Drinking Water (27 page)
The Piedmont region of North Carolina experienced a serious drought from 2007 to 2008. During this time, a number of higher-end restaurants in the region stopped serving tap water. As a waiter patiently explained to a patron one night, “We are doing our part by serving you bottled water at cost.” He was not amused when the diner suggested the restaurant would serve its part even better if it put stones in the holding tank of its toilet. Nor was this restaurant alone. A number of New York City’s trendiest restaurants, such as Lure, Park Avalon, and Blue Fin, served bottled water instead of tap water during the city’s 2002 drought, and often not at cost. Many Atlanta restaurants did the same in its drought of 2007. So who was right, the waiter or the customer?
The more cynical, perhaps, might suggest that altruism is less important here than greed, since bottled water represents one of the highest-margin items on a restaurant menu. But let’s assume the best in our restaurateurs and their well-intentioned efforts to play their part in reducing water usage in times of drought. If their goal is to minimize water use, is serving bottled water instead of tap water worthwhile?
In terms of pure numbers, banning tap water is more symbolic than effective. Assuming a restaurant with twenty-five tables that turn over twice in an evening, an average of three diners per table, and six glasses of water per group (i.e., each diner’s glass is refilled once in addition to beer, wine, and soda), then the restaurant saves about fifty-six gallons of water. Not bad—about the water used to fill a large bathtub. But they would be better served by taking pasta off the menu (thereby saving the gallons needed to boil noodles); using disposable plates, cups, and cutlery (saving even more gallons needed for the dishwasher); or, as was brazenly suggested, putting stones in the toilet holding tank (saving gallons from flushing). A low-flush toilet would be even better, since that can save up to four gallons per flush compared to older, traditional bowls. While glasses of drinking water do add up and every little bit helps, there are other measures, both more and less obvious, that would achieve even greater savings.
This is not to say that the restaurant’s gesture is meaningless. Far from it. Beyond the diners’ feel-good glow from easy self-denial for a worthwhile cause, refusing to serve tap water can be an effective means to highlight the seriousness of the drought. This uses conspicuous consumption as a teachable moment. Their consciousness raised, diners may think twice about how they use water at home. Perhaps this will lead to taking shorter showers instead of baths, not hosing down the driveway, and modifying other personal behaviors that consume large amounts of water during times of drought. It appears the waiter and diner are both right.
H
IGH IN THE
A
NDES, THE
B
OLIVIAN CITY OF
C
OCHABAMBA
rests in a fertile valley astride the banks of the Rocha River. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. Two-thirds of its population lives below the poverty line. The simplest things can be difficult and, as in many developing countries, more than 40 percent of Cochabamba’s residents lack access to a water faucet. And even those who do get piped water cannot depend on reliable service. The poor often live in squatter settlements on the outskirts of town, relying for their drinking and domestic water supplies on private vendors. In a cruel irony, the poorest end up paying more for their water than wealthier citizens connected to the city’s water mains. Sometimes up to ten times more.
As part of a nationwide project to improve city services, the government of Bolivia launched a major privatization reform effort in the late 1990s. Guided by financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the government actively sought out private investors to manage Cochabamba’s water and sewage services. Bringing in companies to run the systems, it was widely argued, would bring multiple benefits. Private capital would improve the water supply system infrastructure and delivery. Private management would ensure greater efficiencies. And the market would ensure increased attention to customer needs.
In the end, a forty-year concession for water and wastewater services in Cochabamba was granted to a private consortium.
Headed by the giant international construction company Bechtel, the group was known as Aguas del Tunari. In the national law passed to facilitate this transaction, water was declared the property of the state, available for licensing to private companies for distribution.
Aguas del Tunari immediately set about laying new pipe, as well as digging the new reservoir and hydroelectric dam required by local politicians as part of the deal. To cover its costs, the company raised the price of water and waste services charged to consumers. Just how much the prices went up remains disputed. Some residents claimed they had to spend more than 20 percent of their household income on water alone.
What is not in dispute is that the public’s reaction was swift. Just four months after the privatization scheme commenced in 2000, protests began. These soon mushroomed into street demonstrations and violence. In the face of property damage approaching twenty million dollars, dozens of injuries, and mass unrest, the government terminated the privatization concession. The city has since taken back control over the water supply system in Cochabamba. The poorest still buy their water from vendors.
During the heady days of protest, grassroots organizations met and issued a common statement to the press. They called it the Cochabamba Declaration, and their view of the conflict was clear. Drinking water should not be a market commodity. They were fighting for a basic, inalienable entitlement. As the Declaration pronounced:
Water is a fundamental human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government, therefore, it should not be commodified, privatized or traded for commercial purposes.
In their eyes, selling the concession to Aguas del Tunari had been a fundamental breach of the government’s responsibility to safeguard the public trust.
The ringing prose from Cochabamba was a response not only to the politicians of Bolivia but to the international community, as
well. It could not have contrasted more starkly with the recommendations of water experts at the International Conference on Water and the Environment held a few years earlier in Dublin, Ireland. Known as the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development, the consensus statement had declared in 1992 that “water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.”
