Tap Water Worries Have You Buying Bottled? Safeway Loves You!

by Jonah Owen-Lamb. Published June 2 by the Merced (California) Sun-Star, and posted on Commondreams.org
 
Wells are drying up across the county from an overtaxed and sinking water table.

Drought and climate change threaten the future of local water supplies.

And Merced has been selling its tap water since 2002 to a water bottling plant, which then sells that water at rates far above what it costs the plant to buy it from the city.

The Safeway Inc.'s water bottling plant in Merced -- one of the top five commercial/industrial water users in the city, which bottles Safeway's in-house purified and spring water brand Refreshe -- uses roughly 50,000 gallons a day, five days a week, for its bottling operation.

The plant, which provides most Refreshe drinking and spring water to Safeway stores in the state, filters city water, puts it in bottles and sells it as purified water. The bottles note that the water was bottled in Merced, but not that it was pumped out of the ground by the city. (Refreshe spring water is shipped in from a spring and then bottled in Merced.)

Some say the operation is just like any other business that buys water from the city. But others claim it represents a troubling trend. Environmentalists and water rights activists contend that the increasing commercialization of public water and the selling of tap water not labeled as such isn't how water pumped out of the ground by cities is meant to be used. They claim that bottled water sells itself as safer and healthier than tap water, but in many cases is not.

The Sierra Club's Water Privatization Task Force noted that the growth of the bottled water industry -- spearheaded by companies like Nestle, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola -- is not only depleting aquifers and springs across the country, but also represents a step toward increasing water privatization.

The task force also noted that the industry advertises bottled water as better than tap water -- even though much of the water in bottles comes from the tap. "The bottled water industry promotes bottled water as a healthy, trendy drink, without mentioning that it can cost 500 to 4,000 times more than tap water," commented the task force.

In Safeway's case they pay more than $1,000 a month for more than a million gallons of water. The retail cost for that much purified bottled water at Safeway is just under $3 million. Safeway would not say how much it costs them to produce their water.

Despite these concerns, the public's taste for the stuff is growing.

According to a 2009 report on the industry by Bottled Water Reporter, bottled water sales in the U.S. accounted for more than $11 billion in 2008. Over the last decade bottled water consumption jumped from more than $4 billion in 2000 to double that by 2008. According to Food & Water Watch, over 112 bottling plants exist in the state and over 1 billion gallons of bottled water are sold in California every year.

In the report, tap water was distinguished from bottled water. "Clearly," noted the report, "consumer perceptions matter, and consumers regard bottled water very differently from tap water. Even where tap water may be safely potable, many people prefer bottled water, which they regard as superior in taste."

Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said that criticisms about commercializing municipal water and replacing it with expensive bottled water are baseless and unfounded. "There will always be critics of products," she said. "We are providing a product that did not exist previously. So I think that the argument that they are making is unfounded," she said.

As for the Safeway's operation in Merced, Merced spokesman Mike Conway said the city treats Safeway as it would any other industrial water consumer.

"There's no difference between any kind of water user who uses our water to process a product -- whether it's bottled water or anything else," said Conway.

"As for some additional perspective," wrote Conway in an e-mail, "if the city pumps about 21 million gallons of water a day, and Safeway uses 50,000, that works out to be 0.238 percent of our total gallons pumped."

But the plant doesn't only use water. It also produces waste. The plant's purification process discharges roughly 52,000 pounds of salts a year into the city's wastewater system, according to their permit.

Safeway's in-house brand Refreshe, bottled in Merced with well water, doesn't say on its label that it was originally municipal tap water.

Massingill's reply is simply that the product that Safeway provides -- fresh water -- isn't tap water.

But a new law could force water bottlers to at least let consumers know the source of their bottled water -- not just where it was bottled.

Assembly Bill 301 would require bottling facilities to register with the state and disclose the source of their water. Currently, the state's Department of Public Health only requires that bottled water labels list where the water was bottled, not the actual source of that water.

Another area of concern with bottled water, says Ruth Caplan, the national coordinator for the Defending Water for Life campaign, is that while bottled water sells itself as better than tap water, it contributes to pollution and has been found to be less healthy than tap water -- at least in some cases.

Many of the bottles end up in landfills, Caplan added, and in some cases contain industrial chemicals and bacteria above state and industry standards. According to the Sierra Club, nine out of 10 plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.

