Bottled water is an offense against energy independence, the global environment and personal finances. But, bad as it is, it is only a part of much bigger and more insidious trend -- the worldwide move by major corporations to privatize what was once seen as a common good, plain old H2O. Those companies have realized what most people, particularly in this country, blessed as it is by relatively plentiful supply, have not: fresh water is now a scarce resource. Already the provision of water is the third biggest global industry, behind oil and power generation. It's a $400 billion industry. Water is well on the way to becoming the most precious commodity in the world.
But a new documentary, screening on the Vineyard this weekend as part of the Martha's Vineyard International Film Festival, brings that realization crashing home. See Flow: For Love Of Water, and you may never drink bottled water again. Nor, in the hope of those who made it, will you view the actions of some of our largest corporations and institutions, from Nestle and Coca Cola to the World Bank in the same benign way.
For what the movie depicts is an enormous global tragedy, overlain and in some cases worsened by corporate greed. Poor are often left with unsafe alternatives. Flow is largely the work of Irena Salina, a French-born documentary maker, resident in New York for the past 14 years...
But what she found is indeed mind-blowing. First off, there is the straightforward matter of demand. It has grown to the point where many of the great rivers of the world -- among them Africa's Nile, China's Yellow River, the Colorado in the USA, no longer even reach the sea. All their water is sucked out first. In an effort to supply more water, huge numbers of dams have been built, most of them by the World Bank. In the 20th century somewhere between 40 and 80 million people were displaced and in many cases dispossessed. But dams interrupt the natural water cycle. Organic matter builds up behind them, rots and releases huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Yet despite these efforts, many people still go without clean water. Each day, according to the film, something like 30,000 people, disproportionately young children, die from water-borne disease. Her interviews show how misplaced much of the effort is. The World Bank and its associated entity, the World Water Council, keep delivering macro-projects when what communities in poor countries really need is micro-projects -- local level solutions. The suggestion is that these international efforts to provide clean water to the destitute have been hijacked by vested interests. In places from Bolivia -- which was forced by the World Bank to privatize if it was to get development money from the World Bank -- to India -- where a giant corporation is planning to sell water to people at 10 times its previous cost -- she finds compelling evidence of the malign influence of the corporate sector.
No case study is more powerful than the one from South Africa, where private investment did indeed bring piped water to poor townspeople. But they could only access it by the use of pre-paid water cards, at higher cost than many could afford. Part of the contract was that previously free taps were removed, so the poor were forced to free but unsafe alternatives.