As the saga of McCloud suggested, Cochabamba’s conflict over who should control water was not a unique event. Similar protests have played out in Paraguay, South Africa, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Cochabamba, however, remains the best-known example and has become the rallying point for opponents of water supply privatization in developing countries. It serves as a perfect morality play. Rights versus markets. Human need versus corporate greed.
The popular recounting of Cochabamba and its fiery Declaration fit neatly into the rhetoric of the globalization debates, as does the Dublin Statement. Rights-based and market-based access to drinking water are depicted as antithetical, while arguments revolve over whether access to water should be publicly or privately managed. Indeed, much of the popular discourse over drinking water has revolved around morality tales. Venal transnational companies will commodify our water, warn antiglobalization bards, while free marketeers calmly reassure us that savior transnational companies bring cleaner water and local investment.
Each version clearly features good guys and bad guys. At their core, they raise questions over the very nature of drinking water—whether it should be treated as a basic human right or tradable commodity. And these stories have shown a striking persistence despite the fact that they’re neither particularly accurate nor helpful.
I
F THE FACILE DICHOTOMY OF RIGHTS VERSUS MARKETS AND PUBLIC
versus private obscures more than clarifies, then how should we think about this conflict? As a first step, we need to better understand the problem that everyone acknowledges they are trying to solve.
To appreciate the breadth of the drinking water problem at the global scale, we must consciously step outside our daily experience. In developed countries, we do not think much about drinking water on a daily basis. It is plentiful, safe, and easily available. Nor do we often consider the quality or quantity of drinking water. We simply turn the tap or open a bottle of water. Most of us do not know the source of our water, and do not particularly care to know. Water supply is seen as a government or corporate responsibility, not an individual concern.
In much of the world, by contrast, neither water quality nor quantity can be assumed. Over one billion people, almost exclusively in the global South, do not have access to even a basic water supply. Well over two billion people lack adequate sanitation. In sub-Saharan Africa, 62 percent of people do not even have access to a basic toilet. As a result, approximately half of the developing world’s inhabitants suffer from illnesses caused by contaminated water supplies. It is not hard to imagine the implications for lost productivity.
Though it is an inexact figure, researchers estimate that diarrheal diseases are responsible for the death of one child every eighteen seconds, 200 children an hour, 4,800 children a day. To place this in a different context, imagine the outcry to the equivalent of a classroom of children in America dying from waterborne diseases every six minutes, and an entire elementary school dying every hour. The numbers of those incapacitated by nonlethal disease are, of course, much greater. One study estimated that every dollar spent to improve sanitation creates nine dollars of economic benefit.
Because water supply infrastructure is not provided in the poorest urban areas or in many rural areas, obtaining water is regarded as an individual or domestic responsibility. In contrast to the ease of turning on a faucet, lack of infrastructure means a high labor input as someone from the household (in most cultures, a woman or a girl) must collect each day’s water, whether from a communal pond or well, a tanker, or a kiosk. Less than half of the population in Africa lives within a fifteen-minute walk of a safe drinking water source. The daily average for water gathering in 1997 across East Africa was
an hour and a half, triple the time spent three decades earlier. In India, roughly 170 million people have to walk to gather their water.
Where communal or free water sources are too far away or clearly contaminated, the poor purchase their water from street vendors or tanker trucks. These prices are always higher than the price of water from municipal supply systems, often twelve to twenty times as much, with the tragic irony of the poorest in society paying the most for their water. The resulting social and economic impacts are immense.
The time women and girls spend walking for water not only exposes them to a greater risk of assault. Carrying such heavy loads day in and out also takes a continuous toll on the body, condemning many women to lower back pain. It keeps them from attending school, from working, from helping take care of their families.
While the statistics alone are shocking, they do not tell the whole story, nor can they. Sterile numbers and photos cannot capture the hardships, the grinding necessity of devoting so much time day after day to collecting water that often makes you sick. To put a human face on the situation, consider the tale of twenty-five-year-old Aylito Binayo.
Aylito lives in the mountain village of Foro, in the southwest of Ethiopia. The height of the town has long kept it safe from malaria in the valley below and cool in the hot summers, but it makes collecting water an arduous chore. Working beside her mother, Aylito stopped going to school when she was eight years old and started carrying water. Every morning, well before the sun rises, she walks down the foot-worn path over rocks, beside cactus and thornbushes, to the Toiro River below. A fifty-minute descent. The drought has lowered the river level, and the water sits in muddy pools. When she gets there, other women are already at the river—providing water is not fit work for a man—so she must wait her turn, losing more time that she needs to spend on her other chores—growing cassava and beans with her husband, grinding grain to make flour, cooking, and taking care of her three young sons. Of all these chores, water carrying takes the most time and is the most physically demanding.
A group of Indian girls stopping to pose while carrying water
Finally taking her place in the river, she works with a plastic scoop, trying to drain water that is not muddy into her six-gallon jerry can. This is difficult because other women stirred up mud as they filled their cans. Donkeys wander in the riverbed, as well, drinking their fill and muddying the waters. Once it is finally filled, she straps the fifty-pound plastic jerry can to her back and turns back up the steep climb to the village. By the time she gets there, between the time for the trips, waiting her turn, and filling the container, she has spent at least two hours, usually more. She will repeat this three times a day, every day of the year.