Blog Action Day 2010 - Water

When Water Becomes a Commodity

It’s that time of year again – Blog Action Day - and the good folk at blogactionday.change.org have made this year’s the topic, water.

Water’s something most of us probably take for granted. We don’t think about it much, like the air we breathe, it’s just there. But what if there was no air. We’d suffocate. And what if there was no water. We’d die. Everything would die. The blue planet would cease to be.

If you live in a water-plenty country the concept of being without water may strike you as bizarre. But when you live in an arid place, you are acutely conscious of just how precious water is.

A few years ago we had a drought here. Two winters of little of no rain meant come the summer stringent water restrictions were applied. I learned to use dishwater and bathwater to water the garden, carrying out buckets of water to precious plants and watching as much of my garden wilted and died. We kept a nervous eye on the pool – we couldn’t do much to top it up and there was a danger it could pop right out of the ground. I learned to switch off the tap when brushing my teeth and to take short, three minute showers. For someone who views the shower as a writer’s psychic phonebooth for creative ideas, I was lost.




Yet this is nothing compared to what some have to endure. In Africa people die regularly as the result of water shortages – they have to compete with animals, who have as much right to the water as humans do, they have to live with water which is frequently contaminated or inaccessible – some walking miles each day to find water. Did you know that 2.6 billion people live without a safe toilet and 884 million people, across the globe, lack access to clean water?
When people talk about Africa being a “dark continent” mired in poverty and disease, stop to consider the very real reasons why this might be the case. A lack of water and sanitation combine with other issues to create a massive crisis which undermines health, education, economic and gender equality progress.

Children, every nation’s future, are often the worst affected. 4000 die from preventable water related diseases every day making it the biggest killer of young children, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined every day. To make the point, let me put that to you another way, about 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year and 443 million school days are lost because of water and sanitation related diseases.

The issue of water is huge, and yet, because most of us take water so for granted we just don’t really stop to think of life without it. Consider this, not only do we need water in our daily personal lives to drink or bathe in, we need it to grow crops, to power industry. And more to the point, without water, we’d have practically no energy. Without energy—and therefore cars, planes, laptops, smartphones, and lighting—we wouldn’t be doing much. Human productivity as we’ve come to know it would grind to a halt. To highlight the point, did you know that your shiny new iPhone requires half a litre of water to charge? Okay, it may not seem like much, but with approximately 6.4 million active iPhones in the US, that’s 3.2 million litres to charge those alone. Or, did you know that in the in the United States alone, on just one average day, more than 500 billion litres of freshwater travel through the country’s power plants—more than twice what flows through the Nile? Or how about this - 10 litres of water go into the manufacture of a piece of A4 paper

As human civilization has progressed, so we’ve become even more dependent on water – forgetting, for the most part, that it is a finite resource.




It’s not surprising then that some of those who realised how precious water is, decided it was a highly tradable commodity. In the early to mid 2000’s, traders – hedge fund and investment managers – piled into water as a commodity set to become more precious than oil. In 2002 Fortune magazine predicted that water promised to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations. A Bloomberg report in 2006 reported that “the world's biggest investors are choosing water as the commodity that may appreciate the most in the next several decades. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 more than 2 billion people in 48 countries will be short of water.”

But did anyone stop to think what happens if you commoditize and/or privatize something which is a basic human right? The right of access to clean and affordable water becomes severely threatened. Price and availability suddenly become dependent on the vagaries of domestic and international markets. Developing countries, in which there are already water shortages, are hit with a double whammy – not only do they not have it, but to get it they will have to pay more than they can afford. It has already been shown that the privatization of water resources, promoted as a means to bring business efficiency into water service management, has instead led to reduced access for the poor around the world as prices for these essential services have risen. And so we see an increased inequality to water access, as control of water sits in the hands of huge corporations and powerful governments.

Thank goodness then that in July 2010 the UN General Assembly declared that access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights. The question is, will the UN’s declaration be enough to stop the march of commoditisation and the greed of commodity traders and their investors? Or, put another way, how much might access to this basic human right cost those who can’t afford it? Might one really hope for a true partnership and shared responsibility between all nations in alleviating water crises – given the UN have already acknowledged (in 2006) that what lies at the heart of the global water crisis is power, poverty and inequality. Same old, same old.

Until humans learn to value and respect each other, until we get past our innate greed and fear, bypass power struggles, and alleviate inequality and poverty, water will remain a very wet sort of battle ground. It will be, until then, yet another case of the haves vs. the have nots.




© Nicky Schmidt; October 2010