March 05, 2009

Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water Justice

Democracy Now's amy Goodman interviews water expert Maude Barlow.

"Maude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. Barlow is author of the new book Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water."

She was interviewed on February 27th, read a full transcript of this exchange here. Some quotes:

..."the story is that as we have polluted the world’s surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or from wilderness or from watersheds, and we’re moving it where we want it to be, so to water great big huge cities that then dump it into the ocean, so don’t return it to the watershed, or we pave over what’s called water-retentive lands, so we don’t have the hydrologic cycle able to fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We’re doing something called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States in terms of these exports. You don’t have enough water to do that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Who exports it?

MAUDE BARLOW: Mainly large agribusiness. It’s mainly commodities and corporations that are using this water to—well, to export massive amounts of commodities. But all sorts of countries are doing it. Australia is doing it. Australia has hit the water wall, and Australia is absolutely in crisis right now, and they’re still exporting massive amounts of water through virtual water, say, to China. So the question is here—we all learned somewhere back in school that it’s impossible for us to interrupt the hydrologic cycle. Not true. The hydrologic cycle has been dramatically and deeply affected by our abuse and displacement of water, and we have to stop...

if there was lots of water, it wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if some people were getting wealthy from it. But the fact is that we’re living in a world of diminishing water. We’re actually running out. And I want to make this point so clearly. And you’re running out in many parts of the United States. It is not cyclical drought. This is the end of water in many parts of the world unless we change our behavior.

Just last week, there was a report that came out that Lake Mead may not be gone in thirteen years. This is the big backup system for Las Vegas and Phoenix. I mean, this is crisis. The Colorado is in “catastrophic decline”—is the language of one scientist. And we need to understand this isn’t cyclical drought.

So if this is the case—and it is the case—then the question of who owns and controls water is very important. Who’s going to make the decisions around water in the future? And what’s happened is that a large number corporations are now coming into the field saying—actually creating a kind of global water cartel, just as there exists for energy now, a cartel of corporations that control every drop of oil before it’s taken out of the ground. These companies are either big utility companies, like Veolia and Suez from Europe, that run municipal water systems on a for-profit system, and in the third world they deny millions of people who can’t afford it.

There’s also bottled water. We put something like fifty billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those bottles everywhere..."