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Should Water Be Legislated as a Human Right?
UNITED NATIONS - The growing commercialisation of water - and the widespread influence of the
bottling industry worldwide - is triggering a rising demand for the legal
classification of one of the basic necessities of life as a human right.
"We definitely need a covenant or [an international] treaty on the right to
water so as to establish once and for all that no one on earth must be denied
water because of inability to pay," says Maude Barlow, a senior adviser to the
President of the U.N. General Assembly, on water issues.
"We’ve got to protect water as a human right," she said, pointing out that the
U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva would be the most likely venue to
propose such a covenant.
But it would be best, she added, if it were ratified by the 192-member
General Assembly, currently presided over by Fr. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann,
a former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua.
"We need at the United Nations more than a human rights remedy," Barlow
told IPS. "We need a plan of action for the General Assembly."
The U.N. says that close to 880 million people - mostly in the developing
world - lack adequate access to clean water. By 2030, close to 4 billion
people could be living in areas suffering severe water stress, mostly in South
Asia and China.
A study commissioned by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), released
in March, said the global market for water supply, sanitation and water
efficiency is worth over 250 billion dollars - and is likely to grow to nearly
660 billion dollars by 2020.
Barlow said the Council of Canadians, which she heads, is working with
countries promoting the right to water constitutionally.
A plebiscite in Uruguay, held four years ago, led to a referendum resulting in
a constitutional amendment singling out water as both a human right and a
public service to be delivered on a not-for-profit basis.
A Colombian group called Ecofundo has collected two million signatures in a
plebiscite that is expected to lead to a referendum on the right to water.
Patricia Jones, an expert on water and manager of the Environmental Justice
Programme at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, told IPS that the
U.S. negotiated against the appointment of a special U.N. rapporteur on the
human right to water during a vote at the Human Rights Commission in
March 2008.
Still, an independent expert was appointed, with a three-year mandate, to
assist member states to identify the scope and content of the human right to
water and sanitation.
"The opposition to the human right to water, of the previous U.S.
administration, is changing," Jones said.
She quoted U.S. President Barack Obama as saying in his inaugural address
early this year: "to the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside
you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow."
For the U.S., she pointed out, the economic stimulus package, and other
funding, is going to address water availability issues within the U.S. "We do
not have a comprehensive water policy at the national level; water is a
devolved power of the states, with regulation through the Clean Water Act
and the Safe Drinking Water Quality Act."
But Jones said the U.S. State Department staff participated in recent
consultations on the human right to water and sanitation.
Barlow, the senior U.N. adviser on water issues, said: "We are winning some of
the battle against the global corporate theft of water."
"In my country [Canada], for instance, 53 municipalities - some of them big
cities such as Vancouver and Toronto - have banned bottled water, and
bottled water sales have dropped dramatically globally."
Many municipalities worldwide are reversing the privatisation of their water
services. The City of Paris, for example, is bringing its water services into the
public sphere for the first time ever.
"We are also successfully introducing the notion of water as a public trust in
political jurisdictions, asserting public control over this vital resource," Barlow
said. However, she noted, "we must be ever vigilant as new forms of private
control are being advanced: water markets, water banking, water trading and
water speculation are all on the horizon for those who would impose a
market model of water allocation in the place of the public trust doctrine."
Barlow said a recent example was the sale of privately traded water rights in
Australia (which were introduced as a way to move water use toward
sustainability) to a big American investment fund. This means that not only is
this water not in public control, it is not even in the hands of Australians any
more, she added.
Asked how investors can help solve the world’s water problems, Jones told
IPS that investors can ensure that the water services investments they make
would bring about the human right to water.
The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) termed the existing priorities in
global water services as "water apartheid," reporting that there was enough
water and financial resources to meet the current needs.
Still, it suggested that fully implementing existing legal obligations on the
human right to water would go a long way to adjusting funding priorities
toward water for the poor.
Some companies, such as Connecticut Water and PepsiCo have adopted a
human right to water policy, Jones said.
Barlow said the international community should be watching the
"superpowers" who are now looking outside their borders for water supplies -
as they did for oil.
She said China is already constructing a pipeline to funnel water from the
Tibetan Himalayas.
- Posted in
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84 Comments so far
Show AllIs it not sad that it has now become necessary in our insane existence to proclaim that basic human needs must be protected from corporate seizure. Is air next? Sun? Blood?
Exactly! Couldn't have summed it up better.
Agreed.
