from the booklet
The global water crisis and the commodification
of the world's water supply
A Special Report issued by the International
Forum on Globalization (IFG)
by Maude Barlow
National Chairperson, Council of Canadians
Chair, International Forum on Globalization (IFG) Committee
on the Globalization of Water
"The wars of the next century will be
Ismail Serageldin, vice president of the World
We'd like to believe there's an infinite supply of water on
the planet. But the assumption is tragically false. Available
freshwater amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of all the
water on earth. The rest is sea water, or is frozen in the polar
ice. Fresh water is renewable only by rainfall, at the rate of
40,000 to 50,000 cubic kilometers per year. Due to intensive urbanization,
deforestation, water diversion and industrial farming, the earth's
surface is drying. If present trends persist, the water in all
river basins on every continent could steadily be depleted.
Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more
than twice the rate of human population growth. According to the
United Nations, more than one billion people on earth already
lack access to fresh drinking water. If current trends persist,
by 2025 the demand for freshwater is expected to rise to 56 percent
above the amount that is currently available.
As the water crisis intensifies, governments around the world-under
pressure from transnational corporations-are advocating a radical
solution the privatization, commodification and mass diversion
of water. Proponents say that such a system is the only way to
distribute water to the world's thirsty. However, experience shows
that selling water on the open market does not address the needs
of poor, thirsty people. On the contrary, privatized water is
delivered to those who can pay for it, such as wealthy cities
and individuals and water-intensive industries, such as agriculture
and high-tech. As one resident of the high desert in New Mexico
observed after his community's water had been diverted for use
by the high-tech industry "Water flows uphill to money."
The push to commodify water comes at a time when the social,
political and economic impacts of water scarcity are rapidly becoming
a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts springing
up around the globe. For example, Malaysia, which supplies about
half of Singapore's water, threatened to cut off that supply in
1997 after Singapore criticized its government policies. In Africa,
relations between Botswana and Namibia have been severely strained
by Namibian plans to construct a pipeline to divert water from
the shared Okavango River to eastern Namibia.
The former mayor of Mexico City has predicted a war in the
Mexican Valley in the foreseeable future if a solution to the
city's water crisis is not found soon. Much has been written about
the potential for water wars in the Middle East, where water resources
are severely limited. The late King Hussein of Jordan once said
the only thing he would go to war with Israel over was water,
because Israel controls Jordan's water supply.
Meanwhile, the future of one of the earth's most vital resources
is being determined by those who profit from its overuse and abuse.
A handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank,
are aggressively taking over the management of public water services
in developing countries, dramatically raising the price of water
to the local residents and profiting from the Third World's desperate
search for solutions to the water crisis. The corporate agenda
is clear water should be treated like any other tradable good,
with its use determined by market principles.
At the same time, governments are signing away their control
over domestic water supplies by participating in trade agreements
such as the NAFTA; its proposed successor, the Free Trade Area
of the Americas (FTAA); and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
These global trade institutions effectively give transnational
corporations unprecedented access to the water of signatory countries.
Already, corporations have started to sue governments in order
to gain access to domestic water sources. For example, Sun Belt,
a California company, is suing the government of Canada under
NAFTA because British Columbia (B.C.) banned water exports several
years ago. The company claims that B.C.'s law violates several
NAFTA-based investor rights and therefore is claiming $10 billion
in compensation for lost profits.
With the protection of these international trade agreements,
companies are setting their sights on the mass transport of bulk
water by diversion and by supertanker. Several companies are developing
technology whereby large quantities of freshwater would be loaded
into huge sealed bags and towed across the ocean for sale. Selling
water to the highest bidder will only exacerbate the worst impacts
of the world water crisis.
A number of key research and environmental organizations such
as Worldwatch Institute, World Resources Institute and the United
Nations Environment Program have been sounding the alarm for well
over a decade If water usage continues to increase at current
rates, the results will be devastating for the earth and its inhabitants.
Groups such as the International Rivers Network, Greenpeace, Clean
Waters Network, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth International,
along with thousands of community groups around the world, are
fighting the construction of new dams, reclaiming damaged rivers
and wetlands, confronting industry over contamination of water
systems, and protecting whales and other aquatic species from
hunting and overfishing. In a number of countries, experts have
come up with some exciting and creative solutions to these problems.
