Blog Posts: Common Resources

By Marcela Olivera

This blog was originally posted at Thebrokeronline.eu.

In the Americas, we have been fighting water privatization since the early 1990s: from Detroit in the United States to Buenos Aires in Argentina. After the infamous 2000 water war in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that led to the expulsion of a multinational corporation, social movements throughout the Americas have organized themselves to protect water from greed.

In August 2003, in El Salvador, several organizations from the Americas assembled and decided to create the Red VIDA (Network for Inter-American Vigilance in Defense of and for the Right to Water).  Through this network, we would launch a coordinated hemispheric campaign to defend water as a common good. 

Since its beginning in 2003, we have worked very hard resisting water privatization and expelling corporations that were profiting from our water sources and water utilities. We have also insured that constitutional amendments were passed that prevent the commodification of water. In Uruguay, for example, the Red VIDA was active in the campaign that led to a constitutional amendment declaring access to water as a human right. 

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By Mitch Jones

Two recent news items highlight the need for policy makers concerned about climate change – which should be all of them, but sadly it isn’t – to rethink their recent approach to reducing carbon emissions.

When President Obama gave his Inaugural Address on January 21, he highlighted the need to take action on climate change. The mention of climate change, after the issues was largely ignored in the election before Sandy hit, was lauded by environmentalists as a sign that the Obama administration was going to do some to curb emissions. What that something would be was left unsaid.

Just three days after President Obama’s speech, carbon prices in Europe’s cap and trade system plummeted to an all time low, causing speculation that the trading regime stands on the verge of collapse. My colleague Geert de Cock wrote a post last week that explains how and why the carbon market in European has failed. Food & Water Europe has joined with other organizations across Europe calling for the EU trading system to be abolished.

The collapse of the EU system – basically a pay-to-pollute scheme – shows that as we move forward to combat climate change in the US we cannot return to the policies put forward as recently as 2009. In that year the US House passed a cap and trade bill that would have created a nationwide carbon market. And the initial news is that the administration is looking at actually reducing emissions, rather than hoping a system that hasn’t worked anywhere, will suddenly start working.

We need to address climate change now, but not by adopting pay-to-pollute deregulatory schemes cooked up in right wing think tanks. We need to truly reduce emissions, building on successes like the increase in fuel efficiency standards implemented by the Obama administration, and committing to ending our addiction to dirty fossil fuels.

Let’s face it: not every one in the media is talking about the financialization of nature. While it’s not always the hottest topic in mainstream media circles, it’s important that we take every opportunity to engage in this discussion in order to bring it to the forefront of any conversation about our common resources and the consequences of putting them up for auction to the highest bidding industries. So when Thom Hartmann invited Food & Water Watch Common Resources Director Mitch Jones to be a guest on his show, The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, Mitch jumped at the chance to discuss our latest brief, And the Value of Nothing: GDP Alternatives to the Alternatives. 

Watch the video and then check out the report right here: http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/ValueofNothing.pdf

By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Listen to Wenonah’s post-election town hall meeting

Last night, voters rejected a vision for our country that would have taken our economy, environmental regulations and consumer protections back decades. If there is one overarching lesson this election taught us, it’s that political organizing CAN overcome industry money in elections. But we can’t sit back and assume protections for our essential resources will improve; instead, we need to take lessons from the last four years and redouble our organizing efforts to press the Obama administration, Congress, and state legislatures across the country to keep our food and water safe and keep our essential resources in public hands. 



Two ballot measures Food & Water Watch worked on this cycle illustrate the need and power of organizing, even in the face of entrenched and powerful interests. 



One of the most exciting victories from election night was in Longmont, Colorado where voters passed an historic and precedent setting ballot initiative to ban fracking. We were up against incredible odds in Longmont, with the oil and gas industry spending over half-a-million dollars for TV commercials, full-page ads and multiple mailers to try to scare Longmont citizens. Governor Hickenlooper sued the citizens of Longmont to slow down our efforts and the Denver Post editorialized against this vote to ban fracking, but we were on the ground, knocking on doors, talking to voters and doing the hard work to support a citizen-led effort to protect our health, safety and property, and the citizens of Longmont spoke loud and clear. We won with nearly 60% of the vote!  

We also worked hard in California with many of our allies to pass Proposition 37, which would require labeling for all genetically engineered foods. This popular measure was only narrowly defeated at the polls, due in large part to the massive spending by large chemical and junk food companies (which outspent our side by over $40 million.) Despite this loss, support for GE food labels has never been stronger, and we will continue to build a robust national grassroots campaign to push for mandatory labeling across the country.



