An example of water privatization is the Coca-Cola's bottling plants in India which was accused to create severe water shortages and pollution. Coca paid for the land then gets the water for free, It was a private-public partnership in the state of Kerala “in a region that has such high rainfall that region has never had water scarcity, within one year of a Coca Cola plant coming, pumping up 1.5 million liters a day for bottling water, three lakes went dry, rivers went dry.”
An illustration in the USA, is Southern California, where water has been drawn from the aquifer. In the California Mojave Desert water is such a valuable commodity that agricultural companies purchased the desert not to farm but to gain right water. Tucson, Arizona and surrounding areas supplies 700,000 residents and 30 golf courses with water pump from an aquifer that took thousands of years to form. The only way now for the city is to purchase water rights to private owners.
Reasoning in ecological model, you value water but you can’t price it because it is priceless. In a market theory you price water but you don’t value it, you get somewhere first, you buy and have absolute rights to exploit in unsustainable manner, to pollute, to destroy then, just leave. The end to the privatization of global water resources is a fundamental universal right. Water has to be governed by natural law, not by the market because water is not property of the state or corporations, water belongs to the people of earth.
The right to access clean water without discrimination is a matter of life and death. Our short-term profitability economy is incompatible with natural cycles, the geologic cycle, the hydrological cycle and renewability. There is a biosphere we inherit and a technosphere of our creation.
References:
Paget-Clarke, N. P.-C. (2002). Interview with Vandana Shiva. Discussing “Water Wars” Retrieved
from http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva3.html#Anchor-Corporate-23240
No comments:
Post a Comment