The National Resources Defense Council tested a wide array of bottled waters in the late '90s and found the majority contained either industrial chemicals and other contaminants, such as chloroform, that were above levels set by the state and the industry. The study included Safeway-brand bottled waters whose labels indicated they had gone through reverse osmosis filtration like the purified water in Safeway's Merced plant.

Safeway's Massingill declined to comment on NRDC's study, but said that Safeway is fully conscious of its environmental footprint and the healthfulness of its products. The company uses as little packaging as possible in its products. For instance, its plastic bottles are among the thinnest in the industry.

In addition, Safeway uses wind and solar energy on a wide scale. "We operate in the most environmentally conscious manor possible," she said. Safeway is one of the largest retail users of renewable energy in the United States as well, she said.

On top of the company's efforts to be green, Massingill said it provides jobs for roughly 70 people at its Merced plant. It's also actively involved in the community through the sponsorship of events, among other contributions.

The Wild West was founded partly over water wars. It's clear some are still being fought, even inside the bottle.

Read more!

People's News from 5th World Water Forum: Democratic forum demands public water for all

A statement from www.peopleswaterforum.org, March 19

International water justice activists converged at the People's Water Forum today to affirm the human right to water and present diverse visions of existing public and community-led water management practices that protect water for people and nature, and can ensure water access for all regardless of their ability to pay.

Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, delivered a statement from him. D?Escoto was clear: "Water is a public trust, a common heritage of people and nature, and a fundamental human right. We must challenge the notion that water is a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Those who are committed to the privatization of water are denying people a human right as basic as the air we breathe."

A diverse group of water justice activists also presented their forward-looking visions. Mary Ann Manahan, of Focus on the Global South in the Philippines said "Access to water and sanitation is not only about efficiency and effective delivery but about justice, gender equity, human dignity and ultimately, democracy."

Sebahat Tuncet, a member of Turkey's Parliament, issued a strong statement against the construction of large dams, condemning especially the Ilisu and Munzur dams and others under consideration for construction throughout the region.

Adriana Marquisio, a member of Public Services International and President of Uruguay's Public Water Union, urged that water be managed publicly and not for profit. "But let us be clear," she added, "that the meaning of 'public' extends beyond state control. Public management must recognize alternative, community-led structures of governance.?

Philipp Terhorst of Transnational Institute, speaking for the European Water Network, criticized the recent EU Parliament?s resolution that fails to recognize the human right to water.

Also speaking at the conference was Al-hassan Adam, Coordinator of the Africa Water Network, who condemned the repression of activists, which, he said, reflects the larger exclusion of the majority of people from basic human rights.

These speakers represent a wide spectrum of visionary leaders offering practical, equitable, and just solutions to the world's current water crisis, said organizers of the Peoples Water Forum.

Read more!

News from the World Water Forum: 24 Hours in Police Custody

The fifth World Water Forum began this week in Istanbul. While the forum is billed as a venue for international work to avert water shortages, activists have denounced it as a front for multinationals promoting privatization of a common good for private gain. The following is a report from two activists who were arrested and deported for protesting at the forum. You can read daily updates from those critical of the World Water Forum's narrow approach and non-inclusive debate at WorldWaterForum.blogspot.com

Account of 24 hours in police custody in Istanbul from 10am on March 16,
2009 to the morning of March 17, 2009

By Ann-Kathrin Schneider, International Rivers

On March 16, 2009 at 9.30am, Payal Parekh and me unfolded a banner that read "No RISKY DAMS" just before the opening ceremony of the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. We also shouted "No Risky Dams" about five times. We were in the middle of the balcony of room 7 at the Sütlüce Conference Center in Istanbul.

The banner stayed up for about one minute -- after that, security forces took the banner. One minute later, security forces asked us to leave the room. We stayed outside of the conference room with about ten security and police officers for some minutes, while they checked our IDs, which they kept.

After that, they escorted us to a police room inside of the Sütlüce Conference Center where they wrote a statement of events, in Turkish. They asked us to sign the statement, which we refused because we didn't understand what the statement said. We asked for a translation of the statement, sentence by sentence, which we did not get.

After that, they led us to a car and drove us to a hospital. They did not take our cell phones away from us, so we were able to inform our friends about the developments. At the hospital, they led us to a doctor who asked us whether we had suffered any injuries, we said that we hadn't, she signed some papers, and we were escorted back to the car.

