RIO DE JANEIRO: Developing countries rich in water resources could become the stage for wars similar to what is happening today in Iraq if water continues to be privatized and sold like any other merchandise or good, warned Leonardo Morelli, the organizer of the Social Water Forum, at the forum meeting here in Brazil.
"Today, war is being waged over oil, tomorrow it will be for water," Morelli, who is also the coordinator of the Brazilian Shout for Water Movement, told IPS in a telephone interview in a break in the 16-23 March debates and seminars that drew activists from around South America to Cotia, a city on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.
Conflicts on a planetary scale could arise from the fact that the developing South has the world's greatest reserves of freshwater, while "those who have the money are in the industrialized North," he augured.
Morelli pointed out that Israel has just 500 litres of water a year per person, while in Brazil and Paraguay the average is 10,000 and 63,000 litres a year per person, respectively.
Water, a "patrimony of humanity", must not be governed by market forces but by public systems based on the concepts of cooperation and solidarity, due to the possibility of growing shortages caused by pollution and the wasteful use of water, he argued.
Control over Iraq is strategic not only because of the country's oil reserves, but also due to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which make that country important in a region with scarce sources of water, noted US writer Norman Mailer in an article on the Iraq crisis published earlier in March by the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo.
The Social Water Forum and similar gatherings in the northern Italian city of Florence, New Delhi and New York were held as a sort of counterpoint to the third World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan.
The parallel social forums, organized by environmental groups and social movements, were held to protest the approach taken by the Kyoto forum and to defend water as a human right and a common resource, whose management must be under public control. About 400 experts and NGO delegates participating in the Social Water Forum in Brazil discussed the social issues that arise in the global debates on managing water. They maintain that clean and affordable water for all is a human right, and that water management must be environmentally sustainable and socially fair.
Prevailing at the Kyoto meeting, on the other hand, were financial aspects, "the economy-based focus of the World Bank," like the idea of charging user fees and thus controlling water consumption, Morelli criticized.
That approach was confirmed, he said, by the Moroccan government's decision to award the King Hassan II Great World Water Prize, which includes an award of $100,000, to the president of Brazil's National Water Agency, Jerson Kelman, at the third World Water Forum. According to the prizegivers, Kelman led the effort to put together a legal and institutional framework for an integrated water resources management system in Brazil.
But Morelli complained that what the National Water Agency did was to introduce a water management model that favoured powerful economic players at the expense of environmental and social aspects, and allowed power plants to use too much water, thus triggering the 2001 energy crisis. It also allowed transnational corporations to gain control over underground water, which they sell as mineral water, while the Brazilian population must make do with surface water, which is far more exposed to pollution, he added.
The Social Water Forum is promoting a plan for mobilization by civil society in defence of water sources that Brazil shares with neighbouring Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, such as the Amazon jungle rivers and the Rio de la Plata.
The plan also covers the Guarani aquifer, one of the world's largest water reservoirs, which extends from south-central Brazil to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay (the four countries that make up the Mercosur or Southern Common Market trade bloc).
The idea is to promote coordinated actions by a network of social and environmental groups from the Mercosur nations as well as the eight countries that share the Amazon jungle, and file complaints with the International Court of Justice in The Hague over serious violations of the right of all living things to water, said Morelli.
The problems caused by the privatization of water were illustrated by the series of social protests in the central Bolivian department of Cochabamba between 4-11 April 2000, in which several people were killed and almost 200 injured. Peasant farmers who depend on irrigation to grow their crops took to the streets to protest a government decision to grant a 40-year privatization contract over all water sources to a private company, Virginia Amurrio, one of the leaders of the Cochabamba Federation of Irrigators, told IPS by phone from Cotia.
The privatization allowed Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the giant Bechtel Corporation, to charge fees for the water consumed, at prices pegged to the dollar, to which a tax was added. That led to an immediate skyrocketing of utility fees, which climbed by as much as 200% in some cases - with some families paying $20 a month in water bills while the minimum wage is less than $100 a month.