This work is crucial, yet such efforts need to be coordinated
and understood in the broader context of economic globalization
and its role in promoting privatization and commodification.
Who owns water? Should anyone? Should it be privatized? What
rights do transnational corporations have to buy water systems?
Should it be traded as a commodity in the open market? What laws
do we need to protect water? What is the role of government? How
do those in water-rich countries share with those in water-poor
countries? Who is the custodian for nature's lifeblood? How do
ordinary citizens become involved in this process?
The analysis and the recommendations in this report are based
on the principle that water is part of the earth's heritage and
must be preserved in the public domain for all time and protected
by strong local, national and international law. At stake is the
whole notion of "the commons," the idea that through
our public institutions we recognize a shared human and natural
heritage to be preserved for future generations. Local communities
must be the watchdogs of our waterways and must establish principles
that oversee the use of this precious resource.
Instead of allowing this vital resource to become a commodity
sold to the highest bidder, we believe that access to clean water
for basic needs is a fundamental human right. Each generation
must ensure that the abundance and quality of water is not diminished
as a result of its activities. Great efforts must be made to restore
the health of aquatic ecosystems that have already been degraded
as well as to protect others from harm.
Above all, we need to radically restructure our societies
and lifestyles in order to reverse the depletion of our freshwater
and to learn to live within the watershed ecosystems that were
created to sustain life. We must abandon the specious notion that
we can carelessly abuse the world's precious water sources because,
somehow, technology will come to the rescue. There is no technological
"fix" for a planet depleted of water.
A Finite Resource
It is commonly assumed that the worlds water supply is huge
and infinite. This assumption is false. In fact, of all the water
on Earth, only 2.5 percent is freshwater, and available freshwater
represents less than half of 1 percent of the world's total water
stock. The rest is seawater, or inaccessible in ice caps, ground
water and soil. This supply is finite.
As Allerd Stikker of the Amsterdam-based Ecological Management
Foundation explains "The issue today, put simply, is that
while the only renewable source of freshwater is continental rainfall
(which generates a more or less constant global supply of 40,000
to 50,000 cubic km per year), the world population keeps increasing
by roughly 85 million per year. Therefore the availability of
freshwater per head is decreasing rapidly."
Most disturbingly, we are diverting, polluting and depleting
that finite source of freshwater at an astonishing rate. Today,
says the United Nations, 31 countries are facing water stress
and scarcity and over one billion people lack adequate access
to clean drinking water. By the year 2025, as much as two-thirds
of the world's population-predicted to have expanded by an additional
2.6 billion people-will be living in conditions of serious water
shortage and one-third will be living in conditions of absolute
World Resources, a publication of the United Nations Environment
Program, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute, has
a dire warning "The world's thirst for water is likely to
become one of the most pressing resource issues of the 21st century...ln
some cases, water withdrawals are so high, relative to supply,
that surface water supplies are literally shrinking and groundwater
reserves are being depleted faster than they can be replenished
Groundwater over-pumping and aquifer depletion are now serious
problems in the world's most intensive agricultural areas. In
the U.S., the High Plains Ogallala aquifer, stretching some 800
miles (1,300 km) from the Texas panhandle to South Dakota, is
being depleted eight times faster than nature can replenish it.
The water table under California's San Joaquin Valley has dropped
nearly ten meters in some spots within the last 50 years. Twenty-one
percent of irrigation in the U.S. is achieved by pumping ground
water at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge (and
most water used for irrigation cannot be recycled).
In the Arabian peninsula, groundwater use is nearly three
times greater than recharge and, at the current rate of extraction,
Saudi Arabia is running toward total depletion in the next 50
years; Israel's extraction has exceeded replacement by 2.5 billion
meters in 25 years and 13 percent of its coastal aquifer is contaminated
by seawater and fertilizer run-off; current depletion of Africa's
non-recharging aquifers is estimated at 10 billion cubic meters
a year; water tables are falling everywhere throughout India;
land beneath Bangkok has actually sunk due to massive over-pumping;
and northern China now has eight regions of aquifer overdraft
while the water table beneath Beijing has dropped 37 meters over
the last four decades. In fact, so severe is the projected water
crisis in Beijing, experts are now wondering whether the seat
of power in China will have to be moved.