The police drove us to Hadic Merkezi Police Station in Beyoglu, Istanbul. There, a female policy officer did a body search on the two of us and they took our jewellery and our money, recorded everything we had, and gave it back to us.

Two lawyers, organized with the help of Turkish friends, arrived. We told them what had happened. The police finalized their statement and asked us to sign it. The lawyers translated the Turkish statement sentence by sentence. Since some details of the statement did not correspond with how we recalled the events of that morning, we refused to sign the statement and asked to give our own account of the morning's events.

Payal then reported the events of the morning to a policy officer. The lawyers helped translating her English into Turkish and the police officer wrote down the statement in Turkish. The lawyers translated the statement for us and both Payal and me signed the statement.

We then waited until about 5pm when our lawyers were called to talk to the head of the police station. The lawyers came back informing us that we had to leave the country within a couple of hours if we did not want to be put in prison for more than one year. They explained to us that our crime was that we tried to influence public opinion with the unfolding of the banner.

With the help of friends from Turkey and abroad we organized plane tickets for Payal to go back to the United States and for me to go back to Germany in the morning of Tuesday, March 17.

We were then taken to another police station and had photographs and fingerprints taken and were measured and weighed. After about one hour, we were sent back to the other police station, where we had spent the early afternoon, and spent the night there on some chairs in an office. We declined the invitation to sleep in the downstairs women's cell. A Turkish friend brought us our luggage from the hotel and we left the police station at about 6am in the morning towards the airport, in a police car.

We reached the airport at around 6.30am on Tuesday, March 17 and spent another one and a half hours at the police station at Istanbul airport, before being escorted to the check-in desk and the gate by a police officer.

The customs officer told me that I was banned from entering Turkey for two years. At the gate, the police officer gave me my boarding pass and ID.

We did not receive any documents describing what crime we were convicted of and the charges. We do not know who ordered our deportation, whether it was the police or a public prosecutor.

Read more!

Newfield, Maine, joins neighbor Shapleigh in banning large scale water extraction

Video from Portland's WCSH-6 news is available here.

NEWFIELD (NEWS CENTER) -- The town of Newfield is now the second in Maine to ban large-scale water extraction.

Saturday's vote was 228 in favor of the new ordinance and 146 against. The vote is a reaction to interest from Poland Spring Water and its parent company, Nestle, in pumping water from an aquifer shared by Newfield and Shapleigh.

Shapleigh voted for the same ban on water extraction two weeks ago. However, there is some concern that that ordinance could be overturned in court. As a result, townspeople voted on a different ordinance at town meeting Saturday that would lay out what a water company would have to do to be able to extract water from the aquifer.

That ordinance, which environmentalists felt was too weak, passed by a single vote.

Read more!

Maine Town Takes a Stand: Closes Tap on Water Privatization

Residents say no to Nestlé's plan to pump local water, and to their Board of Selectmen's attempt to regulate water takings

By Edward D. Murphy. Published March 1 by the Maine Sunday Telegram; reposted on CommonDreams.org

Shapleigh residents have banned companies from drawing or selling its water.

During a special town meeting Saturday morning, residents voted 114 to 66 to adopt the ban drafted by Protecting Our Water and Wildlife Resources, which had opposed Poland Spring's efforts to test, draw, bottle and market the town's water.

The ban had been opposed by the town's Board of Selectmen, which had favored instead a set of regulations on drawing water in the town that will be on the warrant for the regular town meeting on March 14.

"The problem in Shapleigh is that all three selectpeople want Nestlé (Poland Spring's parent company) in here," said Shelly Gobeille, one of the leaders of POWWR. "This vote says they can't come in."

In September, residents adopted a six-month moratorium on water testing, which was seen as a precursor to Poland Spring's plans to set up a pumping operation. The town's planning board used the time to work on rules and regulations for drawing the town's water, but POWWR wanted to ban all major water extraction operations.

When the Board of Selectmen refused to put POWWR's proposed ban on extraction on the town meeting warrant - arguing that two legal opinions said it was unconstitutional - proponents circulated a petition that led to the special town meeting.

Gobeille said POWWR is now concerned that the selectmen could seek to derail the ban, but Bill Hayes, one of the three selectmen, said he's inclined to let the ban go into force without the selectmen getting involved. However, he said, others could challenge its legality.

