The World Water Forum (Kyoto, 2003)

Today, 1.2 billion people are without sustainable access to safe drinking water; 2.4 million have no basic sanitation. By subscribing to the Millennium Development Goals, all United Nations Member States have pledged to halve these figures by 2015.

Involving close to 24,000 participants, with 182 countries represented, 351 workshops and 38 subjects tackled, the 3rd World Water Forum ended, on Sunday 23 March 2003, with a rather slight outcome. The declaration adopted by 96 countries states that every effort should be made to preserve and monitor the world’s water supply, but announces very few concrete measures to achieve this. The clock has stopped at 1,220,000,000 – the number of people without access to drinking water.

On the status of water

One important contribution of the Kyoto forum was the Camdessus panel’s report, “Financing water for all”. No doubt its president, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is no stranger to the reaction of many NGOs, who straightaway rejected the document, fearing the private sector takeover of water resources and assets. Paradoxically, a number of governments and international institutions are threatening to hinder the report, which advocates major changes in behaviour. This constraint goes hand in hand with the necessary decentralisation of water policies’ financing. The NGOs’ criticism focuses on the concept of PPP (Public-Private Partnership), a concept first coined at The Hague (March 2000), “made official” during the Ministerial Conference in Bonn (December 2001) and heavily reported in the media at Johannesburg (nicknamed The Partnership Summit).

Public-Private Partnerships “were to make water a more attractive investment opportunity, requiring good regulation and legal systems, transparent contracting procedures, reliable cost recovery and public acceptance” (Camdessus report). Opponents see PPPs solely as a means of opening new markets to private investments. In fact, it is through such mechanisms that the World Bank and IMF have favoured multi-nationals’ takeover of most natural resources in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the end, PPPs favour above all the ‘merchandising’ of goods and services.

Here we are at the heart of the controversy engendered by GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Many NGOs demand that water be excluded from it. At this stage in the debate the stakes are still hard to identify for most of the players and the public at large. This is not the case for the powers that be; thus the United States have begun an inventory of Andean resources with a view to a possible massive transfer of water(1). Already the technology is operational, as testified by the Great Man-made River Project in Libya(2). Whether it is a question of evaluating reserves, exploiting deposits or transferring water over long distances, the technology only needs to be polished to be profitable. Yet on this point, the wider public does not share the engineers’ and strategists’ fascination: isn’t this fundamentally “unnatural”? What of the right to water?

On “human rights”

Kyoto, once again, has proved very disappointing. Ministers refused to grant water the status of a “human right”. And yet, several international texts have recognised the rank of water as a fundamental and imprescriptible human right: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the International Pact of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (PIDESC) signed in 1966; or, more recently – and this time most explicitly – the declaration by the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 4 December of last year. So why do governments continue to reject this demand? Admittedly the ensuing demands from the right to water would inevitably put certain governments in difficulties, in particular in the poorest and most threatened countries. However, this obstinacy in opposing the legal international “status quo” is somewhat anachronistic.

Consequently, what are the demands of the “World Water Warriors”? First of all, the exclusion of water from the WTO/GATS negotiations (no to the “merchandising of life”); but also the creation of a World Water Authority, democratic and representative, covering three functions: legislative (a World Water Parliament, to elaborate and approve basic rules for the solidary and sustainable development and use of water as a good); judicial (a World Tribunal) and regulatory (an Agency charged with the evaluation and monitoring of public financing for group action projects).

We should welcome UNESCO’s initiative aimed at promoting, developing and sustaining the creation of an independent structure to facilitate the resolution of difficulties linked to the management of cross-border waters – but this would not be a supranational authority for the management of cross-border waters. Moreover international organisations and research bodies have pledged to work towards a better understanding of the concept of virtual water as a means of promoting the safeguard of water and integrating it into national and regional policy (virtual water is the water that a country would require to produce domestically the foodstuffs that it imports; according to J. A. Allan, since the end of the 1980s, the Middle-East and North Africa have imported 40 million tonnes of cereals and flour a year, and so, in terms of virtual water, over half the volume of the Nile used for agriculture in the whole of Egypt(3)).

On solidarity

Unfortunately, international solidarity can also be virtual. Water accounts for less than 10% of public development aid, that is around 4.5 billion dollars a year for supply and sanitation. “Recent estimates of the spending needed to achieve the targets for water set in Johannesburg would require an increase in investment of at least 50% above current levels, if not a doubling of investment”, according to Henri Smets, of the Water Academy. “Such a rise is only conceivable if water becomes a greater priority in developing countries and if international water aid noticeably increases.”

In absolute terms the investment required has been estimated at 180 billion dollars a year over ten years (Camdessus report), an increase of 100 billion a year(4). And it just so happens that 100 billion dollars a year adds up to… the exact sum of annual global military spending.