In Mexico City, pumping exceeds natural recharge by 50-80
percent every year and experts are saying the city could run out
of water entirely in the next decade. In the maquiladora free
trade zones all along the Mexican-U.S border, water is a precious
commodity, delivered weekly in many communities by truck or cart.
In early 2001, the National Water Commission reported that the
border area, thick with industrial and human waste and strapped
for funds, only treats about one-third of its waste water and
sewage. Ciudad Juarez, growing at a rate of 50,000 people a year,
is running out of water; the underground aquifer the city relies
on has declined at about five feet a year. At this rate, there
will be no usable water left in 20 years.
As Stikker explains, this means that instead of living on
water income, we are irreversibly diminishing water capital. At
some time in the near future, water bankruptcy will result. Sandra
Postel of the Global Water Policy Project adds that, in addition
to depleting supplies, groundwater mining causes salt water to
invade freshwater aquifers, destroying them. In other cases, groundwater
mining actually permanently reduces the earth's capacity to store
water. In California, for example, overuse of the underground
water supplies in the Central Valley has resulted in a loss of
over 40 percent of the combined storage capacity of all human-made
surface reservoirs in the state. In 1998, California's Department
of Water Resources announced that by 2020, if more supplies are
not found, the state will face a shortfall of water nearly as
great as the amount that all of its towns and cities together
are consuming today.
Further, the global expansion in mining and manufacturing
is increasing the threat of pollution to these underground water
supplies. (In most Asian countries, for example, these aquifers
provide more than 50 percent of domestic water supplies.) World
Resources reports that as developing countries undergo rapid industrialization,
heavy metals, acids and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are
At the same time, over-exploitation of the planet's major
river systems is threatening another finite source of water. "The
Nile in Egypt, the Ganges in South Asia, the Yellow River in China,
and the Colorado River in America are among the major rivers that
are so dammed, diverted, or overtapped that little or no freshwater
reaches its final destination for significant stretches of time,"
writes Sandra Postel. In fact, the Colorado is so over-subscribed
on its journey through seven U.S. states that there is virtually
nothing left to go out to sea. The flows of the Rio Grande and
upper Colorado rivers are in danger of being reduced by as much
as 75 percent and 40 percent respectively over the next century.
Perhaps the most devastating analysis of the global water
crisis comes from hydrological engineer Michal Kraveik and his
team of scientists at the Slovakia non-governmental organization
(NGO) People and Water. Kraveik, who has a distinguished career
with the Slovak Academy of Sciences, has studied the effect of
urbanization, industrial agriculture, deforestation, dam construction,
and infrastructure and paving on water systems in Slovakia and
surrounding countries and has come up with an alarming finding.
Destroying water's natural habitat not only creates a supply crisis
for people and animals, it also dramatically diminishes the amount
of available freshwater on the planet.
Kraveik describes the hydrologic cycle of a drop of water.
It must first evaporate from a plant, earth surface, swamp, river,
lake or the sea, then fall back down to earth as precipitation.
If the drop of water falls back onto a forest, lake, blade of
grass, meadow or field, it cooperates with nature to return to
the hydrologic cycle. "Right of domicile of a drop is one
of the basic rights, a more serious right than human rights,"
However, if the earth's surface is paved over, denuded of
forests and meadows, and drained of natural springs and creeks,
the drop will not form part of river basins and continental watersheds,
where it is needed by people and animals, but head out to sea,
where it will be stored. It is like rain falling onto a huge roof,
or umbrella; everything underneath stays dry and the water runs
off to the perimeter. The consequent reduction in continental
water basins results in reduced water evaporation from the earth's
surface, and becomes a net loss, while the seas begin to rise.
In Slovakia, the scientists found, for every 1 percent of roofing,
paving, car parks and highways constructed, water supplies decrease
in volume by more than 00 billion meters per year.
Kraveik issues a dire warning about the growing number of
what he calls the earth's "hot stains"- places already
drained of water. The "drying out" of the earth will
cause massive global warming, with the attendant extremes in weather
drought, decreased protection from the atmosphere, increased solar
radiation, decreased biodiversity, melting of the polar ice caps,
submersion of vast territories, massive continental desertification
and, eventually, "global collapse."