"The townspeople voted to enact it," Hayes said. "If they want to incur the legal expenses of defending it if it's challenged, that's up to them."

Hayes said that if Poland Spring wants to draw the town's water, it would be better to regulate the company's operations and make sure the town benefits financially. He said talks with the water bottler never got to the point where a dollar figure was discussed, but the amount the town would earn "would have been significant. This would have been an opportunity to defer" some property taxes.

Mark Dubois, natural resource manager for Poland Spring, said he was disappointed by the vote at the special town meeting.

"It's kind of disconcerting as a company with 400 jobs right now in York County," he said. "It's our home, too, and we're very discouraged we can't have a basic discussion about what we do and do well."

Dubois said the company draws water from nine sites in the state now and has sufficient supplies of water for its current needs. He said the company would have been looking to draw water from Shapleigh in 2011 or 2012, but noted that it takes a long time to gain the state and local permits that are needed.

Read more!

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.

Read more!

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.

Read more!

Lawsuits expected to follow bottled water study

by Scott Sabatini, published on Legal Newsline on Thursday, October 16. You can read the Environmental Working Group's report, which is referenced in the article below, here.

Laboratory tests of popular brands of bottled water will result in at least one California lawsuit against retail giant Wal-Mart, according to the non-profit organization that conducted the study.

The study, released on Tuesday, found 10 U.S. bottled water brands contain mixtures of 38 different pollutants, including bacteria, fertilizer, Tylenol and industrial chemicals, according to an executive summary issued by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.

The study asserts that Wal-Mart's label brand, Sam's Choice, fails to meet California's legal limits for bottled water contaminants.

The environmental group filed a notice of intent to sue Wal-Mart on Tuesday, alleging that the mega-chain failed to warn the public of illegal concentrations of trihalomethanes, which are cancer-causing chemicals.

Abraham Arredondo, a spokesman for the attorney general's office confirmed with Legal Newsline that they had received the letter from the Environmental Working Group and were taking it under advisement. He could not comment on the attorney general's interest in the case at this point, he said.

The study found that all brands met federal health standards, even though they fell short of the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry. California's standards exceed federal standards for water purity.

The Environmental Working Group sent a letter to California Attorney General Jerry Brown notifying him of the study and its implications for California. Brown has been a vocal critic of the bottled water industry.

This summer the threat of a lawsuit from the attorney general's office blocked a plan by Nestle, the nation's largest manufacturer of bottled water, for construction of a plant that would draw millions of gallons of water from the pristine McCloud River in Northern California. Nestle has since agreed to rework its construction and plan, lower levels of production and make further environmental concessions.

In an earlier interview Brown told Legal Newsline that Americans need to rethink their allegiance to bottled water.

"We take our pristine waters and cart them off to Maine or someplace," Brown said. "It's like carrying coal to New Castle, or ice to Alaska. It represents a level of waste that, at least, ought to be acknowledged. Hopefully, consumers will find more efficient ways to hydrate."

Officials from the Environmental Working Group said the bottled water industry has convinced consumers its product is superior, contrary to these study results.

"It's buyer beware with bottle water," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at EWG. "The bottled water industry promotes its products as pure and healthy, but our tests show that pollutants in some popular brands match the levels found in some of the nation's most polluted big city tap water systems. Consumers can't trust that what's in the bottle is anything more than processed, pricey tap water."

More than 25 percent of all bottled water comes from the same sources as tap water, municipal water supplies. Sam's Choice of Wal-Mart comes from Las Vegas' municipal supply.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts.

"The industry is spending millions, millions, on these advertising campaigning to get people think that bottled water is better than tap water." Executive Director Richard Wiles said.

Though the study did not focus on the cost and environmental impact of the bottled water industry, the group's recommendations focus on a change of mindset for consumers.

The average cost per gallon of bottled water, "$3.79 per gallon, is 1,900 times the cost of public tap water. A carbon filter at the tap or in a pitcher costs a manageable $0.31 per gallon," the EWG report states. "Consumers should drink filtered tap water instead of bottled water."

The environmental impact is also a concern, according to the report. Water bottle production in the U.S. uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per every year, according to a U.S. Conference of Mayors' resolution passed in 2007, enough energy to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Roughly one in four bottles of the 36 billion sold each year is properly recycled, according to a 2007 study.

