Replies

"That poor countries have, sadly, dirty or inadequate water is hardly an indictment of private provision of water."

It is. The people who have the money get the water. Others don't and have to eke it out from elsewhere. Remember the story about the Ghanians who were walking to the university to get water because they could not afford to get it from the "private distribution system?"

Recently Canadians were outraged when their water company ( a global corporation) decided to fill tankers with their water and ship it elsewhere because the market for it was better elsewhere. The corporations will take water out of an environment and move it somewhere to be sold because of "better profit". The Canadian people were outraged by this, because it was water originially captured by a municipal water system and was never designed to support a burgeoning human population elsewhere. Same thing happened in Gurneville, CA. Company wanted to harvest water from the river to sell elsehwere. Low water flows would have killed fish and harmed the tourism industry there. But the water corp didn't care about any of that because that wasn't the business THEY were in. In Virginia, customers of a formerly municipal water district had complaints about service and water quality. In our constitutional government they should be allowed to petition the governing board and effect changes, recalling board members if their decisions are particularly egregious. However, because the water is now "owned" by a global corporation, the rules no longer apply. They have ignored the peoples concern. The people can go to the NAFTA tribunal and complain, but do you know the names of the people on the tribunal? Do you have any power to remove them if they make decisions that are detrimental to your community? NO! Global corporations care only about acheiving global monopolies on products and nothing about sovereignty or local populations. This has been proved in a host of ways.

It wasn't until the UN started a drive to "commoditize" water that this effort to capture the global water supplies caught hold. Until then, and rightly so and best for humans, water was a public good.

The people who want to commoditize water and argue for it in the name of "free markets" are naive in thinking there will be a "free market" once ownership is taken out of the hands of the community. Those groups that buy into the UNs idea that water MUST be commoditized, are buying into an effort to reduce the world population by reducing the amount of water available to individuals, and to give complete control over all of us serfs to global bodies who do not care a whit for our concerns or needs.

It is. The people who have the money get the water. Others don't and have to eke it out from elsewhere. Remember the story about the Ghanians who were walking to the university to get water because they could not afford to get it from the "private distribution system?"

Ugh. Again, these worries don't have to do with privitization, per se. They have to do with subsidizing access by the poor. A public utility might charge something for water, and so exclude some people. This could be prevented through subsidy, one form of which would be a requirement to provide free water to the poor. Even publicly owned water suppliers, in other words, will not necessarily provide universal and free access. There will have to some redistributive measures to ensure such access. There's nothing importantly different about private providers in this respect, either.

Just look at food (again). Food is privately owned and distributed, and the cost to the very poor is subsidized. People do not starve in the U.S. or other food producing countries. And food is much more abundant, cheaper, and in significantly greater quality than would be true if the government farmed and ran food distribution centers. But this talk of access for the poor is just a non sequitur, and one we've already discussed at that. And now you're just repeating yourself from earlier messages anyway.

Again, some people are desperately poor-- that is precisely why water is not being sold to them. (And one must be very poor not to have enough money in one's budget for _water_.) The same goes for medicine, food, and anything else without active subsidies. But this problem hasn't raised calls for countries to socialize their food production and distribution. (Indeed, it is precisely private ownership of food producing farms that has given rise to the spectacular advances in food production in my lifetime. Similar increases in supply can be expected from private provision of water.) What has been demanded are redistributive measures, such as free provision of farming technology, food price subsidies, loan forgiveness, etc. There's just no reason to think that food and water are different in this respect.