These measures prove what we already know: An educated and mobilized citizenry can fight back against the corporate control of our common resources, but our work is far from over. 



If you aren’t already on our mailing list, please join it now to remain informed on an ongoing basis about actions you can take to help build power to protect our food and water. We need your support to keep growing the movement! As the election demonstrated, together we can fight for the food and water protections we all want and deserve.

By Mitch Jones

There’s been an increase of chatter lately about the prospects of global water markets. CUNY journalism professor Frederick Kaufman published an essay in Nature that raises concerns about the prospects for a future financialized global water market. His concerns aren’t too different than what we have been saying. But his essay has provoked a response from The Nature Conservancy. 

Under the title “Water Privatization: Let’s Cut the Hysteria,” Brian Richter dismisses concerns about the financialization of nature and the privatization of our common resources. In particular he responds to Professor Kaufman’s concerns about a global water market, claiming it is not going to happen (or not the way Professor Kaufman thinks it will) and it’s “highly unlikely” it would be traded globally, and if it were, it’s price wouldn’t be volatile.

No one claims that there is currently a global bulk water market. There isn’t. There is a global bottled water market, and that market is the thin end of the wedge for getting people used to the idea of water as a commodity. This is important, because in order to create a global water market, water has to be turned into a commodity. Water also has to be privatized for water markets to exist, and that is taking place globally as well. Once water is privatized and commoditized, marketizing it easily follows. Privatized, commoditized, and marketized water can be financialized – with derivatives markets built up to allow financial actors to speculate on the price of water. This speculation in itself could drive price volatility, as evidence shows speculators are increasingly driving the traditional commodity markets.

A global water market is still a threat, even though the economists who dream of it say it is 25 to 30 years away. The chief economist at Citigroup has a vision of globally integrated physical water markets, single hulled water tankers sailing the oceans and a water derivatives market. Already, Valérie Issumo, a Switzerland-based economist, has developed what she terms an “Ethical Water Exchange” designed for the commoditization of treated water on which futures could be traded or serve as the conditions for credit lines. Economist Henning Bjornlund claims a derivatives market for water could provide efficiencies for the distribution of water that would be bigger than the water market itself. What that means is that a water derivatives market would make it even more likely that those who can afford to pay the most for water will be the ones to get water.

This isn’t hysteria. It’s the vision of determined economists – some at powerful banks – who believe the financialized free-market paradigm that brought us the global economic crisis is the right model for determining who gets water where, and for what purpose.

But it isn’t surprising that the folks at The Nature Conservancy are asking us to look the other way—they are deeply invested in the financialization of nature. Their Natural Capital Project seeks to expand the market paradigm over all of nature. They work to develop a global carbon market that would seek to offset pollution by allowing companies to buy offsets in other countries, even going so far as to call for a carbon free-trading zone of the Americas. 

As George Monbiot has pointed out nature has become natural capital, and natural processes have become ecosystems services. The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Capital Project is part of this process seeking to find a quantifiable economic value for the natural world. It accepts the canard that what can’t be priced can’t be valued.

We believe that our common resources can’t be reduced to an entry in an accounts book. Their value is too great to be priced. Instead of gambling with financial actors and markets in nature-based assets, we should rely on the regulation of activities that harm the environment and contribute to climate change. Instead of pushing the expansion, integration and financialization of water markets, we should implement and enforce regulations that preserve our essential resources and promote policies that acknowledge water as a human right.

By Elizabeth Schuster

On October 19, I was honored to join dozens of concerned citizens at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters for an event organized by U.S. PIRG to “celebrate” the Chamber’s 100th birthday. Because no proper birthday celebration is complete without cake, we delivered one decorated with the phrase “Happy Birthday, Corporate Shills.” Since it is not polite to show up at a birthday party empty-handed, we were sure to deliver a gift of over 30,000 petitions demanding that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce be more transparent in disclosing its funders.   

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of many beneficiaries of the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which likens political spending to protected speech under the First Amendment, and it has spent considerable sums on ads promoting its favorite congressional candidates this election cycle—over $31 million to date.
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By Marcela Olivera and Susan Spronk

Click here to learn more about water privatization in Latin America.

We are sitting in a large Catholic hall nestled in the heart of Mexico City, the type of space where many Latin American social movements have historically sought refuge from dictatorships. Today, we are not fending off the military but big multinationals and our governments who want to sell our water, use it to grow soy or poison it with their mines. 

