While the demand for water is on the rise, the supply is shrinking, due to water-intensive agriculture, population growth, industrial pollution, breakneck development and other ecological threats that are depleting freshwater supplies. More than one billion people lack access to clean drinking water.

Global policies from institutions such as the World Bank has left little room for local decisions and instead forced privatization of water on poor countries. The World Bank and other dominant international finance institutions condition their loans on privatization and increased cost recovery –– which often requires charging water fees from those who make below $2 per day. The result in numerous countries has been disastrous –– less access to water for the poor, extremely high tariffs, and poor water quality.

At the same time, to ensure maximum profits, these companies are lobbying to weaken water quality standards, and are promoting new legal and institutional mechanisms to ensure their control over this vital natural resource.

Communities in Latin America are on the forefront of that struggle.

For information in Spanish on communities and organizations defending public water, check out La Red Vida.

ARGENTINA

Argentina has suffered for more than a decade as the global guinea pig for water privatization experiments. Read more...

BOLIVIA

The movements to defend water, and all natural resources and public services, have grown stronger and bolder in recent years. Read more...

CHILE

Chile has been one of the most privatization-friendly countries in Latin America, privatizing its water sector in the 1990s. However with the new center-left president, Michelle Bachelet, elected in January 2006, there may be a shift in the neo-liberal policies of corporate privatization that have governed Chile and allowed the distribution of its most precious resource to be governed by corporations for private profit. Read more...

ECUADOR

In October 2000, just months after the people of Bolivia threw Bechtel out of Cochabamba, this very same company signed a water privatization contract in Guayaquil, Ecuador a city of almost 2 million inhabitants. After years of poor service, water cut-offs, flooding, and unsafe drinking water the residents of Guayaquil are organizing to demand their human rights – which include the right to clean and affordable water. Read more...
 

EL SALVADOR

El Salvador is a country in crisis. Ninety percent of the country’s natural water is contaminated, and half the population drinks untreated water. The people of El Salvador struggle to attend to the most basic necessities while the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank continue pushing the disastrous recipes of privatization. Read more...

HONDURAS

In August 2003 thousands of protestors demonstrated against the policies imposed by the IMF, including water privatization policies. Read more...

MEXICO

Communities across the country are organizing to defend their rivers, streams, aquifers and lakes. Read more...

NICARAGUA

In Nicaragua, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) are promoting a policy of water privatization which will make it more difficult for citizens to obtain clean water at affordable rates. Read more...

PERU

Reforms for the public water sector designed by the international financial institutions in the 1990s caused water utilities to collapse into economic crisis. Now these same institutions argue that the public water sector has failed and privatization is the answer. Read more...

PUERTO RICO

Puerto Rico too often serves as the guinea pig for corporate privatization policies. Read more...

URUGUAY

Uruguay has gained a landmark victory in the struggle to defend water as a public good and a human right. Read more...