The study's recommendations call for "full disclosure of all test results for all contaminants," in bottled water, and made readily available to the public.

Read more!

Is the Water Privatization Trend Ending?

By Julio Godoy, IPS News. Posted June 30, 2008. Posted on Alternet.

Paris is the latest city to take action to put water back into public hands, and they may be part of a new trend.

PARIS -- The announcement by the Paris municipality that water services will return to public hands by 2010 is in line with a global trend of ending privatisation of such services.

Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced June 2 that the municipal administration would regain control of all water services for the city, ending a private monopoly that has lasted more than 100 years.

The contracts with the world's two biggest water service companies, Suez and Veolia, will not be extended after Dec. 31, 2009.

"We want to offer a better service, at a better price," Delanoë said. "We also promise that prices would be stable."

Delanoë said his administration will encourage other municipalities in the Ile de France region around Paris to end privatisation of water services.

"That France, once known as the heartland of water privatisation, is embracing a return to public management of water services, is a strong signal in this new pattern," Olivier Hoedeman of the Water Remunicipalisation Tracker told IPS. The group, a sub-division of the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and the Transnational Institute, documents the decline of water privatisation.

The list of 're-municipalisation' of water services is long, and includes countries as diverse as Mali in West Africa, Uruguay where water has been brought back into the hands of the state at a national level, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe in Argentina, Cochabamba in Bolivia and Hamilton in Canada, besides other cities in France.

More than 40 French municipalities and urban communities have taken water services back into public hands over the last ten years, and brought improved services, cheaper.

In the 1990s many countries privatised their water and sanitation services, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, under strong pressure from neo-liberal governments, particularly in the European Union (EU), and from international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to 'open up' national services.

The biggest beneficiaries were Suez and Veolia, formerly known as the Compagnie Lyonnaise des Eaux and Compagnie Générale des Eaux respectively, which have been controlling water services in France since the late 19th century.

These two companies ventured into practically all privatisation of water services, from Argentina, Bolivia and Colombia in South America to numerous countries in Eastern Europe, and in the Philippines.

In Eastern Europe, Suez and Veolia won several privatisation contracts with the help of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a state-owned institution created in 1990 following a proposal by former French president Francois Mitterrand, and headed since then by a French bureaucrat.

The EU was also instrumental in trying to impose the worldwide privatisation of water and other public services through the WTO.

At a November 2001 meeting of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy of France inserted a clause into the final text of a resolution, to call for "the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services." This would include water services. And Lamy now heads the WTO.

The EU has worked closely with the water companies to fashion its trade policies. In a May 17, 2002 letter, the European Commission, the EU's executive, invited private water companies to inform it of "the position and interest of the European industry, their main market, obstacles if any to access new markets, as well as other questions you would consider relevant in this context."

Bernard Maris, professor of economics at the University of Paris VIII, said Suez and Veolia were behaving like "conquerors" abroad. "At the same time, they have enjoyed a century of protectionism, and their home market continues today to be closed to foreign competitors."

Many of the privatised operations in France and abroad missed targets to expand and upgrade networks, introduced high price increases, and unaffordable connection fees. "Management activities were not transparent and accountable," Hoedeman told IPS. "As a result numerous contracts were terminated, often following popular unrest."

Privatisation of water services in the French Alpine city Grenoble in 1987 was promoted by leading ministers of the government of then president Jacques Chirac. The project by Suez was marked by corruption, fraudulent accounting practices, and high prices.

In 1999, French courts sentenced former ministers and leading Suez executives to prison sentences for their involvement in the corrupt operation, and ordered the company to pay back all water charges imposed between 1990 and 1998.
Once the court cancelled the Grenoble contract and returned water services to the city municipality, prices were immediately brought down. By the end of 2002, the price of water in Grenoble, at 2.14 euros a cubic metre, was about the lowest in all French cities. Similar improvement came in cities around the world that put an end to privatisation of water services.

Read more!

Bottled Water Industry Faces Growing Opposition

Last week’s decision in York County may be part of a national backlash.

by Kevin Wack
Published on Monday, June 30, 2008 by the Portland Press Herald (Maine)
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/30/10004/

Last week’s decision by a York County water board to delay a vote on whether to sell municipal water to Nestle Corp., the owner of Poland Spring, did not happen in a vacuum.

