Wall Street Journal: How to Quench the World's Thirst

The Wall Street Journal interviews Maude Barlow, the U.N.'s new water adviser
by Alexandra Alter

Water has become a booming $500 billion industry, by some estimates. Economists and investors call it "the new oil" and "blue gold."

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, who has bought water rights for a chunk of the Ogallala aquifer in Texas and owns more water than any individual in the United States, has said the natural resource should be treated like any other commodity -- bought and sold for a profit.

In the U.S., companies such as Nestlé, which owns Poland Spring, extract hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater a year. The companies often pay little to nothing for the water that they bottle and sell.

But where some see profits, others see peril. The world is running out of fresh H20, which accounts for just 3% of the earth's water. Recent moves by multinational corporations to privatize water sources could spell disaster for poor countries and residents with no means to pay.

In Bolivia, price spikes following water privatization led to riots in 2000; eventually, Bolivia expelled Bechtel, the engineering company that the government had contracted to take over management of the municipal water supply in the city of Cochabamba. Similar clashes over privatization and price hikes have broken out in Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa and Mali.

Geopolitical experts warn that water scarcity poses not just a public health risk, but a threat to global security. Currently, some 1.1 billion people, one-sixth of the world population, lack safe drinking water. Global water consumption is growing at unsustainable rates, doubling every 20 years, according to a March 2008 report by Goldman Sachs. A study by International Alert, a London-based conflict-resolution group, listed 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion that have a "high risk" for violent conflict over water in the next two decades.

Maude Barlow, a Canadian water activist who has opposed privatization for more than 20 years, was recently appointed as the United Nation's first senior adviser on water issues. Her position, which is unpaid, was created by the Rev. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, president of the United Nations General Assembly. Here are highlights from her conversation with the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: You've been an outspoken critic of the U.N.'s and the World Bank's water policies, saying that both have aided the "corporate takeover of the world's water." Were you surprised to be offered an advisory role at the U.N.?

Maude Barlow: I don't think I would have been offered a role there by anyone but someone like Father Miguel. He cares deeply about the poor. He's a liberation theology priest from Nicaragua.

I've been critical and will continue to be critical of the overly close relationship of the U.N. to big water corporations. At a time when the need was growing so much, they said, 'Well, the private companies will pay for it,' and they didn't. No one has the right to appropriate water for profit while other people are dying.

What will you try to change about the U.N.'s water policies?

I would like to see it shift from reliance on water companies and privatization, what I call the hard path, to the soft path -- watershed protection, rain harvesting and watershed restoration. You can't have the human right to water if there's no water. Studies show that as we remove water from aquifers, we dry up the land. The rain won't come if there's no vegetation.

Some economists argue that privatization will reduce water consumption and waste, the way oil prices have spurred efforts toward more efficient energy use. Wouldn't putting a price on water actually help to reduce waste?

To me, the issue isn't whether you price or not, it's the conditions. There are three important conditions to putting a price on water. The first is that no one should be denied access because they can't pay. The second is that water is maintained by the public sector, so it's like a tax, not a fee. The third is, you're paying for the service, you don't own the water. It's very important that we say water is not a commodity.

Do you see any role for the private sector?

In the building of infrastructure and pipes. There's an important place for the private sector in water cleanup technology. There's no place for the private sector in water delivery. It should be delivered by the public sector on a not-for-profit basis.

The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty include the objective of cutting the number of people without access to clean water in half by 2015. You have said that at the rate they're going, it will take much longer. What steps will you recommend to speed things up?

The twin pillars of a water secure future for the world are on the one hand, conservation and protection, and on the other hand, the human right to water.

One of my criticisms of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals about water has been the disconnect between those who are working on the environmental side and those who are working on the human-rights side. I don't think there's been nearly enough attention paid to protecting source water. Seventy-five to 80% of surface water in India, China or Russia is too polluted to bathe in, drink or fish in.

The U.N. bought into the World Bank's solution, which is, bring in water companies and let them provide these huge projects, and if you're wealthy you can pay for water. They don't see it as their responsibility to provide water for the poor. I've been in communities with prepaid water meters. There's water, but they can't afford to turn the tap on, so they go to the river, where there are cholera warning signs.

In your latest book, "Blue Covenant," you write about virtual water -- the water that is used to produce commodities like cars and computer chips -- as a big source of water consumption.

