Water

Blue gold or human rights ?

Alison Katz, WHO

Riccardo Petrella is the world’s water man. Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he lives, breathes, speaks and hopefully drinks, water. He was invited by the Services Industriels de Genève on 21 February 2003 to make a brief presentation on his favourite subject. Here is a sample of his reflections:

Of sun, air and water.. life itself

Official statistics show that over one billion people on earth today do not have access to clean water. Access, by the way, is defined as within 1 kilometre distance of home - thereby proving the critical importance of knowing the statisticians’ underlying assumptions.

Climate explains only a very small part of this problem. Poverty, as usual, is the culprit. It would appear that only solvent consumers have the right to life.

Industrial agriculture

70% of the usable water on earth is used in agriculture. Industrial agriculture with its heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers is particularly voracious and animal based agriculture is the worst in this respect. 40% of usable water is lost through irrigation.

In relation to our destructive use of water, Petrella makes the point that we are very poor housekeepers - if we regard the earth as our house. We need to bring economy (the rules of the home) and ecology (discourse on the home) together. They are one and the same thing.

Commercialization of life

As water becomes scarce, it becomes more valuable. Indeed we now use the term « blue gold » for water just as we use the term « black gold » for oil. In today’s world, a commodity which is both rare and precious, cannot possibly be distributed to everyone - especially not for free !

Water is of enormous strategic importance and it should come as no surprise therefore that the Pentagon knows more about water sources than any other institution in the world. If you need to be able «to intervene any time, anywhere», you need to know how you will water 10,000 troops. Meanwhile multinational corporations are busy buying up aquifers in the Amazon region, and on the Asian and African continent.

On democracy and public goods

For many of us, privatization of water is self evidently a violation of human rights. Privatization means exclusion. Neither human rights nor democracy can be respected if people are excluded from the very means of existence. Human rights are universal, indivisible and imprescriptible - they cannot be taken away, nor privatized. The right to water must be enshrined in nation’s constitutions. Poverty needs to be declared illegal, just as slavery was. Finally, Petrella reminds us that we became civilized from the moment when collective taxes were imposed for the provision of public goods. This is the basis of democracy.

The first Social Forum on Water will be held in Florence at the end of March 2003.