* Last month in McCloud, Calif., after encountering opposition to what would have been the largest water bottling plant in the country, Nestle announced plans to significantly reduce the plant’s size.
* Earlier this month in Enumclaw, Wash., the city council rejected a proposal to allow Nestle to build another such plant.
* And last Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors voted to phase out use of bottled water for municipal employees.

Across the country, opposition to bottled water is building, amid growing concerns about the industry’s environmental impact and rising fears about private control of public water supplies.

“There’s no question that there is a groundswell,” said Ruth Caplan, coordinator of Defending Water for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign that opposes the bottled water industry.

There are several reasons for the backlash to bottled water. Some of it is driven by fears about global warming - given the amount of oil needed to bottle and transport the water.

Some stems from concerns about the chemical makeup of plastic water bottles.

Some of the opposition is a byproduct of the huge price disparity between bottled water and the kind of water that comes from the tap for free.

Here in Maine, some of the local opposition to Poland Spring’s operations has stemmed from the traffic generated by the trucks that transport the water.

Perhaps the biggest factor, though, is a fear that as bottled water becomes more popular, private corporations are gaining more control over a natural resource that is central to life.

“The fundamental issue is, who owns the water?” said Jim Olson, an attorney for Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, which has been engaged in a legal battle with Nestle. “If this company gets to do it, all companies get to do it, and you’re not going to be able to say no in the future.”

Caplan expressed concern that the bottled water industry is turning water into a commodity, the price of which will be determined by the market.

“What they’re trying to do is get us to think that drinking water comes out of their bottles, and water to wash with comes out of the tap,” she said.

Tom Brennan, a natural resources manager for Poland Spring, said the company’s products are not in competition with tap water. And, he said, there’s enough water in the ground for both uses.

Poland Spring hopes to draw as much as 250,000 gallons per day from the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District, which uses up to 7 million gallons per day, and has recently found sources to provide an additional 3 million gallons each day.

“We’re not depleting aquifers. That would be absolutely counterproductive,” Brennan said.

He and other defenders of the industry note that soda and beer also require water, but they don’t provoke the same opposition as bottled water.

Brennan acknowledged that opposition to the industry is growing, but he put it in the context of growth in the popularity of bottled water.

“To be quite honest, I don’t pretend to understand it,” Brennan said. “I think it’s isolated, yet loud.”

Poland Spring currrently gets water from more than 20 wells in eight Maine communities, including Fryeburg, Denmark and Dallas Plantation. The company has bottling plants in Hollis and Poland Spring, and - in response to rising demand - plans to open a third plant in Kingfield.

In York County, the water district’s recent decision to delay a vote on the Poland Spring deal followed a public meeting where more than 100 people expressed their opposition.

The water district’s trustees voted to postpone their decision until after an independent scientific review of the data underlying the proposal.

Emily Posner, the state leader of Defending Water for Life, said she was heartened by the outpouring of opposition to the deal. She said that people from all over Maine came out to stand up against the corporate control of water.

Brennan, of Poland Spring, countered that many of the people protesting the deal are not from the Kennebunk area or even from Maine.

“And that in my mind is somewhat troubling,” he said.

Read more!

Op-Ed suggests state-level protections for rural aquifers

Water conservation expert Amy Vickers has some good legislative proposals to protect Massachusetts's water supply from for-profit exploitation in this op-ed from Monday's Boston Globe.

Putting a cap on the bottled water industry
By Amy Vickers

Over a half-billion dollars of Massachusetts' taxpayer money will be spent this year on clean drinking water program loans to communities, yet Beacon Hill has been strangely silent about - and invested not one penny in defense of - small- and often low-income rural towns that stand alone against what many see as a threat to their drinking water supplies: Swiss-based Nestlé Waters.

Nestlé, the old candy company that once spawned an international boycott of its products for proffering cheap infant formula as better than mother's milk to women in developing countries, now profits from what many say is sullying another sacred solution: the bottling of pristine waters. It may soon do this in some of the state's most water-stressed and fragile communities.

For more than a year, Nestlé and its well drillers, technical consultants, and lawyers have been quietly surveying the profit potential in the few remaining unspoiled springs and aquifers in Central and Western Massachusetts. In its attempts to strike blue gold, the firm has aggressively pursued water extraction deals that have many locals seeing red.

