DEVELOPMENT: IS WATER A HUMAN RIGHT, OR JUST ANOTHER WIDGET?
Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS - Despite strong opposition from the world's leading civil society groups, multinational corporations in the Western hemisphere continue to push the international agenda on sustainable use and distribution of water toward privatisation.
Taking part in the ongoing global dialogue, the private sector, as one of the major stakeholders in policy debates on sustainable development, says it can play a key role in helping poor countries create sustainable water management systems by offering efficient means and technical expertise.
But the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) participating in the UN-sponsored discussions argue that the private sector has failed to deliver in the past, and that it is more concerned with profits than giving poor people easy access to clean water.
In addition to development and environment ministers from around the world, both water industry leaders and NGO representatives are currently attending a two-week meeting organised by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development to explore policy options related to water, sanitation and affordable housing.
"We are against privatisation," says June Zeitlin, executive director of the Women's Environment and Development Organisation, which represents hundreds of women's groups worldwide. "We view the right to water as a basic human right."
Industry executives say they recognise the principle that access to clean water is a human right, but argue that many governments cannot achieve that goal alone unless they are assisted by the private sector.
"No one in the business is talking about privatising water," insists Pierre Victoria, a vice president of the France-based Veolia Water Corporation. "We are not the owners of the assets. It's about privatising water delivery systems."
Providing safe drinking water and basic sanitation are important parts of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which promise to reduce by half the number of people who have no access to clean drinking water by 2015.
"Access," according to a UN document "is a question of physical accessibility by consumers of urban and rural areas and of the affordability of such services."
Development experts say that more than one billion people have no access to safe drinking water at all and that over two billion continue to lack basic sanitation.
Critics of privatisation say most companies involved in water management projects in the past have shown a consistent trend of hasty retreat from countries where they jacked up water rates and cut off services to those who were unable to pay the bills, mostly the urban poor.
In July 2002, for example, the French-based Suez, one of the largest multinational water companies, terminated its contract with Argentina when the country's economic collapse ruined its profit margins, leaving behind a confused mess of water systems in the capital, Buenos Aires.
"During the first eight years of contract, weak regulatory practices and contract re-negotiations that eliminated corporate risk enabled the Suez subsidiary, Aguas Argentinas, to earn a 19 percent profit rate on its average net worth," noted Maude Barlow and Tony Clark of the Canada-based Polaris Institute in an article published last year.
"Water rates, which the company said would be reduced 27 percent, actually rose 20 percent," they said. "Fifty percent of the employees were laid off, and Aguas Argentinas reneged on its contractual obligations to build a new sewage treatment plant. Over 95 percent of the city's sewerage is now dumped directly in the Rio del Plata River."
Despite such disasters, critics note that the World Bank and other international financial institutions continue to pressure developing countries to commodify their water resources and put them on the auction block to the highest bidder.
"The Bank is taking advantage of the 'Washington Consensus' model of development now adopted by its donor cou (END)
