Water: A Human Right or an Economic Commodity?
by Mhizha Edmund Chifamba
Executive Director, Washington Office on Africa
In Africa, water and land are common goods to be maintained by
the community for future generations. Yet multilateral agencies and private companies
want to commodify water, arguing that this is the best way to solve problems
of access to clean drinking water and to reduce the incidence of diseases.
Clean water is crucial to life and health. In the past, it has determined
the sites of human settlement, and lack of it now is one of the underlying causes
of poverty. It is central to food security, income generation, and sustainable
development. The fear is that though many Africans endure life without other
commodities such as telephones, electricity or formal education, and that a large
majority of African people survive without Western-style health care services,
none can survive without sufficient drinking water.1
At suitable moments throughout the history of the development agenda, industrialized
nations have flaunted the sanctity of human rights as a virtue that pervades
Western societies. Will the rights of private companies now overshadow the basic
needs and rights of the public good?
Africa's water problems are the worst in the world. The continent has the
lowest number of its population, 62 percent, using water supply services, and
access to water for sanitation is at 60 percent. Africa's rural population is
much worse off, with only 47 percent having access to water supply services,
and 45 percent with access to water for sanitation. This compares to 85 percent
in urban areas, which have access to water for drinking and sanitation. (WHO/UNICEF
2000)
Yet the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - agencies perceived
to be for human development - have included the privatization of water services
as part of their structural adjustment conditions and poverty alleviation programs.
For example, in exchange for increased aid and inclusion into the HIPC program,
Mozambique must transform its rural water delivery from a supply-driven to a
demand-driven model, involving participation by the private sector. In other
words, stop giving the water away to those who need it; instead, sell it to those
who can pay a private company for it. (Joseph Hanlon, July 5, 1999, Jubilee 2000
UK).
Ghana
In Ghana, the World Bank and IMF argued against the government's policy
of receiving subsidies on water provision and sanitation from wealthy and industrialized
customers to benefit the poor. The plan was to allow for competition by private
companies and corporations, such as San Francisco's Bechtel Corporation, the
Vivendi and Saur of France, and Biwater of the U.K., to take over water services
to be sold at full market rates (Blackwell, 1998). Their argument was that this,
in part, would reduce the high incidence of water-borne diseases, such as cholera
and dysentery, as well as ensure improved health conditions. However, the outcome
was contrary to expectation.
"In 1998, the year after the Ghana government stopped water subsidies
for poor people, the incidence of guinea worm jumped from 5,473 to 8,965. Taps
were turned off, and people couldn't afford to turn them back on. Rates shot
up 200 percent over a period of three years, leading to 78 percent of Ghana's
poor not having access to piped water..." 2
South Africa
After a successful fight against racial apartheid in South Africa,
the contest for economic rights in that country has continued. Patrick Bond argues
that as soon as the government of South Africa agreed to trade liberalization,
neo-liberal water industry actors began pushing for the deregulation and privatization
of those services. Municipalities in South Africa moved to transform debt-ridden
and inefficient water utilities into profit-making operations, and provided concessions
to multinationals in a bid to attract private investment. Soon after privatization,
municipalities began to cut off basic services to non-payers, creating public
health hazards.
Resistance to privatization has grown in urban townships and rural squatter
camps. In the words of Richard Makolo, of the Crisis Water Committee in the Orange
Farm Township, "privatization is a new kind of apartheid. Apartheid separated
whites from blacks. Privatization separates rich from poor." 3
Commodification of services has marginalized the same poor people that were
victims of racial apartheid (before political independence in urban townships
and rural squatter camps became the principal battlegrounds in the fight against
apartheid in South Africa). Bond also underscores that controversies over such
features, as in the case of Johannesburg-style water apartheid, are increasingly
common in Latin America, Africa, Asia and even industrial countries (ibid).
U.S.A.
This approach to providing water is not unique to developing countries.
The United States government under George W. Bush has been pushing for this policy
domestically, by supporting a proposed law that would require any U.S. community
that wants federal money to improve its water system to consider privatization.
The European Union (where the largest private water corporations are headquartered)
is pressuring the U.S. into opening up its water markets to private companies.
From New Orleans to Stockholm, officials have been toying with handing over water
systems to private corporations that will reap huge profits at the expense of
customers. As Savanna Blackwell points out, researchers - including those at
Public Citizen and the Pacific Institute in Development and Security - have found
that privatization often leads to skyrocketing rates, environmental damage, poor
maintenance, economic inequity, and decreased accountability.4
Water privatization has failed the world over to solve the problem of access
to water, largely because selling water for profit at market prices is required
once private companies become involved in water delivery; putting it out of range
for the poor and unemployed. It is worse for the majority of Africans living
in rural areas (relying on subsistence agriculture for their livelihood), as
these market-driven water strategies do not improve their access to water, but
leave them with water shortages along with the absence of other basic needs.
Despite the negative impact of water privatization on the poor and marginalized,
the World Bank and IMF link this strategy to development, imposing privatization
as part of debt conditions and development strategies. Governments are increasingly
required to provide water services by incorporating private companies into crucial
public services. This forces an untenable competition between governments in
developing countries and large multinational companies in the business of providing
clean water. Private companies profit from the same small sections of the population
with the earning capacity to pay for services. Yet this small group is also the
small taxation base upon which governments rely.
Development of water services based on the replacement of government agencies
by private profit-making companies moves the common good away from the public
sector and into the private sector. While it has been shown to be clearly inadequate
for the urban poor, it completely marginalizes rural communities, leaving them
with ongoing water scarcity both for drinking and sanitation, with all the negative
consequences. Yet rural people have as much right to water and sanitation as
the people living in urban areas.
This is a denial of basic needs and the way in which water is central to life
and crucial to development efforts in food stability, health and income generation.
Access to water should be viewed as a basic human right, with just as much significance
as all other aspects of human rights.
General Assembly
"The problems associated with limited water resources
and their equitable distributions are part of a larger whole. In the past two
hundred years humans have developed powerful technologies to wrest resources
from nature to improve the material conditions of human life. Improvements have
been spectacular. Now on the back of this good rides increased materialism, ecological
degradation, and new forms of injustice. The present task is to orient these
technologies to sustainable and sufficient ends and to balance the power of those
who own and manage these technologies. Issues of limited water resources, water
rights, and takings are only one part of this larger task." (From "Limited
Water Resources and Takings," approved by the 216th General
Assembly (2004),
developed by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy of the General Assembly
Council.)
Footnotes
- Coppejans, 2006, "Poverty
and privatization of public domestic water and sanitation services in Africa."
- August 2002 report by fact-finding mission to Ghana that
included representatives of a Washington D.C.-based Public Citizen funded by
Ralph Nader, Public Citizen, Oakland - Pacific Institute for Development, and
Security.
- Richard Makolo was the leader of the Crisis Water Committee
at Orange Farm formed to resist the privatization of water in Johannesburg.
- Savannah Blackwell, "Water
privatization has been a failure all over the world."
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