I think we're going to hear a lot more about that in the next few years. The U.S. is exporting a third of its water in the form of virtual water exports through commodities. Britain and Japan import most of their virtual water.

Europe grows its roses in Africa around Lake Naivasha in Kenya. The lake is so damaged now that these companies are looking for new lakes in Uganda. It's not just looking at our water footprint in our own country and community and household. It's where your water footprint is coming from.

Has the financial crisis slowed the pace of global investments in water indexes?

What worries me is the opposite. It's the one area where people are still going to invest. It's not going to fluctuate the way other commodities do, because we're a species running out of clean water.

The other thing I'm worried about from the credit crisis is that cash-strapped municipalities and states may sell off water treatment plants to the private sector.

You've criticized the Bush administration for "gutting the Clean Water Act." and have noted that funding for water research in the U.S. has been stagnant for 30 years. Do you expect to see changes under an Obama administration?

I'm sure hoping. I think this is a much more environmentally conscious president coming in, as the issues around food, water and energy are becoming more prominent. I do think that we may have an opportunity with a more open administration and a more aware public to really start to move these issues forward. But if it doesn't happen, the U.S. is going to be one big Atlanta .

Which countries would you hold up as models in terms of sustainable water management?

None. Europe is way ahead in terms of how it cares for its water. However, Europe imports the bulk of its water footprint, so the way it protects its own water is to use and abuse other countries' water.

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Maude Barlow on the global water crisis

Recently named to the new post of senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues, Maude Barlow discusses the water crisis with Canadian journalist Erin Anderssen. First posted October 25 at the Toronto Globe and Mail

"What does it take to frighten people?" Maude Barlow wonders.

She rattles off a grim list of worries, barely pausing for breath: water supplies in Africa guarded by dogs and chain-link fences while families go thirsty, the vital Murray-Darling Basin in southeast Australia crumbling into desert, the mighty Colorado River in the United States drying up to a trickle.

"The water crisis is deepening everywhere," sighs the 61-year-old activist and head of the Council of Canadians, who has tasted tear gas and faced down stun guns in defense of universal access to clean water. What scares her most is that the problem will not get fixed for her grandchildren.

This week, Ms. Barlow was named senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues - a new position created by General Assembly president Miguel d'Escoto, who raised the subject of water as a human right in his first UN speech in September. Ms. Barlow, who has been meeting with Mr. d'Escoto unofficially since August, agreed to take the position without pay.

"With my heart and soul, I believe it is the single most important environmental and human-rights threat of our time, and it's the one hitting now," she says on the telephone from Winnipeg, where she was attending a conference. "There is nothing 'in the future' about this [issue]."

Raised in Digby, N.S., where her father was the town's first social worker, Ms. Barlow has become a prominent opponent of the privatization of water - a June article in the Australian newspaper The Age said she was "to H2O what Al Gore is to CO2" - but she first made her name in Canada as an outspoken activist fighting the North American free trade agreement. She received more than her share of criticism, and her more dire predictions have not come true, but on that subject she has a practised answer: "My mother used to tell me, 'Serious people make serious enemies.' "

And Ms. Barlow is nothing if not serious. She has written 15 books - her most recent, Blue Covenant, on the global water crisis, was published last year. She travels continually and not, as one colleague pointed out, on luxury junkets. While her calendar is swamped with speaking engagements, she is not one to linger at conference centres.

"She is just tireless," says Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, an organization Ms. Barlow chairs.

In India, Ms. Hauter recalls, Ms. Barlow sat for two days in a small village with mothers who were holding a silent vigil to protest against a Coca-Cola plant that was siphoning off their water to bottle it. She was tear-gassed during an anti-globalization rally at the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong in 2005.

In Johannesburg, water services have been privatized, prepaid meters have been installed by the French company Suez, and the supply cut off to those who can't afford to pay. When local townships formed a protest march, Ms. Barlow and her staff moved to the front of the line, hoping to deter the police from using stun guns. A few days later in the Orange Farm township, she confronted some visiting Suez executives, who eventually hopped back on their bus and left without taking their tour.

This is the same doggedness that Ms. Barlow now vows to bring to her new post at the United Nations, where her main focus will be developing a new convention that sees water not as "a commodity to be sold on the open market like running shoes," but as a public resource held in trust by the government and provided as a human right to its citizens.

