When “Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water” hit bookstores in 2002, it became an indispensable international best-seller. The book examined the global sale of water, in which governments are increasingly selling rights to private corporations, who by their nature must profit from the increasingly scarce commodity, all under agreements created by the World Bank and World Trade Organization.

“This is a crisis now. And the political question of who controls water is an absolutely crucial one,” says Maude Barlow, co-author with Tony Clarke of “Blue Gold.” Barlow joined a panel discussion at Phillips Exeter Academy on Monday, April 24, to discuss “The Price of Water: A Human Rights Issue.”
Barlow is also author of 14 other books, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, a 1,000-member nonpartisan citizen advocacy group working to fight global trends in privatization and deregulation, and director with the International Forum on Globalization.

The Wire caught up with Barlow on the afternoon of the discussion, at the Inn of Exeter.

You refer to “our” movement, and you use the word “we” a lot. … Who is it that you speak for?
I guess I always want to credit a movement much larger than myself. It’s comprised of people who are fighting in their communities for their water rights, but who’ve identified ourselves as part of a movement to reclaim water as a public commons, and part of the Earth’s and human heritage. We feel very strongly it musn’t be controlled by large corporations and privatized and put on the open market.

You view access to potable water as a basic human right. Can you distinguish between a human right and a human need?
The World Bank and the World Trade Organization all insist that water is a human “need”—of course it would not be in their benefit to call it a human right, because in the end it’s really hard to sell or trade a human right. And there’s a fight for the human right to water taking place right now at the United Nations.

More and more countries are being pushed by their citizens to declare water a human right. Uruguay was the first to go through a public referendum at their election (declaring) that water was not only a human right, but (one) that had to be delivered as a public service on a not-for-profit basis. And Norway, a wealthy northern country, has declared that it’s not going to send any more aid to the World Bank as long as it’s giving privatization as a conditionality for water services in the third world. So, bit by bit we’re beginning to see a light on the horizon.

There are countries that are opposed: my country’s opposed, the United States is opposed, most of Europe’s still opposed. Some (southern countries) are afraid that they won’t be able to deliver—what does it mean if they tell their people they have the legal right to water and then can’t deliver?—and I understand their concerns. One has to draft legislation that would be fair to countries that are not in a position to afford to do this. But it is a right whose time has come.

The right to water was not included in the original UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is imperative that we rectify that and that people understand they don’t have to beg for water, they don’t have to pay for it if they have no money, and they still have the right to water. This is something that needs to be fundamentally understood by everybody.


What is the status of water in countries like the United States and Canada?
Of course it’s more catastrophic in the third world, but in the United States, there are pockets of the country that are running out of water now. There are struggles around water all through New England, with these big water companies coming in and taking huge amounts of the groundwater, paying very little and (selling it) around the world. California has 20 years’ supply left, New Mexico only has 10, Arizona’s out. Idaho, Oklahoma, all of these states are up against a water crisis.

There are three issues that I see. One is this reality of water scarcity. The second is pollution. There is massive pollution in the U.S. (and) leaking, old infrastructure. There are a lot of areas where wastewater isn’t properly treated, and there are lot of new ingredients in water like hormones and antibiotics that were never meant to be pulled out by the treatment plant when it was first installed.

The third is that the United States is becoming a very deeply class-based society. Detroit has actually put meters in and if people can’t afford the water, they just deny them water. We’ve actually had situations where social workers have come in and taken children away from families because they say, “You’re not supplying them with water.” So, this is right here in the U.S. The issue is still farther away for most Americans, but it’s on its way here, there is absolutely no question.

In your January 2005 interview in Mother Jones, you stated about water that, “Basically, once you privatize it, it’s very very hard to turn back.” Why?
It tends to be a one-way street. As an example, (private corporations) do not invest in the third world. The World Bank places the investment. The companies come in and run it, but in the end, if they don’t (make money), they pull up and take off, and the public sector is left with this mess.

And even if the private project has failed—and I can give you so many examples, but just a recent one (is) the failure of (the French company) Suez in La Paz, Bolivia—when the country says, “We want to reverse this,” then the World Bank says, “Well, we won’t give you any more funding for water services. You’re just on your own.”

A recent report from the UN shows that the private sector is just failing. And that admission is being made by just about everybody, even including the World Bank.

What we also fear is if they’re successful at the WTO in getting water included as a service under the General Agreement on Trade and Services, then once it’s been privatized in your own city, you won’t be able to undo it. So we always say to places that are thinking about this: Stay public, make it work. If there are things wrong with the public (system), at least it’s in your hands, at least it’s democratically controlled and you can make a bad situation better.

You’ve noted some unsettling statistics, that every eight seconds a child dies of waterborne disease somewhere in the world and that The World Bank and United Nations say that by the year 2025, two-thirds of the world will be living without adequate access to water unless we do something. At a minimum, 1.3 billion people live now in a water-scarce situation, but close to another billion have substandard access. What action is needed at this point, and by whom?

Just as the blood in your veins is necessary for your life, so is the water through the veins of the Earth necessary for our collective life on Earth. So we need to, first and foremost, start to understand that and start to take care of water. We have to stop polluting. We have to reclaim fouled waters. We have to shift from corporate and industrial agriculture to a much more sustainable type of agriculture. We have to shift from growing things in deserts, and growing cities like Las Vegas in deserts that cannot sustain them. We’ve got to stop polluting surface waters so we’re not mining the groundwater so much faster than it can be replenished.

But along with that, of course, is the whole issue of water justice. And the commitment to real water for all really does mean that governments are going to have to come together, peoples are going to have to come together and really take the next set of steps. It’ not interrupting the trade and markets and economy yet. When it does, that’s suddenly when people will say, “Ah. This water crisis is here.” But, I’m telling you, at a human level, the crisis is already here.

What advice do you have for small and rather meagerly funded groups like Save Our Groundwater, which is fighting a USA Springs bottling plant here in southern New Hampshire?
Save Our Groundwater is a wonderful example of how a local citizen’s group can be (effective). (They’ve) also worked toward building a New Hampshire-wide coalition called the New Hampshire Water Table. The more we’re all working together, the more this becomes a movement. The more it becomes a movement, the more governments have to listen—they want to get elected and they want to get re-elected. The more governments listen, the more we can make things happen.

So know that what you do makes a difference, and not to feel that you’re too small, and not to feel you don’t matter, and not to feel that you’re up against all this big stuff and you can’t do anything. That will paralyze you, for sure. Everybody can do something about the world’s water crisis. Everybody.