Late in July, the United Nations drafted a resolution calling clean water an essential human right.
The two-page document, which one human rights advocate described as “historic”, quickly became not a move to insure potable water to millions, but a subject of contention, with the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, Botswana, and 36 other nations abstaining.
For the 122 nations in favor, the failure of some of the world’s most prosperous countries to support the resolution was immediately viewed as a “north versus south” issue. For those abstaining, the pro-voting countries were seen as usurping work already taking place in Geneva, making the UN General Assembly measure not only preemptive, but detrimental to obtaining a true consensus on the right of every human to have access to potable water.
Thus, the losers declared, the resolution becomes not a test of the developed world’s willingness to insure clean water rights to poorer nations, but a move which almost entirely fails to delineate how such a resolution could be enforced, and who will pay for the needed clean water infrastructure.
These details are important in a world where approximately one in eight individuals, or 884 million people, lack access to potable water; where 3.575 million people die each year from water-borne diseases (and nearly one out of two fatalities is a child under five); where those making as little as a dollar a day pay up to 10 times as much as the wealthy for a drink of clean water; and where access to a cell phone is twice as manageable (and affordable) as access to a liter of clean drinking water.
So, even if the resolution were to get a clear consensus, with all 158 nations voting yes, who would act as the “water police”, and who would pay to insure that third-world water – some of the scarcest and dirtiest in the world – is treated to acceptable standards and provided at a cost the poor can afford?
Equally as important, who will insure that corporations like Guess, the blue jean maker, and multinationals like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, soft-drink bottlers, limit the amount of water used in their manufacturing processes, and treat wastewater in a manner that allows it to be returned to the environment? Even if such processes drive up the cost of producing the item, raise the cost to the consumer, and tip corporate ‘economies of scale’ on their head.
As Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow notes, the UN General Assembly 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was drafted at a time when no one could imagine water supplies being in jeopardy anywhere in the world. Thus the provision was never actually incorporated into the document.
Now, more than 60 years later, the idea is not merely imaginable but persistently evident, as countries from Bangladesh to the Philippines draw water from wells contaminated with arsenic, while shallow wells in Kenya’s poorer districts demonstrate 100 percent fecal contamination from nearby pit latrines.
The Canadian-based Blue Planet Project, which works to protect the world’s fresh water supplies from privatization by corporations like Nestle (which operate with the support of multinational trade agencies like CAFTA, NAFTA and the SPP; the Security and Prosperity Partnership, also known as the North American Union), is on the front line of the water rights issue. It is joined there by the Sierra Club, the World Health Organization, or WHO, and world leaders who, in 2000, pledged to support the UN’s Millenium Development Goals to reduce by 50 percent (by 2015) the number of people who had no access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.
Of course, the world’s poor are used to forgotten promises and failed agendas. But Barlow cites something that seems more than a lapse; according to her, Canada has purposely (albeit clandestinely) blocked a global right-to-water agreement – a response reportedly based on her nation’s fear that it might be legislated into sharing water with the U.S. under emerging SPP regulations.
However it plays out, the issue of water for everyone is bound to be further stressed by climate change, economic stagnation, rising shipping costs, and the fact that those who have rarely want to play fair with those who don’t. Regardless of the balance of power, however, water should be a means to life, not a means to profit.
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