If somebody asked me what the criteria for a "right" to this or that is versus a privilege, I would say that access to something is a right if it is basic to survival. In the jungle, there are no rights, per se. If a group of animals require more water than others to survive, they become easy prey during a drought. The issue for humans is the accursed mentallity of putting a premium on anything that is scarce, regardless of whether you need it to live or not, just to make a buck. Widespread and fair public utilities and socialist governing breeds mutual trust. The hyper capitalism and constant attempt to monopolize a market so as to jack up the price of a product breeds independence and anarchy. The bastards never get it.
Putting a premium on something that is scarce makes a lot of sense to me. Simple market mechanisms force supply up once the price goes up. I don't know what you mean by "socialist governing", but if you mean ignoring market forces, it's a little impractical.
Socialist governing is simply having the government guarantee the same access of all citizens to public utilities. Public utilities must include whatever is necessary to make a person a productive citizen. Since machines do most of the the real work now, this whole "work for a living" thing is mostly a scam. Most rich people and investors don't work. No one should be born behind the power curve. So the government should provide food, shelter, transportation, education and health care as well as police and fire services.
Beyond that, if you want to jack up the price of a rare painting or a limited edition coin or a fancy car, have at it. But don't try to control me by bullying me through making my life needs artificialy expensive through some "free market" hocus pocus. What is happening now is akin to having the rich force all of us to use pay toilets and then say that if we don't want to pay, then don't shit. Bullshit. The government should not dictate what you study or which career you chose. But when you make a choice to steal from others with some fancy "free market" euphemism, you should be imprisoned.
AGG, Endearingpatterns,
What about free speech? While not ‘basic to survival’ it is considered by some to be a fundamental right. If you say it’s included because it’s needed to keep things that ARE basic to survival then you’ve changed your definition; it now includes much more debatable items than food, water, air, shelter, Habeas Corpus and free speech. (The first 4 amount to a right to land, although we don’t recognize that.) Freedom of religion? Doesn’t even fit the new definition. Life, OK, but liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
I don’t think the issue is “the accursed mentality of putting a premium on anything…scarce” any more than the issue in measles is spots. We absolutely do ignore market forces, in all our most important relationships. Mothers don’t charge babies for milk. I’ve never paid a friend for a hug or gotten paid to help one load a moving van. (although I hesitate to mention those for fear of giving conservatives more privatization ideas.) Ecologists know that in the jungle there is far more cooperation than competition.
“Simple market mechanisms” can’t force the supply of land up, can’t force the supply of good water up (although it’s proven it can force it down) or forever force the supply of fossil fuels up. In the end, it can’t forever force the supply of anything up. The only sustainable growth is of wisdom. To be practical, we absolutely MUST ignore market forces—that is, hold other values higher than the freedom of the market. Which of course we do. The market is not and never has been free, and corporations make it less and less free all the time, to their benefit and usually, our loss.
Doesn’t seem to matter to the poor if rare coins are expensive, but since some people will do whatever they can to get (aka steal) enough land, water, energy, labor, food to get those coins—thus driving the price of each up—it is important. Society puts its resources into whatever its decision-makers decide is most important. We could try to control the price people pay for things, but with no wiser governor than that some things will disappear—as we’ve seen with rainforests and frogs and the middle class. Also, except in an utter and terrible totalitarian state black markets will always form. (Come to think of it, black market and free market—pretty much the same thing) That is the tragedy of the commons. In the end, the only answer is wise and compassionate decision-makers, which must include everyone.
>>>AGG wrote: But don't try to control me by bullying me through making my life needs artificially expensive through some "free market" hocus pocus.
Good point. This is exactly what's happening in India and in some Latin American countries. But what gets reported and what the tourists see are mostly controlled by the elite in these countries.
A Dr. Who episode covers, the air, the sun and the death taxes, as well as the general state of owing one's soul to the company store, who gets to surcharge tax the air you breathe while at the work place as well.
Just wait til they find a way to do to atoms and elements what they're now doing to plant and animal genes: change and patent them and replace unpatented atoms with their own (owned) ones. You will be theirs down to your hydrogen and oxygen, and if you fight them it will only happen faster to you. Call it Schmeiserizing.
Water along with......
food
clean air
honest politicians
Good Grief this list could go on forever.
I wonder if Halliburton will be providing the water?....I mean, ' selling the water'.
If you're a Libertarian (or a Ferengi, a la Star Trek), chances are you believe that all goods should be privately held and all services privately provided; you believe that it destroys the 'moral fiber' and 'industriousness' of humans to have anything held, owned, protected, or provided by the state.
It doesn't matter to most Libertarians that this kind of hyper individualized economics is objectively at odds with the natural laws that underlie the biosphere and sponsor human life on earth. It only matters that the Randian Doctrine remain 'pure,' internally consistent, and be followed in all cases without exception.