Two recent efforts by Nestlé to pursue pumping operations in small towns illustrate why withdrawals for commercial water bottling operations in our state pose unacceptable risks, not only to local drinking water supplies, but also to such natural assets as fisheries and conservation land. Last summer, Montague residents halted - at least for now -Nestlé's pursuit of the spring water beneath Montague Plains, a state wildlife management area that also recharges critical ground water for a state fish hatchery and the local wells on which many homes and farms depend.

This spring, after considerable public outcry, Clinton town officials appeared to have finally rejected Nestlé's bid to extract and export up to a quarter-million gallons of spring water a day - equal to 4 million servings of some of the cleanest drinking water in the state - from the nearly 600-acre Wekepeke Reservation land that Clinton owns in the town of Sterling. The offer posed several legal issues, not least the fact that Clinton's 19th-century water rights to the Wekepeke are for surface water - not spring water - and only for town public water supply needs.

Clinton stopped using Wekepeke water in the 1960s and the town is now supplied by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Sterling residents, 70 percent of whom rely on the Wekepeke for ground water to supply their home wells, were incensed and asked why another town would have the right to literally sell the water beneath their feet for global export to the highest bidder.

Since when has Massachusetts enjoyed a surplus of pristine drinking water supplies that multinational firms, not Bay State citizens, are considered more deserving to receive? The state classifies 70 percent of state river drainage basins as "flow-stressed." Since when have they been restored to such good health that we now have a surfeit of naturally clean freshwater ready for shipping to bottle-chugging out-of-staters - and this in an era in which we face unprecedented global warming, increased agricultural irrigation needs, and worsening water pollution, which requires skyrocketing treatment costs?

Leaders in government, business, religious, and spiritual movements across America are increasingly rejecting bottled water because of its indefensible environmental costs. It is time that this state also calls a halt to the aggressive intrusions of the bottled water industry into the vulnerable water sources that supply small-town homes, farms, and public conservation lands.

The Legislature should place an immediate statewide moratorium of at least two years on new bottled water extractions along with a cap on existing withdrawals.

In the meantime, an assessment of the state's available water supplies and needs - coupled with long-term climate change forecasts - must be made. Further, a statewide law must be enacted that affirms that the waters of Massachusetts shall be protected in perpetuity for its inhabitants, first and foremost, and that communities and aquifer protection areas may ban out-of-state water exports.

Unless it can be proven that Massachusetts has water to spare, there is no time to waste in stopping the bottled water industry from draining our most prized and irreplaceable sources of clean drinking water.

Amy Vickers, who lives in Amherst, is an engineer and water conservation consultant.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Read more!

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted October 11, 2007.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/64948?page=entire

Thanks to global warming, pollution, population growth, and privatization, we are teetering on the edge of a global crisis.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."

We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.

But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.

As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.

We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.

The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.

What's gone wrong?

As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe's resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions.

Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world's supply by over 50 percent.

The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops.

This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.

Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. "Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge," wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water.

The Ogallala aquifer -- the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota -- is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, "California's Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today," add Clarke and Barlow.

Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities.

The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa.

As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in "economic liberalism," which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public.

In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."

It has oft been expressed that the next resource wars will not be over oil -- or energy at all -- but over water. As the idea of neoliberalism, proliferated by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, spread, the public sector has become dangerously privatized. And it may not be the wealth of nations on the line -- but the wealth of corporations.

A senior executive at a subsidiary of Vivendi, the world's largest water controller summed it up, "Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is an equally powerful ingredient for profitable manufacturing companies."

But when private companies control water resources, people's needs for survival are pushed aside in place of the bottom line. In Africa, an estimated 5 million people die each year for lack of safe drinking water. And yet Africa, with its many cash-strapped countries, is targeted by multinationals that force governments to turn over their public water systems in exchange for promises of debt relief.

When corporations control water, rates go up, services go down, and those who can't afford to pay are forced to drink unsafe water, risking their lives. This has happened across the world -- in South Africa, in Bolivia, in the United States.

This same philosophy of corporate control drives the construction of dams, which have displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide. In India alone, over 4,000 dams have submerged 37,500 square kilometers of land and forced 42 million people from their homes.

Multinationals looking to cash in on the water business have also made giant inroads in selling bottled water in richer countries. Expensive marketing campaigns convince people that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Then, companies like Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal tap water and others like Nestle pilfer spring water from rural communities and resell it at huge profits.

