Global Policy Forum

By Gareth Harding

Activists from seven of the world's poorest countries have called for access to water to be made a fundamental human right and brought under the democratic control of those dependent on its use.

Meeting in Brussels last week, the so-called P7 Summit - which groups together politicians, academics, aid workers and environmental campaigners - issued a declaration roundly condemning the use of water as a commodity.

Treating water as a kind of petroleum to be traded according to market principles would lead to further environmental degradation, wasteful and inefficient farming methods, greater water poverty and an increased risk of conflict, the conference concluded.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 1.7 billion people do not have access to drinking water and half the world's population lacks access to sanitary services.

Malin Falkenmark, of the Swedish International Water Institute, said this problem was compounded by the fact that rampant population growth requires more water to be diverted to food production, which uses 50-100 times more water than households. Falkenmark said that there was an urgent need for politicians to address the "unavoidable trade-offs between feeding the population and protecting aquatic ecosystems".

Honorary President of P7, Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist, said that droughts and famines were less the result of natural disasters and population growth and more often due to World Bank funding for cash crops requiring huge amounts of water. Twenty years ago the water table in drought-stricken areas of northern India was 20 feet (about 6.5 metres) below the surface, but now wells were being dug to 2000 feet to irrigate thirsty crops such as cotton, said Shiva, director of the Indian Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

Describing the Washington-based bank's water privatisation reforms as an "organised theft of water from the poor", Shiva added: "the moment you let the market determine the situation, all that will happen is that the swimming pool of the rich will get a higher priority over the drinking water of the poor".

Mamadou Diouf, P7 coordinator from Senegal, also noted the "desperate scramble for profit" water companies were engaged in. Diouf said that in West African countries privatisation had turned public into private monopolies and national resources into those of French multinationals.

The three-day conference, which was hosted by Green members of the European Parliament (MEPs), rejected the conclusions of the second ministerial World Water Forum in the Hague in March this year, which treated water primarily as an economic commodity and refused to consider access to water as a human right.

This ran counter to the conclusions of the UN "Earth Summit" in 1992, which declared that "all peoples.have the right to access to drinking water in quantities and of quality equal to their basic needs". The P7 meet concluded that "all living beings have a right to water as water is part of humanity's common heritage".

Instead of private companies monopolising the distribution of water, the conference called for the management of water services to remain in the public domain. "The best managers of water are citizens and local communities," it stated.

Undemocratic control over water leads to conflicts, several speakers pointed out. Fadia Daibes Murad, of the Palestinian Water Authority, said water was one of the main reasons for the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Most of the water in the mountainous area of the Palestinian water basin was being expropriated by the Israelis for cash crop production, said Murad. "If the water problem is not solved there will be no peace in the area," he said.

Imeru Tamerat, of Action Aid Ethiopia, took a more optimistic view, arguing that "water basins have more often been the source of cooperation than conflict". The 10 countries in the Nile basin were increasingly working together to agree common rules, he said. However, the water expert did say that huge demands were being put on the river because of population growth and the over-use of resources by Egypt.

Water knows no political boundaries. Therefore we need to challenge the belief in the national ownership of water," he said. Calling for a new form of "water democracy," the conference declared that parliamentary assemblies should be set up to manage large river basins and a World Water Parliament should be established to lay down common rules for the management of water resources.

The P7 decided to launch a world campaign for the right to water and to present a report pleading for this at the tenth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. They also called for a group to be set up to develop alternatives to the privatisation of water and for measures to ensure sustainable and equitable water use".

Green MEPs promised to draw up a report on global water policy for adoption by the Strasbourg-based assembly.

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