July/August 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Water for Life, Not for Profit

Ruth Caplan is campaign director of the Alliance for Democracy's Defending Water for Life Campaign and also chairs the national Sierra Club's Water Privatization Task Force. She helped bring together the Water Allies Network. To learn more, visit www.waterallies.org.

Water is a human right, basic to life itself, yet powerful corporations and entrepreneurs see it as "Blue Gold' to be mined for profit. Across the United States and around the world people are organizing to stop the corporate privatization of water and to assert community control over water and essential water services.

Water covers 70% of the earth's surface, but only 1% is accessible fresh water. This sliver is being polluted and depleted by industry, mining, and corporate agriculture. Now corporations see the opportunity to profit from scarcity and treat water as a marketable good to be sold to the highest bidder - whether in small plastic bottles or bladders the size of two football fields.

Corporations have also used the Trojan Horse of "public-private partnerships" to take over public water/wastewater services. They first targeted developing countries by teaming up with the World Bank and IMF, which promote privatization as part of their "structural adjustment programs." When these ventures proved less profitable than expected and organized opposition arose in countries like Ghana and Bolivia, the water companies turned their attention to the United States and Canada.

European corporations dominate the global water services market - Suez, Vivendi (its water division now spun off as Veolia), and RWE, which became a major player after purchasing the British water corporation, Thames. These three have gained a foothold in the US by purchasing the three largest domestic water companies.

Organizing Prevents Corporate Water Grab

These water giants have lobbied US mayors to sign long-term contracts for municipal water/wastewater services. In 1998, Suez bagged a major "public-private partnership" contract with Atlanta. Then they headed for Lawrence MA, where they convinced the mayor to promote a 20-year lease worth more than $100 million.

After 10 months of secret review by the mayor's consultants, the City Council met to discuss privatization. When residents were not allowed to speak, their noisy protests shut down the meeting. Within two weeks, the mayor selected Suez' subsidiary, United Water.

The Lawrence Grassroots Initiative mobilized to reverse this decision, forming Hands Off Our Water. In this old mill town, now largely Hispanic, they ran a highly effective neighborhood-based grassroots campaign, all conducted in both Spanish and English. Rich or poor, residents did not want to lose control of their water to a distant mega-corporation.

Victory came in July 2003 when the City Council voted down the contract. "This was a slam dunk," said Jonathan Leavitt, who had been the local high school basketball star before his organizing days, and a founder of the Lawrence Grassroots Initiative. "We had enough people who knew how civic decisions were made in Lawrence and we got there early enough."

New England: Water For Sale?

When it comes to bottled water, there are three major players -Nestlé, Coca Cola, and Pepsi Cola - going after this lucrative market worth $8.3 billion last year in the US alone. Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal water with some extra treatment, while Nestlé has cornered the market on spring water by buying up small bottlers around the country, including Poland Springs in Maine.

Nestlé has 75 spring sites and is actively prospecting for more, targeting the unincorporated territory of western Maine for major expansion. Without a public hearing, Nestlé has been given a permit to pump at an initial site in Maine, but citizens have started to organize. In Lexington Township, near the site, residents have held two well-attended public meetings and are now linking with activists who have successfully kept Nestlé out of Wisconsin and who have brought a successful case against Nestlé in Michigan, a case now on appeal.

In southeast New Hampshire, an entrepreneur bought land and incorporated USA Springs to sell bottled water. He planned to pump over 400,000 gallons of water a day from an aquifer providing well water for residents and local businesses in ten communities. In 2001, residents in Nottingham and Barrington formed Save Our Groundwater (SOG) and have been organizing ever since. In 2003, SOG won victories when the state Department of Environmental Services (DES) denied USA Springs permission to pump. Then DES reversed course. On July 2, 2004, DES granted permission after USA Springs submitted a slightly modified application. Now SOG and the local communities have to decide whether to appeal the decision.

These stories are repeated across the country. To counter the Blue Gold Rush, activists opposing water privatization have formed the Water Allies Network to build a movement strong enough to keep water in public hands, including protecting traditional tribal and Mexican-American ejido rights (rights of Mexican-Americans to collective use and ownership of areas of land collectively owned and used by Mexican ancestors before the US invasion in 1848). Converging in Miami in November 2003, activists declared:

"We, people of many cultures and colors from across the United States, have come together to say that secure and equitable access to clean water is a human right and must be protected for all generations and for all living things."

This US-based network, which includes the New Hampshire Office of the AFSC, is linked to the hemispheric Red VIDA network launched in August, 2003 and the People's World Water Movement launched in New Delhi in January, 2004 to promote international collaboration and action.

These nested networks, with leadership from communities of color and the global south, are challenging the corporate globalization paradigm by promoting community control, not corporate control, of water.

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