She says issues around water cover all the areas she feels most passionately about: gender, poverty, the environment, social justice. She describes returning from a trip in which she visited Nairobi's huge Kibera slum, where people use "flying toilets" (you defecate into a plastic bag and throw it in the street), and counting up her faucets and water lines in her Ottawa home. "I could turn them all on and run them for days, and nobody would say a word. We just take it for granted."

When she began studying the politics of water, she had to unlearn much of what she had been taught about the resource - beginning with the idea that it is infinitely renewable and that Canada is overflowing with it.

"We are a planet running out of clean water," she says. "We all learned that couldn't happen back in Grade 6. But it is happening."

And she notes that many Canadians still believe that their country has 20 per cent of the world's water supply and is therefore safe from shortages. (In fact, scientists now say Canada holds closer to 7 per cent of the planet's fresh water, and much of that is too far north to be accessible.)

Consider the ready examples that belie our myth of abundance, she says: The Great Lakes are becoming increasingly polluted as their water levels fall, many aboriginal communities have limited access to drinking water and the oil-sands expansion continues to damage the ecosystem of northern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Canadians rank among the biggest per-capita users of water in the world. "We treat our water badly," Ms. Barlow sighs.

But while the battle for a UN convention declaring water access a human right, similar to freedom of assembly and speech, will probably be long, she has reason to be hopeful.

After four years of silent vigil, the women in India managed to get their case against Coca-Cola to court and its plant was closed. As quickly as bottled water became a fad in the West, it is now becoming a faux pas; for instance, cities such as London have banned its use at municipal functions and many schools in Canada have stopped stocking it.

Blue Covenent opens with a disaster scenario: a future world where the poor continue to die from dirty water, corporations have made water a luxury of the rich and climate change is ravaging the land. Asked whether she is optimistic that the world can act in time, Ms. Barlow offers the only answer, perhaps, that a woman with four grandchildren can give: "We have to have the courage to see the crisis as it is. But anyone who knows me will tell you, I was born with a smile on my face."

In deep water: Statistics on the global water crisis from Blue Covenant

1.1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water.

The World Health Organization has found that contaminated water contributes to 80 per cent of all sickness and disease worldwide. Half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.

In China, 80 per cent of major rivers are so polluted that they no longer support aquatic life.

By 2050, based on a population growth of three billion people, humans will need an 80-per-cent increase in water supplies to feed themselves.

In 2006, 200 billion litres of bottled water were consumed globally - a 200-per-cent increase since the 1970s.

For the price of one bottle of Evian, the average North American could buy roughly 4,000 litres of tap water.

Less than 5 per cent of plastic bottles around the world are recycled.

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SPP Lets Pesticides In, Shuts Peace Activists Out, Says Council of Canadians

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 4, 2007 1:31 PM Source	CONTACT:Council of Canadians Tel.: (613) 233-4487, ext. 234; Cell: (613) 795-8685; meera@canadians.org.
SPP Lets Pesticides In, Shuts Peace Activists Out, Says Council of Canadians
CANADA - October 4 -The federal government needs to revisit its border security arrangements with the United States in light of two peace activists being denied entry to Canada this week based on FBI records, says the Council of Canadians. “The barred entry to Canada of two U.S. peace activists is proof that the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) between the two countries has its priorities backward,” says Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians. “What kind of ‘partnership’ lets higher levels of pesticides into Canada in the name of regulatory harmonization but stops peace activists at the border in the name of harmonized policing.” On Wednesday, October 3, Medea Benjamin, founder of the anti-war women’s group CODEPINK, and retired Army colonel Ann Wright were denied entry into Canada at the Buffalo-Niagara Falls Bridge. They were told that they could not cross the border into Canada because their names appeared on an FBI database that Canadian border agents rely on to screen visitors. A key initiative of the SPP’s “security agenda” is to, “Work to ensure compatibility of systems to share data on high-risk travellers and… to provide for risk management decisions on travellers destined to or transiting North America.” Meanwhile, the SPP’s “prosperity agenda” calls for the harmonization of regulatory standards on pesticides and other chemicals, which has already resulted in Canada allowing more pesticides on hundreds of fruits and vegetables to match lower U.S. standards. “Most people would agree that pesticides pose a significantly higher risk to Canadians than peace activists,” said Barlow. “Any agreement that blocks the free movement of people based on political beliefs, ethnic background or who their friends are but that allows even more hazardous chemicals across the border clearly has nothing to do with the real security of North Americans.” ###

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