Like its hyper collectivist, zero private property counterpoint on the extreme Left, such absolutist thinking is a form of clinical hysteria -- a mental illness.
The idea of private interests divving-up and fragmentedly 'owning' the earth's interlocked hydrosphere, needs to be fought against not as an economic proposal but as a psychiatric disorder in the minds of those proposing it.
Regretably, the appeal of simplistic black and white "one size fits all" solutions seems to induce the same "psychiatric disorder" in the minds of many. It may be more prevalent on the right side of the political spectrum, but certainly not to the exclusion of all others.
Perhaps the most unfortunate results are exclusionary reactions and failures to find any common ground anywhere. At times, one wonders if it's even possible to find a common terminological understanding for purposes of rational debate.
Well said. Recently a fellow in Plattburgh, NY died when he overdosed on bottled water in a water drinking contest. There was nothing wrong with the water. We are homeostatic creatures that live in a delicate balance of acid/base ph in our tissues and bloodstream. Hydration affects this electrolytic balance markedly so we have to stay "in range". The bastards in our government agencies like the CIA that study torture have fine tuned their knowledge of physical requirements to perfect torture without leaving body marks. If half as much money was spent on social well being as on how to herd, corner and torture people, we'd probably know how to achieve something very close to utopia.
But we do know how. Ecology tells us how to live harmoniously on Earth; psychology tells us how live harmoniously with each other and raise children who aren't compelled to destroy. Both are confirmations of ancient wisdom traditions and probably arise from the inner memories and other knowledge of those rather than any progressing rational scientific process. Clear away your over-civilized misconceptions and look within.
When you can convince the employees of the CIA and most of the fortune 400 and S&P 500 corporations along with the bomber pilots and drone operators to "look within", then maybe I'll admit that we "know" how to achieve utopia. Go ahead and study your navel while some war lover steals everything you thought you were entitled to. Do a "Kung Fu" and remain calm while everything goes to hell. If you can do that and retain your composure, you are a better person than I am. I would love to be "above it all" like you seem to be, but I'm not there. Maybe someday.
Not above it, in it. Not transcendence, immersion. Full body immersion. Family systems therapy or Mahayana Buddhism...take your pick. No one gets out until we all get out. We have to improve ourselves not just with the eye to improving ourselves but with the eye to improving the whole system. We treat the employees of the CIA, F500 and pilots and drones by becoming conscious of the part we play in the system ourselves, which helps them to become conscious of the part they play.
I wasn't suggesting this would be easy, I was just saying we do know how. It's not a question of research or simply making the political play to spend more money on some things (although you're right, that would go a long way to helping). It's a question of social-emotional work, which means mind and body and tribe.
And just an aside.........
One way to start? Stop watching television. Kung Fu was just the usual Hollywood crap dressed up with language that at the time was starting to threaten the conservative paradigm. It co-opted that scary hippy idea with a slight variation on the paradigm of force, of seeing a violent solution to every problem. It was the same story every time, the same as every Steven Segal movie ever made and half the rest of the movies and virtually all the big ones. The violence-as-the-last-resort story. In other words, fiction. As long as we keep believing violence (aka coercion) is the last resort we will, EVERY SINGLE TIME, resort to it. Not until we see it as no resort will we stop using it. In the story, that we see 100,000 times by the time we're 20, violence is essentially the first resort, because the idea of it, its constant presence as the recognized inevitable end, casts a shadow over every other resort. It is, to us, the only resort.
As soon as we stop buying the story ourselves we will convince the CIA.
Thank-you. Keep attacking the so-called libertarians...
At this point, I'd go out and vandalize the graves of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman if I lived near them. Oh well, Henry Clay Frick's grave is nearby...
Can I go with you? I'll bring a sledgehammer and mattock.
Ha, ha, ha I use the example of Ferengi all the time to demonstrate to people the logical extension of unregulated, unfettered capitalism. If they know what one is, rarely do the diehards cop to it. Most dispute the analogy, but it's too late, you've led them to look in the mirror. BWA-HA-HA, the power of Gene Roddenberry's prescience speaks again, with apologies to any collaborators that should be credited.
There are no human rights. The constitution is just a goddam piece of paper. Water? Bah. Health care? A privilege for those who can afford it. The world belongs to the winners. Everyone else, slaves.
If water were a human right, would that mean water could not be shut off when people don't pay their water bill in the U.S.?
It could mean that there wouldn't be any individual billing, but not necessarily. It would depend on the right's precise wording. The right to keep and bear arms, for example, doesn't imply that you don't have to pay for them.
This is true. However owning a gun is not a human right as it is a civil right. Civil rights may be suspended(as in the case of convicted felons) however human rights are inalienable.
