Maude Barlow, former Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly described the denial of access to clean water as the “most violated human right”. It’s worth recalling some alarming statistics:

1.2 billion people have no access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion without access to proper sanitation. Every 8 seconds a child dies from preventable water-borne disease. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by the lack of water and sanitation.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not explicitly recognize the human right to water and sanitation, allowing member states to reject the existence of these fundamental rights. Climate change has already increased water scarcity and contamination.

Sadly, many states, most notably the U.S., Canada, Australia and England, oppose a resolution establishing the right to water and sanitation. Divisions between the North and South are growing.

There are two timely campaigns underway to influence decision-makers. One is to pressure the US Ambassador to the UN to support the resolution. The other is for elected officials from around the world to sign an Open Statement to the Member States of the UN General Assembly.

What about the planet’s plants and animals? Will winning the right to water also guarantee that the globe’s ecosystems also receive their fair share of water? No, but this resolution would be an important first step in a radical rethinking of how we manage our water commons around the globe. Currently, Bolivia is building similar support for a resolution on the rights of mother earth.

The world’s thirsty people will drink deeply. Act now and stay tuned!

There is broad agreement that official climate negotiations are controlled by the large CO2 emitters and that they will not lead us out of this mess. Hats off to Bolivian President Evo Morales and the thousands of people gathered in Cochabamba for being serious about solving climate change. The challenges we face beg for unprecedented solutions. To get to 350 parts per million (or less), our compromised economic and political systems must be turned on their heads.

So what’s the plan? We seem to have a long term idea – build a citizen’s led sustainable economy based on ecological, human rights and commons principles. But what’s the short and medium-term roadmap?

 It’s going to require one hell of a big global public works program. Where is the money going to coming from and who is going to spend it where? I hope that the Cochabamba conversations answer some of these practical questions.

I hate the dirty money. There is overwhelming evidence that all the so-called international development organizations out there – the World Bank, regional development banks, USAID, etc. – have been giant contributors to climate change through financing and technical support to agro-industry, extractive industries and more. Governments – even Evo Morales’ – are inextricably tied into the extractive industry development model. It’s more than a little ironic that such a fossil fuel dependent country should be hosting this alternative climate summit.

So I’m more than a little confused about how we can move out of this mess. Climate change programs such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) are rife with pitfalls. A slippery slope to be sure. But is there room within deeply flawed programs to finance massive watershed restoration and support community and indigenous-led models of agro-forestry and agro-ecology? Climate repair will likely be more incremental and messier than any of us would like.

These are age-old debates about how change happens – but perhaps the fire breathing down on our communities adds new urgency to their resolution. Do civil society organizations and popular governments have the grassroots power to oblige large financial institutions to start repaying the climate debt? Are these institutions so fundamentally toxic that we engage with them at our peril? Is it delusory to think that we can hold these rotten institutions accountable? I’m not sure we can simply sidestep them.

Similarly, how can we use national and international laws and regulations to curb destructive state and corporate behavior? The truth of the matter is that so much climate damage could be reversed by simply enforcing existing environmental and human rights laws and regulations. We must make best use of compromised legal frameworks and build them stronger.

My desire for the Cochabamba deliberations is that in the process of forging alternative paths to climate and water justice, we go toe to toe with the perverse programs set up within the UNFCC. My desire is that we fight over climate change monies even within the arenas we abhor. My desire is that we wade into the warming swamp we inhabit and come out muddy with some practical ways forward.

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } The battle to preserve water as a common good takes to the Roman streets this weekend. As you turn on the tap to hydrate yourself today, please take a moment to think of our Italian colleagues fighting to overturn the water-privatizing Ronchi law.

World Water Day is Monday, March 22. Not doing anything this weekend? Do as the Romans do … Head to Rome and protect water for all.

Here’s a really illuminating exchange between two European water activists, one Italian and one German about the implications of the Italian fight for European water.

Dear friends,

Just a brief update on what’s happing in Italy.

At the end of November 2009, a new law was approved. Its name is Ronchi Law: the starting point of water services privatization was launched!

Since that many things have been done: hundreds of public meetings have been organized all around the Country to let people now what is the real meaning of privatizing water services.

