Skip to content

Project Censored names ‘the World Water Forum’ a top 25 censored news story

As noted on their website, Project Censored “tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country’s major national news media.”

This year, they have highlighted ‘Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud’ as one of their top 25 stories.

As you will remember, the Council of Canadians sent our chairperson Maude Barlow, Blue Planet Project organizer Anil Naidoo, and national water campaigner Meera Karunananthan to the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey this past March.

The Project Censored report states, “High-profile civil society voices such as Maude Barlow, senior adviser on water issues to the United Nations General Assembly, are calling for this to be the last corporately held World Water Forum. ‘The security is tight, because what they’re about is promoting privatization, promoting a corporate vision of the world,’ she said, ‘and they want to pretend to the world that that’s the consensus of the world. And it isn’t.’ Barlow maintains that multinational water companies and the World Bank are not proper hosts for a World Water Forum. She proposes that it be held under the auspices of the General Assembly of the United Nations, keeping the right to clean commons in the public trust to avert a deeply inequitable situation in which water is diverted from the poor to those who can pay for it.”

Their report also includes an update from Maude Barlow. She writes, “This story matters because the growing water crisis is one of the most pressing threats of our time. But the only international body that presumes to speak for global policies and practices is one whose members are making billions as depleting water sources become market commodities and who deny water to those who cannot pay for it. It is a fundamental issue of democracy and of justice in deciding the future of policies that will affect the whole world. There was very little media from North America covering this crucial story (thank heavens for Amy Goodman!) but it did get covered in Turkey and in the global South. For more information, go to Food and Water Watch, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org, and the Blue Planet Project at http://canadians.org.”

To read the full report, please go to http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/23-activists-slam-world-water-forum-as-a-corporate-driven-fraud/.

The full list of the ‘Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010’ can be read at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/two-thousand-and-ten-book/.