Further water is a finite resource. Without individual billing we would have massive overconsumption. One could hypothetically turn the faucet on and leave in one wasting thousands of gallons of clean potable water. The only alternative would be to ration water or make it available for only certain hours of the day. Which would suck.
All good points. Well made and well taken.
I think, however, that some aspects would still depend on how precisely the right was worded in final form. One hopes that it would take careful account of legitimate concerns such as you've expressed. "As required to sustain life" perhaps?
Of course, whether it would be ratified by the U.S. in any form and, if so, whether it would actually be adhered to is a whole other question.
Well if my reading comprehension serves me well enough I am to understand the bulk of the issue centers on the adequate access to potable water for peoples in the developing world.
I like your use of the phrase 'life sustaining'. Could we perhaps work to affirm water as a national sovereignty issue? Something along the lines that essential elements(treatable water, top soil and adequate acreage for CO2 cleansing forestation) for the sustainment of human life be protected by the respective states' sovereigns? As many States in the world are Republics ie sovereignty lies with the people that would work to ensure a State's right to control treatable water as it does its own airspace?
I'm not a Law School graduate but this may be a start.
"As required to sustain life"
Good phrase as the right to LIFE is already recognized.
As well as a right to water this also covers a right to health care in order to continue living.
au contraire, gh, it would be quite easy to differentiate between the amount of water needed to sustain life (an inalienable right) and the infinite amount one could waste, oh, say, raising monsoon crops in the California desert (a market issue, but subject to the limitation of not being allowed to deprive others of their inalienable amount.
Again that sounds like suck. Rationing is suck. However you've shed new light on why this matter interests you by raising the issue of California. All this is just grumbling about your water bill out in Cali, isn't it?
Again that sounds like suck. Rationing is suck. However you've shed new light on why this matter interests you by raising the issue of California. All this is just grumbling about your water bill out in Cali, isn't it?
Who says I live in California?
I personally use a tiny tiny amount of water, except in the vegetable garden and fruit and nut orchard, (please no California jokes) which in the end means a lot less is used for my food than for most people in the US. And the ducks drink a lot. I will be collecting my own soon, but in any case I've never seen a water bill. You can see my previous post on coercion and violence, but rationing is not the only way to deal with shortages.
The neoliberal consensus holds that the market rules all. Water is scarce and therefore is a profit-making resource. Don't expect mere human beings to be valued more than profit in our brave new world.
"We definitely need a covenant or [an international] treaty on the right to water so as to establish once and for all that no one on earth must be denied water because of inability to pay,"
That statement puts water into the same boat as health care. Those who can pay, will pay dearly, and those who can't will get theirs free. Which is probably how it'll end up being.
This whole article shows just how sick the water situation has become, and it's going to get a hundread times worse. It's already moving in the direction of the oil.
We need to establish an international moratorium on water not being allowed to be owned by any party, corporation, or government, but owned by every individual citizen on the earth (first getting 'personhood' out of corporations!). And I know -that's as much a fantasy as my winning a 50 million lottery tomorrow.
I can just about guarantee that should there be more widespread adoption of home water generation (such as water extraction from air devices) that the authorities would crack down and prosecute or legislate the hell out of them in order to keep people under the thumb.
Whilst we're at it mandating that water should be a human right, it should also be a war crime to attack or destroy a countries water supply system for whatever reason. The USA did it to Iraq's water infrastructure and they struggle with water supply to this day.
In any case, hasn't anyone else noticed the constant erosion and destruction of all human dignity until now the last stand bastion term of 'human rights' is all that's left, and precious good that's doing anyone who's trying to stand up to the thugs in this world.
After 'human rights' have been thwarted and subjugated, what else is left? - Might as well start throwing living people into shredder machines for animal feed right now for all the good that will do because what's one step less than slaves other than fodder?
By the time 'authorities' start mandating things, water supplies everywhere will be 'owned' by corporations. Authorities will be too scared or simply paid-off to care about ordinary people.
Control the food & the water and all you've got left is air, so unless your a Breatharian nutcase, you're not going to last long.
In every manner people are being hemmed-in and controlled. Water is usually one of the primordial last things that they don't wish to give up because everyone needs it in one form or another despite what food they eat.
Climate change is going to make water resources dwindle to riot levels, whilst elsewhere in the world they'll be drowning in floods. - Isn't it justifiably so typical that ordinary people understand things but those in power refuse to admit to even common sense?
Water should be a human right.
So should food, proper comprehensive & decent education (a must, and without religion), power supply, housing, and a practising commitment to have sustainability in all things human and ecological.
