Water is the new oil. With rising populations, shrinking
freshwater aquifers and climate changes reducing snowmelt,
the demand for this vital resource is ever rising and
supply is ever more costly. THE PRICE OF THIRST sets out
the situation around the world today and takes a scary look
at the future.
Karen Piper is a geography professor and professor in post-
colonial studies in English at the University of Missouri.
Over a decade she travelled and studied to research the
supply of water. Her first photo is of bored men in suits
from the multinational water industry at the Global Water
Forum in France, 2012. Like it or not, she says, water is a
commodity. A handful of big firms control most of the
world's privatised sources of water. Firms moving in on the
money include banking, chemical, mining and soft drink
firms. While Beijing Enterprises Water's customers all live
in China, the French firms Suez and Veolia (in the US they
are named US Filter and United Water) mainly serve
customers outside France, in a re-enactment of colonialism
called development economics. A grassroots organisation
FAME, dedicated to water supply without profit, is ignored
and unfunded by contrast.
The author looks behind the corporate missions, histories
and profits first. Anyone involved in a charity might want
to look away. She says that historically, the World Bank
lent money to dam and water projects only on the basis of
industry and irrigation, seeing no benefit to arise from a
healthier population. Attitudes have progressed, but dams
still displace millions of people worldwide; in the 1990s
the World Bank began forcing private ownership as a
requirement for any dams which it funded. Thus water became
a corporate profit-maker instead of a civic good.
Ironically, says Piper, imposing a cost, such as a coin-
operated water fountain in a slum, has forced poor people
to drink from streams and caused cholera outbreaks.
Like oil, water that has collected underground for millions
of years has been pumped up for use and is rapidly becoming
depleted in USA, India and other highly populated
countries. One percent of the planet's water is surface
freshwater, which today is heavily polluted by urban and
industrial sprawl, or abstracted for irrigation. Glaciers,
the above ground storage, are melting faster than imagined
and the vast rivers they feed - particularly in India and
Asia - will soon run dry. Fracking, a tense subject as
water is used to force gas fuel from shale rock, can lead
to permanent contamination of aquifers. Corporations,
however, see a shortage as a reason to regulate supply and
charge higher prices, while oil and gas firms are buying up
water rights.
Karen Piper visited towns which are not on the tourist map,
such as Huron, California, whose water has been abstracted
and polluted by other interests. Once a thriving food
production area, parts of the San Joaquin Valley are a
dustbowl with uncovered landfills, so trash and toxic dust
blow on the wind. Native Tachi and Yokut peoples have no
fish or food. However, the Kern Water Bank catches
rainwater in a marsh, which seeps underground and can later
be pumped out and sold to Los Angeles.
Visiting Chile, Piper found that this was the first country
to privatise 100% of its water, which ended up in the hands
of General Pinochet's friends. They later sold their
control to Spain which sold it to Italy. Farmers are
refused access to supplies by hydro-electric power firms;
indigenous peoples are forced off land. Damming major
rivers here will affect the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
which balances the Earth's temperature.
Highly populous South Africa is one of the most water
scarce countries in the world. Piper tells us that in 2004
more than 10 million people there had their water supply
cut off by the firm Suez, while others were unable to
afford the seven dollar fee to be connected. She found a
shanty town completely unsanitary. Beer is said to be
cheaper than water. Giving money to the government or NGOs
won't help, as they have no control over water supply.
In India, near the headwaters of the Ganges, glaciers are
melting fast and flooding eroded, deforested mountainside;
most recently in July 2013 when hundreds died. Piper spoke
to activists who had protected trees - and biodiversity -
and protested against huge dams for decades. Small, local
dams are a much better idea according to them. Down in
Delhi, disease and mosquitoes follow the filthy water left
to many residents while others pay for treated, piped
supplies. Allegations of corruption followed the World
Bank's entry to fund the developing market. China is vying
to divert one major river to its own use.
The Egyptian revolution against President Mubarak in 2011
was partially a revolution of the thirsty, says Piper;
indeed our television screens show a wider Middle East
which generally looks incapable of supporting life. Piper
found there appears to be no urban planning in densely
populated Cairo, and wealthy districts get services while
poor ones get none. Wikileaks released CIA cables stating
in 2010 that 30 - 40 million people here were living in
inconceivable poverty. In Iraq, Piper found that Veolia and
Suez had been handed many billions of dollars to run the
water system, which is still in disrepair; the World Health
Organisation finds that the country now has five percent
the quantity of drinkable water that it did before the Iraq
War. As Iraqis are unlikely to pay for their water, she
claims American taxpayers are funding it.
As water becomes more expensive, so will food. Growing and
preparing food uses enormous quantities of water. Desert
countries which export food, such as oranges or dates, thus
export water. As water costs more for farmers, so food
becomes scarce and pricey and countries turn to imports.
Piper suggests that an international accord should be
reached whereby contracts found to be corrupt, ruinous or
racist should be abandoned without financial disaster. At
present, she says the opposite appears to be the case.
Corporate executives explained to her that they had to act
corruptly to gain contracts, because other firms were
corrupt and they would get the contracts.
This well-researched book THE PRICE OF THIRST will be of
interest to students in many disciplines, including
economics, geology, ecology, hydrology, journalism,
international affairs and politics. Other interested people
will be well advised to dip in to the book and see what
catches their attention. As one activist told Karen Piper,
young people will revolt against the system eventually, but
for now, plant trees. THE PRICE OF THIRST is social
unrest, migration and disease. Whether or not you agree
with the author's findings, the issue is not going to
disappear so I recommend this book for concerned readers
everywhere.
“There's Money in Thirst,” reads a headline in the New York
Times. The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water,
heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market
value, he says in a promotional video, so “we're all aware
that it has a price.” But for those who have no access to
clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is
thirst.
This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts
us through in The Price of Thirst—one where thirst is
political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and
more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by
multinational corporations.
In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the
hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when
global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water
supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay:
border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of
the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid
of water rights in South Africa.
The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to
privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a
crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in
water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges
are being diverted to a private water treatment plant,
fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated
privatization of water resources destroyed by our military
is further destabilizing the volatile region.
And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are
quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water
banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban
sprawl and private towns.
The product of seven years of investigation across six
continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews
with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change
specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture
of a world out of balance, with the distance between the
haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the
coming crisis moving ever closer.
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