How have international trade agreements complicated the water issue? | Big Think

How have international trade agreements complicated the water issue?

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Governments cede control of their water because of acts like NAFTA and the WTO, says Barlow.

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Maude Barlow:

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly. She also chairs the board of Washington-based Food and Water Watch and is a Councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council. Maude is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates as well as many awards, including the 2005 Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”), and the 2008 Canadian Environment Award. She is also the best selling author or co-author of 16 books, including the recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Maude Barlow: It is because of trade agreements that I got into this issue in the first place. Water was placed in NAFTA, and actually the trade agreement that came before NAFTA, which is the first free trade agreement in the world, the Canada-US free trade agreement, signed in 1989 and then morphed into NAFTA, then that became the model for the WTO (The World Trade Organization).

Water is in NAFTA and the WTO as a good. What that means is that once you start exporting your water for commercial purposes, you basically lose control of it. It is not your water anymore and you have to continue to export it.

It is also in NAFTA as an investment. I will give you a very specific example. As an investment where a corporation can sue the government of another NAFTA country if that country changes its rules. I will give you an example. In Northern Alberta there is something called the Tar Sands. The Tar Sands is a huge area, the size of New Brunswick. It is huge, maybe twice the size of Florida. That has this sticky, thick, heavy oil in this thing called bitumen. It is like tar. Just think of tar and sand.

We are producing oil from this because we are running out of conventional oil all over North America and this is for export to the United States and Canada. To get at that oil, we have to use massive amounts of water and these corporations and they steamblast this bitumen and this heavy oil, and then the oil warms up and comes to the surface and then they are able to take it off--but it is destroying the water table in Northern Alberta including the Athabasca watershed basin and the Peace River and so on.

It is a really big issue there.

People are now talking about oil or water. So, you can’t have both.

But many of the corporations that are operating this are American. So, if the Alberta government were to say, well, we are going to restrict the amount of water you can use because you are destroying this water, or you have to use gray water, or you are just going to have to find ways to conserve, or we are going to cut you off, [then] Canadian companies operating there would have to abide by it. American corporations under NAFTA could sue for financial compensation because the government changed the rules of engagement. So these corporations get huge rights under NAFTA and under the World Trade Organization agreements to basically constrain what governments can--not just in water, but in many, many other areas.

They also are trying to get at the World Trade Organization water included in the general agreement on trade and services, so that if a city like Atlanta brought in privatization, brought in Suez, the big water company from France, and then changes its mind because it turns out it is a mistake, if they had water as a service in the WTO, you wouldn't be able to do that. You just can't undo a privatization once it has happened.

These trade agreements support private over public in all sorts of ways. And they force governments to look to a private answer when a public answer might be preferable.

Between the World Bank and the World Trade Organization forcing privatization of water services, it is a real struggle for us, just to continue to fight for the basic right to water. Again, we are not saying people shouldn't pay for water after a certain level of use--but not to a transnational corporation when that water is just going to go to pay overseas investors and outrageous salaries of the CEOs.

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