This is your chance to voice your opposition to water profiteering. You can vote against the privatization and commodification of water by participating in an online "Cambridge style" debate hosted by The Economist magazine.

The debate proposition is: "Water is both an industrial input and a prerequisite of life. Roughly a billion people do not have a constant supply of clean and safe water. Would water supplies be better managed if it were treated as a commodity, and priced accordingly? Or is water a basic human right that governments should secure for their citizens?" 

We know that water is a vital resource, critical for all of us. The provision of such an essential public good cannot be left in the hands of corporations, who will raise prices in the search for greater profit.

Join the debate and tell the moderator that allowing the market to determine the price of water will severely impact the world's poorest people, subjugate environmental conservation and trade public control for private profit.

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter commented:

The U.S. government and its corporate allies clearly believe that water is a new profit center. They are promoting markets and privatization as the solution to providing water to the world's poor -- 1.4 billion people without access to drinking water and 2.5 billion without sanitation services. International finance institutions, funded by the U.S. and other developed nations, provide loans to developing nations on the condition that they privatize services and charge steep user fees. Indeed, the very institutions that are charged with alleviating poverty, like the World Bank, are implementing policies that force people who make $1 or $2 a day to choose between food, housing or water.

Communities all over the world have suffered from the empty promises of water-privatization profiteers. Whether in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, or Guayaquil, Ecuador, or Atlanta, GA, the results have been devastating. They include cost-cutting measures that jeopardize public safety, job cuts to essential staff, maintenance and water quality problems, lack of infrastructure investment, sewage spills, corruption, environmental degradation, outrageous rate hikes and political meddling.

Almost across the board, private corporations deliver poorer service at a higher cost than do most public utilities. Surveys of U.S. utilities show that privately owned water utilities charge customers significantly higher water rates than their publicly owned counterparts charge -- anywhere from 13 percent to almost 50 percent more, according to an analysis by Food & Water Watch, the advocacy group I direct.

To cite just one example, in 2005, the government of Tanzania canceled its 10-year contract with the British-based firm Biwater after two years of poor management and unmet obligations left people without water and the government short about $3.25 million. The East African country enjoyed some measure of justice in early 2008 when an international tribunal ruled that Biwater must pay almost $8 million in damages and fees to the state water utility in Dar es Salaam. Not coincidentally, the company had taken control of the city's water supply in a controversial, noncompetitive privatization process favored by the British government and the World Bank.

The answer to providing safe, affordable drinking water and sewer services to developing nations is not giant corporations. The World Bank and other IFIs should stop predicating their loans on privatization. These powerful institutions must stop forcing poor countries to structure their economies in a way meant to benefit multinational corporations, and instead prioritize public health and increased access to clean and affordable water for all people. Because water is, after all, a human right.

Join her in saying no to the water barons who seek profit at the expense of clean, safe and affordable water for all.

For more information about the water debate, check out our Private vs. Public page and other reports on our website. 

– Mary Grant