The Price of Water in the 21st Century
by Soheil Rezayazdi
It started getting scary in Cochabamba. Plainclothes snipers shot at civilians; police and military officers muzzled protesters with force. The 21st century had just begun.
Facing riots and a nasty political battle, Bolivia’s third-largest city became synonymous in 2000 with one of globalization’s recurring dilemmas: the shift from public-owned to private-owned water. In Cochabamba, at least six protestors died in the struggle.
Public uproar crushed privatization in Bolivia, but, with a string of newer efforts in South Africa, India, Latin America, and Sri Lanka, some University of Iowa professors have grown worried, tackling the phenomenon in their international research.
Professors like Maureen McCue argue that in today’s neoliberal global market, nothing — not even water — is too sacred for a price tag.
“Many transnational corporations are moving into water because water is becoming increasingly scarce,” McCue said. “This global push to commodify water has really been in the last decade or 15 years. That’s not so long that we can’t turn it around.”
Sri Lanka: first a tsunami, then privatization
Paul Greenough
A devastated inner harbor in Trincomalee, two days after the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami. This zone of churning boats, homes, and shops was only a hundred yards wide, beyond which there was perfect order.
Of all the ways to study Sri Lankan life after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Paul Greenough chose drinking water. Sri Lanka, for him, wasn’t an arbitrary choice. On Dec. 26, 2004, during a three-week stint in Sri Lanka researching polio immunization, Greenough walked in on the deadliest day in Sri Lankan history.
Paul Greenough
A tsunami-flooded refugee camp on the outskirts of Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, on Dec. 29, 2004. The camp was founded years before the tsunami to house Muslim Tamils fleeing the civil war between the government and rebel Tamil Tigers.
“The waves came up a certain distance, then they absolutely stopped, and there was something very eerie because everything worked beyond that line,” Greenough, a University of Iowa professor of history and public health, said. “Once you got away from the coast, and by the coast I mean a few hundred yards away from the sea, the whole country was intact.”
Struck by this first-hand account of natural disaster, he sought a $30,000 seed grant from Iowa’s Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) in 2006 for a return trip to initiate a study of disaster responses including the provision of drinking water. Greenough, a longtime CGRER member, revisited the country in late 2006 to interview tsunami survivors with UI adjunct professor Harish Naraindas and Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, a UI doctoral student in cinema studies. In January 2008, Greenough presented his findings for the first time at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in India, where he gave the keynote address at an international conference on the 2004 tsunami.
Paul Greenough
Sri Lankan Tamil refugees’ double whammy: first dislocated by civil war, then by tsunami.
Though it wasn’t Greenough’s initial focus, water privatization became a central preoccupation for him in Sri Lanka. According to the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR) in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan government and the World Bank continue to exploit post-tsunami recovery in attempts to introduce privatized water in the country. In 2005, MONLAR reported the government planned to spend $84 million on pipe-born water structures for the implementation of privatized water. With more than one million Sri Lankan families earning less than $15 a month, MONLAR posed water privatization’s toughest question: “Can these people pay for their water at prices determined by big water companies?”
Greenough’s findings echo such arguments.
“Their clear goal is to introduce highly engineered modern water, that is, water that’s electrically pumped, stored in overhead towers under pressure, treated with chlorine, and commodified,” Greenough said. “Commodified means sold, because all that engineering and all those chemical treatments have to be paid for […] and it isn’t clear how those costs are to be paid. Apparently they are to be passed on to the consumer.”
Tapping impoverished nations
Maureen McCue, UI adjunct professor and Iowa state coordinator for Physicians for Social Responsibility, observed that the privatization push in poorer nations has often had devastating health effects.
“In South Africa, when the water was privatized and everyone’s spigots had locks on them depending on if they paid or didn’t pay, there were increased outbreaks in cholera because people must have water,” she said. McCue, a longtime colleague and friend of Greenough’s, added that the privatization “scam” isn’t relegated to developing nations — the advocacy group Think Outside the Bottle estimates up to 40 percent of bottled water in America is nothing more than tap, or public, water dressed in an alluring label.
Harish Naraindas and his JNU colleague Sunita Reddy arranged the JNU conference in January. Naraindas accompanied Greenough on trips to Sri Lanka in 2004 and 2006 and tsunami-devastated Nagapattinam district in India in 2007. According to Naraindas, water privatization is one prong in the “general regime of neoliberalism,” a free-market economic policy that advocates, among many other principles, privatizing public-owned projects.
Like McCue, Naraindas argued that privatized water, contrary to popular assumptions, isn’t necessarily cleaner or healthier than municipal or well water. Even if it were cleaner, Naraindas said, privatization would still exclude Sri Lanka’s poorer population, which tends to live on the nation’s battered coasts.
“The pipes which are being laid in some of the small towns in Sri Lanka don’t go all the way into the tsunami-affected communities,” Naraindas said. “They stop short about 100 meters from the sea. One of the reasons the pipes don’t go there is because the poorer parts of the population are unable to pay for piped water.”
The global push
As of 2008, some of the biggest multinational corporations pressing the water privatization movement include SUEZ, Thames Water, and Bechtel, with active support from The World Bank. Greenough noted that even organizations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have taken to trashing Sri Lanka’s pre-tsunami water consumption “as primitive, as dangerous, as unsanitary, as backward, as non-modern” in an abrupt turnabout from pre-tsunami evaluations.
The global push for privatization — despite protests, grassroots activism and academic derision — persists from all angles, mostly unabated.
“[Corporations] are trying to privatize just about most parts of the world — including water,” Naraindas said. “They don’t want to give water for free, the way water has been given to poorer populations in Third World countries. They want to place a price on water. This means that the poor populations that are most in need of water, the ones that are getting very little of it, are likely to continue to get little of it — or get even less.”
Soheil Rezayazdi is a graduate student at the University of Iowa studying journalism and mass communication.