by Leon Spencer, Washington Office on Africa

Water is essential to life. We know that. What we may not know is that-in an economic era of privatization-access to this most fundamental of life's essentials is increasingly being treated as an economic commodity to be controlled, owned and sold to those with the resources to pay. There is no right to water.

People, of course, have no alternative to water, and for that reason alone, many in the faith community and elsewhere now maintain that providing water cannot be left to market forces.

At least 1.2 billion people in the world have no access to clean, safe drinking water. The target for the Millennium Development Goals is to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to safe water, but unless dramatic steps are taken, some experts predict that instead, by the year 2025, two-thirds of the world's people will not have access to sufficient drinking water.

Many multinational corporations see this human crisis as an economic opportunity. "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations," reported Fortune Magazine (May 2000).

Historically, people — and governments — have seen water as being held as a "public trust," and therefore responsibility for water services has been held by public and municipal systems. Not anymore. The World Bank has concluded that water privatization — providing water to the public by private companies for profit-is the best way to make safe water and sanitation available to people in developing countries.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have often imposed water privatization as a precondition for development assistance or debt relief. Meanwhile, World Trade Organization (WTO) rules let multinational companies "buy and sell" water rights in countries throughout the world.

Certainly many public utilities are poorly run, in the United States as well as in Africa. The current controversy over lead in the water in Washington, D.C., is a case in point. But rather than provide resources and technical help to governments to restructure, rehabilitate and expand public water services, the World Bank embraces the view that private initiatives will always run more efficiently than public ones.

How do these multinationals (the two largest water companies are Vivendi and Suez, both French companies) provide safe water more efficiently and effectively (if indeed they do)? One way is by cherry-picking: Essentially profit-making water services are separated from loss-making markets. Providing water in urban settings, and wealthy areas, is less costly than in rural areas or slums. So, companies take the profitable sectors, and leave the unprofitable sectors to the government to provide.

International financial institutions, meanwhile, promote systems that allocate water to "high value users," principally industry and agro-business, and neglect subsistence farmers as well as the general rural public. The IMF and World Bank help to starve public services by withholding funds that would strengthen them. And, by demanding what is called "full cost recovery"-fees from consumers for the full cost of operating a water utility-governments are discouraged from treating water as a human right, and prices rise. All of this pushes governments toward privatization* and then for-profit companies raise water rates and cut off services.

The international political-economic agenda, then, is this: When African governments provide water through public structures, they should withdraw subsidies that help make water a human right and should impose full cost recovery, thus declaring water to be principally and foremost an economic commodity. That's a start, the World Bank and IMF say, but it is not enough. Water as a public enterprise for the common good should yield to water as an economic product sold for profit by a private corporation. Private companies have little incentive to expand water access to poor people who cannot afford to pay.

Ghana and South Africa are key examples of water as an economic commodity. Under a 1999 agreement (part of the debt relief process), the Ghanaian government was required to privatize the Ghana Water Company. That public service company had glaring failures. In Teshie, a suburb of Accra, residents' taps had been dry for five years, and they bought water by the bucket from private vendors.

Nevertheless, Ghanaian civil society protested its government's support for privatization, fearing increased prices before water supply. In 2002 Christian Aid supported a Ghanaian research group Southern Links in its study of water privatization. Among their findings:

• Prices rise under privatization; in Ghana, water rates rose 95 percent in May 2001.
• For those without piped water- largely people living in poverty-costs were magnified, for tanker truck operators and intermediary buyers and sellers passed on their costs.
• Price increases hit people in poverty harder, for their relatively smaller incomes mean they pay a higher proportion of their income for water. In Ghana, purchasing three buckets of water a day can cost as much as 20 percent of a person's income. To use a tax term, water rates are regressive.
• When safe water is neither available nor affordable, residents turn to informal storage containers that are often unsafe.

Which brings us again to South Africa. In 2001, pre-paid water meters in South Africa prevented access to safe water by people living in poverty, causing a massive cholera outbreak where more than 100,000 people became ill and several hundred died. These meters, installed through a partnership between Johannesburg Water and the French company Suez, require payment before water is dispensed. No money, no water. As many as 10 million people have been affected by cut-offs since the end of apartheid. Ironically, the South African constitution and its bill of rights is one of the few in the world that declares that "everyone has the right to have access to sufficient water."

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has introduced a resolution in the House on "Water for People and Nature." It advances the view that water is a human right. We will keep you informed as it begins to move through committee.