We have gathered for the general assembly of Red Vida, an inter-American network of social movements working in defense of water from Canada to Argentina. Forty of us are debating political strategy to build on our successes in reversing the tide of privatization of the 1990s (see Struggles for Water Justice in Latin America).

Mexico in hot water

We can’t rest on our laurels. Mexico is just one ‘hot spot’ where our brothers and sisters are fighting private water companies and governments that support them. They have seen how private providers in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina have failed to deliver on their promises for cheaper and higher quality water services, and they can’t let their country make the same mistakes.

In Mexico, a national coalition of environmentalist organizations, COMDA, is currently embroiled in a campaign to reform the water law. COMDA wants the law to respect the right of communities to manage their own water resources and to defend the commons against ‘enclosure’, particularly from contamination by big mining companies.

Debating strategies

One of the productive tensions that has emerged in this meeting is whether we should be pushing our governments to include the ‘right to water’ in legislation or whether we should be focusing our energies on struggles to defend ‘the commons’.

Oscar Olivera from Fundación Abril (Bolivia) spoke eloquently about the need to defend spaces of self-government such as community-run water systems in the peri-urban areas of the Andes. If people have constructed their own water systems with sweat and blood, do we really ‘need’ the state to provide these services? Many members of such autonomous communities, most self-identifying as indigenous, see the state as an alien institution imposed by colonial rule.

By contrast, Adriana Marquisio from Uruguay’s publicly owned and operated water utility OSEhighlighted that state provision in her country has allowed to achieve near universal coverage, and much higher quality services than many of the small community systems could ever provide.

From our conversations it is clear that it is not enough to frame our campaigns around the right to water and we must document concrete alternatives to privatization. Red Vida is better able to do that thanks to collaboration with researchers from the Municipal Services Project, who attended our assemblies as invited observers in Buga, Colombia in May 2009 and are here with us again in Mexico. 

If we can articulate what the alternatives are perhaps we can convince others that privatization is not the solution. We can also demonstrate the negative impact of the more insidious practices of sub-contracting and corporatization, which threaten the ‘public’ nature of our utilities. These trends are affecting every one of us, whether our governments claim to be left-of-center or not.

As our Declaration signed in Mexico by all member organizations of the Red Vida states, in the face of all these struggles, we will continue to fight “like water, in a manner that is transparent, joyful and always in motion…until the final victory.” 

Marcela Olivera is the Latin American coordinator for the Water for All Campaign of Food and Water Watch, and coordinates the Red Vida.

Susan Spronk teaches international development at the University of Ottawa. She is an active participant in several projects of the Red Vida and a research associate with the Municipal Services Project. 

This was originally posted on the blog of the Municipal Services Project.

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

This week, Food & Water Watch and Friends of the Earth filed a joint lawsuit to force the Environmental Protection Agency to preserve the integrity of the Clean Water Act as it turns 40 years old this month. Represented by the Columbia Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, we are suing for the removal of the water pollution trading provisions that are part of the 2010 plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

This cap-and-trade plan for water, known as the Bay total maximum daily load or TMDL, is being promoted by both the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, both of which view the program in the Bay region as a national model that would be replicated in watersheds across the nation. But if this scheme is allowed to move forward it will allow new and increased pollution discharges into the Chesapeake Bay watershed under a complex system of market-based offsets and pollution trading that we believe is illegal under the Clean Water Act.

Pollution trading violates the fundamental concept that the Clean Water Act is built upon, which is that pollution is illegal and industries don’t have a right to poison our shared waterways. Ironically, this evisceration of the Clean Water Act is taking place as the landmark piece of legislation that was passed during the Nixon Administration is about to have its 40th anniversary. It is built on the premise that we should strive to eliminate water pollution from our lakes, rivers and bays. Water pollution trading schemes are a disastrous substitute for proven means of regulating harmful chemical discharges into our waterways.

And we should be clear that the Clean Water Act (CWA) has been an enormously successful piece of legislation. In 1972, two-thirds of our nation’s waterways were unsafe for fishing. Chemicals and wastewater were indiscriminately dumped into our waterways. Today, according to EPA about one-third of our nation’s waterways are unhealthy. Obviously there is more work to do, but why would we allow such an effective piece of legislation to be replaced by a scheme that essentially legitimizes pollution?

The water pollution trading that is being promoted in the Chesapeake Bay is based on buying and selling unverifiable pollution credits. It turns what is now illegal under the CWA into the right to pollute. It’s essentially an “entitlement” program for the financial services industry and polluters.

