Press Releases: World

Today Nestlé announced it has purchased Pfizer’s infant nutrition unit to expand into fast-growing emerging markets, particularly in Asia. This renewed focus on growing the market for its infant formula products is troubling given the corporation’s track record of using dubious practices to market infant formula in developing countries, where it is often prepared in unhygienic conditions with unsafe water. It appears this investment will pave the way for more dubious marketing practices, which as recently as last year have been criticized by public health groups in Laos.

Press Release: Today, national consumer organization Food & Water Watch announced a new program to scrutinize the largely unchallenged claims that market-based schemes like pollution trading, water markets, privatization and commodification of common resources will help reduce pollution and manage our water resources.

Media Statement: “The 6th World Water Forum this week, despite lagging attendance and Sarkozy reneging on his promise to attend, has still been an opportunity for multinational water corporations to solidify their plans to further privatize nature at Rio+20. Thanks to Canada’s successful effort to weaken language in the forum’s ministerial document regarding the human right to water, and as demonstrated by the banking industry’s plans to integrate water trading into futures markets and to create derivative water-based financial instruments, the privatization of water has accelerated dramatically, creating a setback for right to water as resolved by the UN.

Media Statement: “Yesterday’s ministerial statement, while shrouded in happy language about the right to water, was a step backwards for water justice and the UN process that has begun to enforce the human right to water. The forum document, like the forum itself, is illegitimate because it presupposes that corporations have a role in democratic water governance, when nothing could be further from the truth. The entire event itself is a corporate tradeshow parading as a multilateral forum.

Press Release: New technology enabling the extraction of large quantities of oil and natural gas from shale and other rock formations could drive the world’s next great global water crisis unless it is banned, according to a new report released today by national consumer group Food & Water Watch.

Media Statement: “Today’s announcement by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that part of the United States’ requirement for mandatory country of origin labeling of food is a violation of international trade law illustrates, once again, that the WTO does not want U.S. consumers to know where their food comes from.”

The Council of Canadians and Food and Water Watch commend the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation for stressing the urgent need for States to increase funding for the fulfillment of the human right to water and sanitation with a particular emphasis on meeting obligations towards the most marginalized and un-served segments of society in her report to the General Assembly today.

Media Statement: We are saddened and appalled by the recent death of Metin Lokumcu, who was killed in Hopa, Turkey during what was supposed to be a peaceful protest of the country’s agriculture and water policies. Lokumcu, a fifty-four year old schoolteacher and a member of the OPD, Freedom and Solidarity Party, had been attempting to mediate confrontations between protestors and police. He will be remembered as a beloved and well-respected activist, committed to protecting the rights of all citizens of Turkey to safe, affordable water.


Media Statement: “As water justice advocates from five continents gathered together in Dakar, Senegal for the World Social Forum, we applaud Bolivian President Evo Morales’ proposed United Nations declaration to block the sale of public water service to private companies.”

Washington, D.C. – Decades of trade rules that dismantled or restructured farm safety net programs in the European Union have displaced sustainable, domestic feed grain production and escalated dangerous soy imports from Latin America—and helped turn European farms into polluting factory farms while driving down food quality and expanding waistlines, according to a new report from consumer organization Food & Water Watch.