You can't have that though.....all you get handed is a bottle of Coca Cola instead, made with water stolen from elsewhere and sold at a profit.
The peasants have no bread, so let them eat cake....they have no water, so let them drink Coca Cola.
"it should also be a war crime to attack or destroy a countries water supply"
It is under Article 54 of the Geneva Convention, and the U.S. is a signatory thereto making it a "supreme law" under the U.S. Constitution as well. But the U.S. simply declares "quaint and obsolete" any treaties or covenants that it deems inconvenient for its own immediate purposes.
The much larger issue in all of this is the fact that "human rights", even if they are a part of ratified international law, mean absolutely nothing in the United States of America in any case.
Cripes! The U.S. doesn't even pay heed to such fundamental and long-established principles as habeas corpus.
Well, yes, of course.
However we cannot get the US to recognize that single-payer health care, racial normalization and education are human rights, so what chance does a fundamental human need have?
If we are talking about gun ownership and imperialization as basic human rights, then the US would be all over it.
Unregulated capitalism is the great lie of our times!
Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way.
Listening to these hysterical people at the town meetings screaming in fear about "socialized" health care, it's obvious how much they have been brainwashed.
They are terrified of "socialism" yet they go without health care, their children get poor schooling, their children cannot afford to go to universities, they live in inhumane slums, they don't have enough to eat, they work for pennies, etc. etc. They don't realize that they are fighting against their own best interest.
Socialism and private enterprise are not mutually exclusive. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries. Heck, just look up north.
Maude Barlow is a stellar Canadian. She has been fighting for human rights most of her life and the past few years, water, as a human right, has been her main focus.
Also, Vandana Shiva, who wrote a book "Water Wars".
"Socialism and private enterprise are not mutually exclusive."
Some people seem to have great difficulty distinguishing between private enterprise itself and the public interest regulatory environment provided by the governing authority under which it operates. The confusion is understandable, I suppose, in a country where the same controlling interests prevail in both areas.
Excellent post
Nah. Let Them Drink Youreen. Full of melatonin, donchaknow. The Happy Hormone. In fact, i'm envisioning the Billionaires for Bush making a comeback with signs -"Let Them Drink Urine". Hmmm...
The Bolivians did not put up with having their water taken...and no on else should. There was a time water was an infinite resource. Until we polluted most of what we have. It's what humans do....we crap where we eat and drink...unlike the supposed lower species who are much more intelligent. Give up your water and air is next. Know one thing; there is no end to human greed and avarice.
Air is next.
With rights go responsibilities. By all means give everybody the right to water, whatever that means, but by the same token stop the rest wasting it.
ALL the requirements of life for us and our planet should be considered a human right and taken back from the privatizing bastards commonly known as the super rich.
I hope that this answers the question posed in the title of this piece.
We can't even get health care. Do you think anyone cares if you have a drink of water!?
Water use and reuse after recycling is one of those incredibly obvious things that the corporate goons that buy our government are always fighting against.
The proper cycle is:
1) You get water from a public utility to drink and cook and wash.
2) Urine and feces along with flush water should be collected by the government as payment for pure water. This waste is the raw material for fertilizer and certain types of construction materials.
3) Wash and cooking water waste is used for irrigation.
REPEAT
Most of the infrastructure for this is in place. The water treatment plants use all kinds of noxious chemicals that are totally unneeded and very polluting. We should be harnessing bacteria to produce clean water rather than using chemicals that require vast amounts of energy and pollution to produce.
Do you know the real reason these "no brainer" solutions aren't applied? It's because the selectboard member, the mayor, the legislator, the town manager, the chemical supplies salesman and on and on are interconnected in a back scratching network and no one wants to be the first to say this whole system is killing us.
Yeah, we practice grey water use in our household. The mother in law complained to the county about it affecting the children. Investigation. Outcome? Children were determined to be fine, thriving, courteous persons living out their values. County became aware of alternatives to more waste water treatment construction. Currently ignored by governmental agencies, practiced by the Amish and other like minded to us sorts. Mother Earth News turned me onto this 30 years ago, and they've only gotten better since. I'm sure Google would supply workable solutions to support whatever level a household would want to participate in. We have 5 persons in our household and our water bill is about 1/2 that of our neighbors whose families vary from 1 to 3 people.
A scientist researching this very thing set up a mini habitat wherein natural processes were used to treat raw sewage. This involved certain tree, water plants and things like snails.
The water that comes out at the other end of the process is every bit as PURE as what a water treatment plant can produce AND gives habitat to wildlife at the same time.
Now why the reluctance to adopt such measures?
Its provided to us FREE of charge via nature. The Corporations have not figured a way to claim OWNERSHIP of these natural processes.