The Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency reports that, “The growing commercialisation of water – and the widespread influence of the bottling industry worldwide – is triggering a rising demand for the legal classification of one of the basic necessities of life as a human right.”
Maude Barlow tells IPS that, “We definitely need a covenant or [an international] treaty on the right to water so as to establish once and for all that no one on earth must be denied water because of inability to pay. We’ve got to protect water as a human right. We need at the United Nations more than a human rights remedy. We need a plan of action for the General Assembly.”
Barlow also says, “We are winning some of the battle against the global corporate theft of water. In my country [Canada], for instance, 53 municipalities – some of them big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto – have banned bottled water, and bottled water sales have dropped dramatically globally. We are also successfully introducing the notion of water as a public trust in political jurisdictions, asserting public control over this vital resource. (However) we must be ever vigilant as new forms of private control are being advanced: water markets, water banking, water trading and water speculation are all on the horizon for those who would impose a market model of water allocation in the place of the public trust doctrine.”
The article notes, “Barlow said the Council of Canadians, which she heads, is working with countries promoting the right to water constitutionally. A plebiscite in Uruguay, held four years ago, led to a referendum resulting in a constitutional amendment singling out water as both a human right and a public service to be delivered on a not-for-profit basis. A Colombian group called Ecofundo has collected two million signatures in a plebiscite that is expected to lead to a referendum on the right to water.”
“The U.N. says that close to 880 million people – mostly in the developing world – lack adequate access to clean water. By 2030, close to 4 billion people could be living in areas suffering severe water stress, mostly in South Asia and China.”
The full article is at http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=48077.
