Reports: World

Within the past decade, technological advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” have enabled the oil and gas industry to extract large quantities of oil and natural gas from shale formations in the United States. However, the practice has proven controversial. Pollution from modern drilling and fracking has caused widespread environ- mental and public health problems and created serious, long-term risks to underground water resources.

In this report, Food & Water Watch reviews the risks and costs of shale development that have been demonstrated in the United States, including economic costs that run counter to industry-backed claims about the economic benefits of the practice.

Food & Water Watch then summarizes the state of shale development in six selected countries: France, Bulgaria, Poland, South Africa, China and Argentina.

Veolia Environnement est la plus grande entreprise de services d’eau au monde. Depuis son siège social à Paris, Veo- lia opère sous de nombreux noms, dans des dizaines de pays et à travers des centaines de filiales. Mais en dépit de sa présence internationale, le cœur de ses activités reste en France.

Europe: Globalization has fundamentally changed agriculture across Europe. The idyllic image of small farms with sustainable agriculture has been replaced with agricultural cogs producing food-ingredient inputs for international industrial agri-businesses. The pork chops and chickens on European tables begin their lives far away on soybean plantations in Latin America, where the feed for European livestock is harvested.

Des débordements d’égout à Milwaukee, Wisconsin, à l’eau potable contaminée à Gloucester, dans l’état du Massachusetts, de sérieux problèmes ont affecté les municipalités à travers les Etats-Unis suite au transfert de la gestion de leur eau ou égouts vers United Water, succursale de Suez Environnement.


Its waters covering about 50 square miles5 of Kenya‚ Great Rift Valley, Lake Naivasha (elevation 6,200 feet) sits 62 miles north of Nairobi. Communities thrived along its shores 4,000 years ago. The Maasai people long grazed their cattle along the lake‚ banks.6

In case after case around the world, water has been turned into a profit making commodity , preventing access to the most essential element on Earth. Pollution, corporate takeover, and the mismanagement of water ecosystems have resulted in dire water poverty and scarcity in many parts of the world.

Rising oil prices, energy security, and global warming concerns have all contributed to the current hype over biofuels. With both prices and demand for oil likely to continue to increase, biofuels are being presented as the way to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to develop homegrown energy that reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

The poorest people of Johannesburg, South Africa saw some measure of hope with a judicial reaffirmation of the country‚ constitutional right to water in April 2008. However, their fight is not over because the powers arrayed against them have appealed the decision.

The 2008 global food crisis is compromising the survival of 860 million undernourished people and threatens to push a hundred million people into extreme poverty, erasing all of the gains made in eradicating poverty in the last decade.  Record high prices have put food out of reach for the poorest people in the developing world, many of whom already spend more than half their income on food.  Growing food insecurity is undermining tenuous civil stability in at least 33 countries, about one sixth of United Nations member countrie

saac Ouma Oloo remembers Kenya‚ Lake Naivasha as pristine, its waters sustaining an abundance of fish, lions, antelope, leopards, hippopotamuses, and birds. But the overuse of water and environmental destruction caused by international flower farms have fouled his memories of the lake. ‚Kenya is a begging country,” he says. ‚Were among the top on the list of the World Food Programme for food donations, even though in Naivasha we have a freshwater lake that would allow us to grow food to feed ourselves. Yet we take this water to grow flowers and then ship them 5,000 miles to Europe so that people can say I love you, darling and then throw them away three days later. To me that is an immoral act.”