The federal plan for the bay that includes trading is based on the total maximum daily load of pollutants that can be discharged and still allow a water body to meet water quality standards set by the states under CWA. These pollutants come from energy facilities, factories and wastewater treatment plants and those harder to control nonpoint sources like many of the Bay’s agricultural operations.

The TMDL is, in the simplest sense, a rationing plan. It seeks to allocate pollution loads to our waterways among the many sources of pollution in the Bay. The TMDL can be an effective tool to reduce pollution, but it must be developed and implemented consistently with the goal to eliminate the biggest threats to the Bay watershed – nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment.

As a practical matter, the trading of pollution credits is inherently fraught with problems.  In this case, EPA is allowing trading without setting clear and enforceable minimum limits on trading activity, including providing safeguards to prevent fictitious or overstated pollution reductions from being used as offsets.

The “pay-to-pollute” trading program allows financial middlemen to identify and purchase nitrogen and phosphorus “credits” from industrial agriculture operations in the watershed that attest to reducing their pollution levels in the future. These unverifiable credits are then aggregated and bundled together, and sold to power plants, wastewater treatment plants and other “point source” polluters who are either unable or simply unwilling to meet their CWA permit limits.

Many states have tried to implement nutrient trading schemes around the country, but there is no documented, successful nonpoint-to-point source trading program implemented in any watershed in the United States.

And, we must look at this trading scheme in context. Rather than regulating pollution, it is part of an on-going effort spurred by the financial services industry of using the market to allocate costs to the environment, rather than using the performance-based indicator of meeting a regulated standard.

But, in the wake of the largest financial crisis in 75 years, one both created and spread by the irresponsible behavior of the financial service sector, the argument that free market-based principles should replace traditional environmental regulation is wrong minded. It represents a financialization of nature and the transferring of the stewardship of our common resources to private business interests. It makes the responsibility of caring for our natural resources secondary to the economic interests of the few.

Leaving the health of the bay to this trading scheme is reckless and it is a recipe for disaster.

By Maude Barlow

From left to right: Barbara Gysi, Cedric Wermuth, Yvonne Feri, Jacques Neyrinck, Maude Barlow, Rosmarie, Balthasar Glättli and Franklin Frederick. Photo Courtesy of Council of Canadians.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of Council of Canadians and Board Chair of Food & Water Watch. This post originally appeared on the Council of Canadians’ blog.

I have just returned from a week in Switzerland to promote the right to water and to challenge the giant Swiss bottled water giant Nestlé. My visit was arranged by Franklin Frederick, an activist and leader in the global fight against Nestlé Waters, who is originally from Brazil, but now lives and works in Switzerland. Franklin is an extraordinary man. He is fiercely committed to global water justice and has been a thorn in the side of the water privateers for years. I also reconnected with Rosmarie Bar, a former Green Member of the Swiss Parliament and former senior member of the Swiss development network, Alliance Sud. Rosmarie and I worked together to form an international group called Friends of the Right to Water and worked for many years to lay the groundwork for the recognition of this right at the UN.

I spoke at the universities of Bern and Lucerne and in a beautiful 500 year-old church located in the heart of Bern. In the magnificent wood paneled Swiss Parliament, I also met with a delegation of MPs from every party who are committed to protecting public water and the human right to water. In all these venues, I met wonderful, committed people working for economic and social justice.

However, it is very clear that Nestlé is a powerful presence in Switzerland and its influence in the halls of power goes deep. Everyone I talked to said so in one way or another. Switzerland has no law limiting political donations from corporations, or requiring transparency in campaign financing. Given that the marketing department of Nestlé has a larger annual budget than the World Health Organization, it is widely understood that the company has great political influence.

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By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Sometimes the forces working to commoditize our vital natural resources exist in plain sight, flaunting their selfish motives. Other times, they hide behind euphemistic smokescreens, which is far and away more menacing.  Regardless of where you may find them, their actions share a common consequence—undermining our collective right to access safe, clean, affordable water.

Last May, I traveled to Dubai for the Global Water: Oil & Gas Summit where I was surrounded by corporate executives discussing their “drill baby drill” philosophy with abandon and no mention of the environmental or societal costs. Then in August, I traveled to Los Angeles to speak at the premiere of a film about powerful corporate interests who conceal their intentions to privatize California’s water supply behind the guise of conservation and disaster preparedness. 

While half a world apart, these scenarios both represent the global force determined to privatize and commodify water for the sheer benefit of corporate profits. My colleague Scott Edwards says it best: “Water-related death, drought and degradation aren’t calamities; they’re profit opportunities.” This couldn’t be truer for California where political wars have been waged over water since the Gold Rush. Read the full article…