Water - Need or Right?

A World Water Forum was held in March 2008 in Istanbul, Turkey, where a week-long gathering discussed water policy at a time when over a billion people lack access to clean water and two-and-a-half billion lack water for proper sanitation.

Activists from the People’s Water Forum, an alternative formation representing rural poor, the environment and organized labor, slammed the official event as a non-inclusive, corporate-driven fraud pushing for water privatization and called for a more open, democratic and transparent forum.

The forum, which is organized every three years by the French-based World Water Council, is funded in large part by the water industry. The forum opened with Turkish police firing tear gas and detaining protesters, who were shouting “water for life, not for profit.”

The final non-binding communiqué from the official forum describes access to water as a “basic human need” rather than a ‘human right’, despite efforts by dissenting Latin American countries...” (Democracy Now, 23 Mar 09)

“Recognizing water as a basic human right would mean equating it with other fundamental rights already observed by the United Nations, defining it as an unalienable right, and obligating most governments to ensure this for their entire populations.

Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela refused to sign the final declaration of this year’s water forum in Istanbul, but instead an alternative declaration that did recognize access to water as a basic human right”.

According to Maude Barlow, the senior adviser on water issues to the United Nations General Assembly, in an interview on New York-based radio program ‘Democracy Now’, “The World Water Forum is bankrupt of new ways to address the growing water crisis in the world, because they have maintained an adherence to an ideology that is not working, that has dramatically failed,”.

In a press conference, Bolivian Environment Minister René Orellana said this declaration “ignores native peoples, collective rights to water, local or community systems of water management, but above all, there was no political will to include any change to the text.”The 25 nations that signed an alternative declaration made a call for future debates over water with greater participation, social inclusion and democratic values. (Latinamerica Press, 2009).

According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, “46 million of the 580 million inhabitants in the region lack access to drinking water, and 121 million do not have sanitation”.

See below for Trinidad and Tobago's position on water...

Water is a ‘basic need’? Water is a ‘basic right’? Nah man, here in T&T water is a 'basic profit'...

On 30th October, 2008, local Newsday newspaper reported Minister of Public Utilities, Mustapha Abdul-Hamid in a post-cabinet news conference as saying “there are plans to build five new desalination plants to boost water production. A plant which has not yet been commissioned, has been constructed in Moruga.” The plant was constructed by a “South Korean water-treatment company ‘Hankook Jungsoo Industries Company Limited’ and construction began on April 14, and is almost ninety percent complete”.

During campaigning in the run-up to the November 25, 2007 General Election, Prime Minister Patrick Manning used the issue of water desalination plants as a means of solving water problems being experienced in certain parts of the country.

During a post Cabinet briefing on September 18, Abdul-Hamid noted the Government would bring in an “advisor” to aid in the setting up of five new plants. “First of all, we propose to hire an independent procurement expert with experience in management, construction, operating and owning and maintaining desalination plants, as well as waste-water treatment plants, drinking water treatment plants and construction of water-transmission networks.”

Hamid assured that “companies were being sought to design, build, own and operate the desalination plants with the companies then selling water to Government. “We sent out requests for information…we expect to have our contracts awarded somewhere in March of 2009,” Abdul- Hamid said.

A worker, who spoke on the basis of anonymity, boasted that water produced by the desalination plant was capable of producing water which exceeds World Health Organisation (WHO) standards. [strange, how this anonymous ‘worker’ is unconcerned about his ‘needs’ and ‘rights’ to water or his future job prospects and increase in water bill].

He [the worker] explained further “that water purity standards, measured on the nephelolometric turbidity units (NTU) scale (which is a universal water standard set out by the WHO) usually rank potable water as having an ntu rating of below five units”.

He [the worker] said the water produced by the new desalination plant was capable of producing water at below .15 ntu. “The final quality of this water is better than most bottled water,” the worker boasted. [the worker “boasted”?] – Truth Drummers wonder how the Korean desalination plant water quality squares up with the once pristine and mineral rich water of the Northern Range, before becoming silted up with quarry run-off. Read below our proof of ‘anti-sustainable development’ using the quarry and water sectors as evidence…