SCARCE WATER, SCARCE FOOD
As well as creating major environmental problems, overtapping
of ground water and rivers is exacerbating another potential crisis-world
Irrigation for crop production claims 65 percent of all water
used by humans, compared to 25 percent for industry and 10 percent
for households and municipalities. The annual rise in population
means that more water is needed every year for grain production
(for humans and animals), a highly water-intensive activity. But,
every year the world's burgeoning cities and industries are demanding
more and more of the water earmarked for agriculture. California,
for example, now projects a serious decline in irrigated lands
just as its population is exploding.
Eventually, some dry areas will not be able to serve both
the needs of farming and those of the ballooning cities. If these
regions are to meet everyday water requirements, they might have
to permanently import all or most of their food. This raises the
prospect that lack of water will make some countries chronically
dependent on others, or on the international community at large.
Throughout rural Latin America and Asia, massive industrialization
is throwing off the balance between humans and nature. Export-oriented
agribusiness is claiming more and more of the water once used
by small farmers for food self-sufficiency. Another major drain
on local water supplies are the more than 800 Third World free
trade zones, such as those in Latin America, where assembly lines
produce goods for the global consumer elite. In the maquiladora
zones of Mexico, for example, clean water is so scarce that babies
and children drink Coca-Cola and Pepsi instead. During a drought
crisis in northern Mexico in t 995, the government cut water supplies
to local farmers while ensuring emergency supplies to the mostly
foreign controlled industries of the region.
The story is perhaps most stark in China. The Worldwatch Institute
warns that an unexpectedly abrupt decline in the supply of water
for China's farmers could threaten world food security. China
faces severe grain shortages in the near future because of water
depletion due to the current shift of limited water resources
from agriculture to industry and cities. The resulting demand
for grain in China could exceed the world's available exportable
supplies. While China might be able to survive this for a time
because of its booming economy and huge trade surpluses, the resulting
higher grain prices will create social and political upheaval
in most major Third World cities and shake global food security.
The western half of China is made up mostly of deserts and
mountains; the vast bulk of the country's 1.2 billion citizens
live on several great rivers whose systems cannot sustain the
demands currently placed upon them. For instance, in t 972, the
Yellow River failed to reach the sea for the first time in history.
That year it failed on t5 days; every year since, it has run dry
for more days. In 1997, it failed to reach the sea for 226 days.
The story is the same with all of China's rivers and with its
depleting water tables beneath the North China Plain. As big industrial
wells probe the ground ever deeper to tap the remaining water,
millions of Chinese farmers have found their wells pumped dry.
Four hundred of China's 600 northern cities are already facing
severe water shortages, which affects over half of China's population.
These shortages come at a time when China will see a population
increase in the next 30 years greater than the entire population
of the United States, when conservative estimates predict that
annual industrial water use in China could grow from 52 billion
tons to 269 billion tons in the same period, and when rising incomes
are enabling millions of Chinese to install indoor plumbing with
showers and flush toilets. The Worldwatch Institute predicts China
will be the first country in the world that will have to literally
restructure its economy to respond to water scarcity.
Around the world, the answer to the increase in water demand
is to build more dams and divert more rivers. Water has long been
manipulated. Even the earliest civilizations, from the Roman to
the Mayan, built aqueducts and irrigation schemes. But we are
now tampering with water systems on a scale that is totally unsustainable.
The number of large dams worldwide has climbed from just over
5,000 in 1950 to 38,000 today and the number of waterways altered
for navigation has grown from fewer than 9,000 in 1900 to almost
500,000. In the northern hemisphere, we have harnessed and tamed
three-quarters of the flow from the world's major rivers to power
our cities. While advances in modern engineering have allowed
governments to supply farms and cities with water, these practices
have done great damage to the natural world.
In the U.S., only 2 percent of the country's rivers and streams
remain free-flowing and undeveloped. The continental U.S. has
lost more than half of its wetlands and California has lost 95
percent. Populations of migratory birds and waterfowl have dropped
from 60 million in 1950 to just 3 million today. Watersheds that
are the most biologically diverse are the most degraded, putting
species and wilderness at great risk.
"The U.S. is the epicenter of freshwater biodiversity
in the world," says Larry Masters of the Nature Conservancy.