The water crisis may be growing, but so is resistance to privatization as communities are fighting back against the corporate control of the world's most vital resource.

How we can fix it

We need water to survive, not just as individuals, but as communities. Author John Thorson put it perfectly when he said, "Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other."

Just ask the people of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They've experienced water wars for the last hundred years that have pitted neighbor against neighbor and tribal member against farmer.

Native American tribes in the region -- the Klamath, Hoopa, Karuk, and Yaruk -- with priority rights to water, have struggled with farmers over limited water resources. Nature has been unable to deliver as much water as the government has promised to farmers and tribal members, as well as downstream fishermen. With not enough water in the river, either crops have failed or fish have died, creating community strife and economic hardship.

But in the last year, things have begun to change. These groups have formed a coalition to save the river they all depend on for survival. They are sitting at the same table and finally beginning to hear from each other about the needs of farmers, the value of subsistence economies, the history of families on the river, the ceremony that comes with the salmon runs, the rights of nature.

Together, this unlikely alliance is taking on PacifiCorp, one of the largest multinational power companies, whose out-of-date dams are threatening the ecosystem and the economy of the region.

And just over the peak of Mount Shasta another community and tribe are battling to save their spring water from Nestle, which hopes to tap the community's greatest asset for its own wealth.

The people of the small town of McCloud and the Winnemem Wintu tribe are fighting back, and they are not alone. Across the country a backlash to the bottled-water business is gaining steam. Fancy restaurants like California's Chez Panisse, Incanto, and Poggio and New York's Del Posto have gotten on board. San Francisco has also led the way among municipalities that are beginning to cancel their bottled water contracts, understanding the great harm the industry does to the environment and communities.

It is not just bottled water that has posed a problem, but private companies buying out municipal water systems and then raising rates and lowering services. One the best examples is Stockton, Calif., which went private in the largest "public-private partnership" in the West. Since 2001 the people of Stockton have been fighting for control of their water against a multinational consortium.

The case gained international attention when it was featured in the film and book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The public finally won out in July, when the city council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract and send the corporation packing.

The citizen groups that have been working to defend their communities are being supported by many national and international groups pushing back against corporate control and empowering people -- groups like Tony Clarke's Polaris Institute in Canada, which has focused on public education and research around issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water security and bottled water.

In the United States, Corporate Accountability International is encouraging people to drink tap water over bottled water with their "Think Outside the Bottle Campaign." They are working to educate the public, as well as city governments and businesses, with great success.

And today, on the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, Food & Water Watch, is sponsoring a National Call-In Day for action on clean water to urge representatives to support the creation of a clean water trust fund, "which is a long-term, sustainable, and reliable source of funding to upgrade and improve our public water systems." The organization has been working to protect public water systems from private takeover and to help fund municipal water so that all residents have clean, safe and affordable water.

The movement extends across the country and the world as people are also rebelling against the corporate takeover of their municipal water systems -- in California, in Ghana, in Brazil, in Canada, in France, in Indonesia -- and the list goes on.

Opposition to corporate control is rooted in the belief that water is part of the commons. Everyone should have access to clean water, regardless of their level of income or their country's international standing.

In order to ensure that all people have access to clean, affordable water, we need to make some changes.

Some see technology as the necessary fix -- or at least a step in the right direction. As the BBC reports:

New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.

Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.

Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used -- and drunk -- several times over.

Desalinization makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.

But many warn against relying on a "techno-fix" to solve our problems.

Water experts argue that we need to reduce consumption on individual and community levels. Author Tony Clarke advises working with those closest to the problems, such as helping farmers to develop a more sustainable agriculture system. And the same goes for industry. Looking to the folks who have been on the land longest, like indigenous and traditional cultures, will also help us learn how an ecosystem works.

And experts say that we also need to start developing a comprehensive water policy that goes from the regional to international level. The World Bank and United Nations have the capability to change the designation of water from a human need to a human right, ensuring that corporations can't exploit this resource for economic gain, as Clarke and Barlow advocate for in Blue Gold.

Governments should be investing in their people, in conservation and in the infrastructure that we depend on to access clean, affordable water.

It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?" wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. "And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?"

See more stories tagged with: water, water privatization, clean water, clean water act, bottled water, nestle, coke, pepsi

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

Read more!