official event as a non-inclusive, corporate-driven fraud pushing
for water privatization. They called for a more open, democratic and
transparent forum. A block of Southern governments led by Uruguay is
building support for an alternative, legitimate forum to be led by the
United Nations.
High-profile civil society voices such as Maude Barlow, senior adviser
on water issues to the United Nations General Assembly, are calling
for this to be the last corporately held World Water Forum. “The
security is tight, because what they’re about is promoting privatization,
promoting a corporate vision of the world,” she said, “and
they want to pretend to the world that that’s the consensus of
the world. And it isn’t.”
Barlow maintains that multinational water companies and the World Bank
are not proper hosts for a World Water Forum. She proposes that it be
held under the auspices of the General Assembly of the United Nations,
keeping the right to clean commons in the public trust to avert a deeply
inequitable situation in which water is diverted from the poor to those
who can pay for it.
“The World Water Forum is bankrupt of new ways to address the growing
water crisis in the world, because they have maintained an adherence
to an ideology that is not working, that has dramatically failed,”
Barlow remarked on Democracy Now! “What’s clear here is that
the energy and the commitment and the brilliance and the ideas and the
cultural change have come together. And this [the People’s Water
Forum] is where the future of water is coming from, this movement here.”
Update by Jeff Conant
The World Water Council, a private consortium led by two of the world’s
largest water corporations, has come to be seen in the global water
sector as a legitimate host of the world’s largest water policy
gathering. But policies promoted by the corporate body have led to profound
inequity in water service provision worldwide, while also serving to
move huge amounts of public money into private hands. The World Water
Council and its triennial gathering, the World Water Forum, strongly
promote so-called Public-Private Partnerships that put water services
under private ownership. PPP’s in Argentina, Bolivia, Ghana, Tanzania,
the US, and other countries have resulted in price hikes, decreased
pollution control, and water cut-offs, patently denying people—and
especially the poor—access to safe drinking water and sanitation
services.
One way in which the World Water Council seeks legitimacy is through
promoting the appearance that it’s flagship event, the World Water
Forum (WWF), is sponsored or endorsed by the United Nations. So, when
Father Miguel D’escoto, President of the UN General Assembly, and
a vocal opponent of water privatization, received no response from the
Directors of the World Water Council to his appeal to speak at the Fifth
World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, the curtain was drawn back and
the Council’s legitimacy came into question.
Covering the WWF in Istanbul, I persistently raised the question at
press events there, “Why did Father D’Escoto’s letter
receive no response?” The answer from Loïc Fauchon, President
of the Council, was that no such letter had been received.
Since then, however, we have learned that the Directors of the WWC
have contacted Father D’Escoto’s office to meet with him,
and have suggested that many of the WWF’s future activities might
come under the auspices of the UN. They seem to have been shaken by
the attention.
The one aspect of the Forum over which the Council seems to want to
retain control, however, is the Ministerial process. As I noted in my
article, “An Inside Peek: Why the World Water Forum is a Sham,”
“At each Forum, a series of roundtable discussions between government
ministers, corporate lobbyists and NGOs leads to a final Ministerial
Statement which, while it has no teeth in international law, plays a
significant symbolic role in projecting policies on the ground.”
I wrote at the time, “While this process happens entirely behind
the scenes and is obscure to nearly all the Forum’s participants,
it is perhaps the most influential aspect of the event. Over the next
two days we expect to see the intrigue come to a head.”
In fact, the conclusion of the process resulted, on March 22, in a
serious vote of dissent, with twenty-five country delegations signing
a statement defending the human right to water, and an additional sixteen
demanding that future Water Fora be hosted by the UN. This is the largest
collective act of dissent that the WWF has seen since its inception.
There has been very little mainstream press attention to the issue;
in fact, there is persistent dearth of attention to the dire issues
of water and sanitation in general. One exception has been the French
press, which took up the issue in a cover story in Le Monde the day
after the Forum’s closing. In the United States, these issues receive
almost no coverage at all outside of the extreme independent press—a
shocking truth given that lack of access to safe water is the number
one cause of disease and death worldwide.
The best sources of information on this story, and on global water
policy in general, are to be found through Food & Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org),
for whom I work as a researcher and advocate, World Development Movement
(http://www.wdm.org.uk), Public Services International Research Unit
(http://www.psiru.org) and Transnational Institute, (http://www.tni.org).
Update by Maude Barlow
One of the most contentious issues surrounding the growing global water
crisis is the question of who is going to determine access and allocation;
will it be the market, or will it be people through their elected governments?
Is water a commodity to be put on the open market to the highest bidder
or part of our commons, a public trust and a human right? This struggle
is intense in communities around the world who are fighting big private
water utilities delivering water on a for-profit basis or giant bottled
water companies coming in and depleting local water supplies. But every
three years, the fight goes global at the World Water Forum, a massive
gathering of people that resembles a United Nations summit but is actually
sponsored by the World Water Council, made up largely of the big water
corporations, the World Bank and pro-corporate segments of the UN.
The fifth World Water Forum was held in Istanbul and, as you know from
the story, was the target of intense criticism from activists and environmentalists
from Turkey and around the world; Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, the
President of the UN General Assembly; and many nation-state representatives
who disagreed with the fact that the “right to water” was
not in the final declaration. In the end, twenty-five countries signed
a second declaration declaring their support for the right to water
and many openly stated that the next World Water Forum should be sponsored
by the General Assembly of the United Nations and not by big private
water operators who stand to profit from the assembly.
Since the forum, the pressure for the General Assembly to take over
this role has intensified, and in my role as Senior Advisor to the President
of the UN General Assembly, I am urging the General Assembly to adopt
an emergency resolution taking upon itself the responsibility of coming
up with a global framework of action to deal with both the ecological
and human crisis now upon the world, one that recognizes that water
is a human right and therefore cannot be denied on the basis of the
inability to pay.
This story matters because the growing water crisis is one of the most
pressing threats of our time. But the only international body that presumes
to speak for global policies and practices is one whose members are
making billions as depleting water sources become market commodities
and who deny water to those who cannot pay for it. It is a fundamental
issue of democracy and of justice in deciding the future of policies
that will affect the whole world.
There was very little media from North America covering this crucial
story (thank heavens for Amy Goodman!) but it did get covered in Turkey
and in the global South. For more information, go to Food and Water
Watch, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org, and the Blue Planet Project
at http://www.canadians.org