However, 37 percent of its freshwater fish are at risk of extinction,
51 percent of crayfish and 40 percent of amphibians are imperiled,
and 67 percent of freshwater mussels are extinct or vulnerable
One billion pounds of weed and bug killers are used throughout
the United States every year, reports National Geographic, most
of which runs off into the country's water systems. The Natural
Resources Defense Council says that 53 million Americans drink
tap water contaminated with lead, fecal bacteria or other harmful
pollutants. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. rivers and streams are too
dangerous for fishing,
In Canada, Jamie Linton has documented a disturbing story
of water system abuse for the Canadian Wildlife Federation. Wetland
loss includes 65 percent of Atlantic coastal marshes, 70 percent
of southern Ontario wetlands, 71 percent of prairie wetlands,
and 80 percent of the Fraser River Delta in Canada's province
of British Columbia. Acid rain has caused a 40 percent decline
in fish species in some Canadian lakes. Most major river systems
have been dammed, and more stream flows are diverted out of their
basins of origin than in any other country in the world by a considerable
margin. Over a century of mining, forestry and large-scale industry
has affected virtually every water body in Canada, and toxic chemicals
are found even in the most remote parts of the Far North. "We
have crashing ecosystems in every river basin in the West,"
says Steve Glazer of the Sierra Club's Colorado River Task Force.
In the Great Lakes of North America, the world's largest freshwater
system, the result has been a "catastrophic loss of biological
diversity," according to Linton. Janet Abramovitz of the
Worldwatch Institute adds that the Great Lakes have lost two-thirds
of their once extensive wetlands and that less than 3 percent
of the lakes' shorelines are suitable for swimming, drinking or
supporting any aquatic life.
The Nature Conservancy has identified 100 species and 31 ecological
communities at risk within the Great Lakes system and notes that
half don't exist anywhere else. Two hundred years ago, each of
the five Great Lakes had its own thriving aquatic community. In
1900,82 percent of the commercial catch was native. By 1966, native
species were only two-tenths of 1 percent of the catch; the remaining
99.8 percent were exotic species, most of them devastating to
the local species.
The story is the same all over the world. All but one of England's
33 major rivers are suffering; some are now less than a third
of their average depth. The Thames is threatening to run dry and
already larger ships are having to restrict their movements to
high tides. Development has cut off the Rhine River in Europe
from 90 percent of its original flood plains, and the native salmon
run has nearly disappeared. Over the last 25 years, the Danube's
phosphate and nitrate concentrations have increased six-fold and
four-fold, respectively, causing great harm to the region's tourism
and fisheries. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), 80 percent of China's major rivers are so degraded they
no longer support fish. The building of Egypt's Aswan Dam in 1970
caused the number of commercially harvested fish to drop by almost
The World Resources Institute reports that, after the Pak
Mun Dam was built in Thailand, all 150 fish species that had inhabited
the Mun River virtually disappeared. Introduction of non-native
species to Victoria Lake in Africa has all but destroyed the native
species population, already imperiled by millions of liters of
untreated sewage and industrial waste dumped by the cities of
surrounding Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Three-fourths of Poland's
rivers are so contaminated by chemicals, sewage and agricultural
run-off that their water is unfit even for industrial use. Nearly
half of the water and sewage treatment systems in Moscow are ineffective
or malfunctioning and, according to the Russian Security Council,
75 percent of the Republic's lake and river water is unsafe to
The Aral Sea basin shared by Afghanistan, Iran and five countries
of the former Soviet Union was once the world's fourth largest
lake. Excessive river diversions have caused it to lose half its
area and three-fourths of its volume, while its surrounding wetlands
have shrunk by 85 percent. Calling it one of the planet's greatest
environmental tragedies, Postel reports that almost all fish and
waterfowl species have been decimated and the fisheries have collapsed
entirely. Each year, winds pick up 40150 million tons of a toxic
salt mixture from the dry sea bed and dump it on the surrounding
farmlands. Millions of "ecological refugees" have fled
There is simply no way to overstate the water crisis of the
planet today. No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse
of whole societies and ecosystems. A radical rethinking of our
values, priorities and political systems is urgent and still possible.
Yet, as we will explore in the next section, there are forces
at work in the world today that, unless challenged, would move
the world almost inexorably into a water-scarce future.