Local authorities have been involved and have been playing a strategic role: this new law “steals” proficiencies that belong to decentralized authorities; for this reason five Regions have excepted to know if this law goes against on what’s forseen in the Italian Constitutional Chart.

Tens of Local Authorities have changed their Statues inserting an article that says that “Water is a common good and a human right; water services have no economic value”. This is a strong political message sent to Rome.

A great mobilization is affecting the whole Boot: in each Region grassroots committees have joined the proposal of the Italian Forum of Water Movements: having a great demonstration on March the 20th in Rome to defend water as a common.

During these three last months the Forum with many other civil society organizations has also decided to set up a referendum to annul Ronchi law. This will be launched during the demonstration: this means that a collecting signatures campaign will involve all the country in the next months: 500,000 signatures are needed to ask for the referendum.

We’ve decided to react strongly to this irresponsible privatization policy.

You’re all invited to support us also by coming to Rome on the 20th of March.

Thanks in advance for your support,

Raffaella Cavallo

Ce.V.I. – Centro di Volontariato Internazionale per la cooperazione allo sviluppo

Via Torino 77 – Paderno – 33100 UDINE – Tel ++39-0432-548.886 – Fax ++39-0432-486.929

sito web: www.cevi.coop

 

Dear Rafaella,

Many thanks for this update concerning hopeful countermovements to cancel Ronchi law.

What will happen in Italy, could influence also the future European water policy. A successful outcome of the referendum would send an important signal to Brussels, so that the European Commission hopefully will not ignore that a liberalisation and privatisation of the water sector will provoke strong and public opposition.

Spreading information I hope that large crowds of people come together in Rome joining the demands of the Italian Forum of Water Movements in order to protect water as a common.

All best wishes for the referendum.
Jutta Schuetz, ATTAC Germany

 Avanti Italia! Thank you for preserving the water commons!

How does improved water stewardship fit into cooling our planet? How well were the water-climate connections made at the recent Copenhagen climate deliberations?

If you’re like me, you only have a lay person’s understanding of ecology — and global politics for that matter. But I do know that the CO2 reduction and carbon sequestration strategies that were batted around in Denmark — caring for our tropical forests and fighting desertification, for example — will require copious amounts of clean water.

I’m beginning to understand that the role of water in climate change is not just about adapting to accelerating droughts and floods. Michal Kravcik, a Slovakian hydrologist, said in advance of the Copenhagen talks, “My expectations are simple: to incorporate in the Copenhagen Protocol a mechanism of using water for recovery of the climate … Until now, all initiatives for solution of climatic changes addressed only CO2 reduction.”

Kravcik’s research suggests that climate stabilization requires ensuring that water is absorbed into the earth. That absorption and the subsequent recharging of groundwater reserves prevent landscapes from drying and allows water to play its essential temperature regulating role.

What’s becoming clearer is that getting to 350 parts per million of CO2 isn’t a goal that can be separated from careful and massive restoration of the earth’s ailing watersheds. And that means grappling with thorny questions of who owns and manages the water commons we all share — a conversation unfortunately not had in Copenhagen.

That’s not a complaint; it makes a lot of sense that emissions reduction was the principal focus at the climate talks — and truly tragic that nations didn’t take the necessary bold steps in that area. But water can’t remain at the edges of the climate change conversation for very long. It’s too important in bringing the earth’s climate back into balance.

Our well-intentioned attempts at climate correction are hurt by not looking at the full picture. Salvation is much more likely when our remedial steps are based on basic principles of ecology — inter-relationship — not of a separate air or water or forest program.

What steps can we take towards this kind of holistic climate stabilization strategy that revives water’s critical role in cooling our planet? Here are a few ideas:

1. Build on Michal Kravcik’s research. It makes intuitive sense that water facilitates cooling — just think about how you pour it into your car’s radiators. But let’s nail down water’s specific contribution to global cooling and come up with a specific goal for hydrological health akin to the very tangible and campaignable 350 parts per million for the atmosphere.
2. This hydrological health relies on health watersheds. Maude Barlow proposes declaring not only water, but watersheds themselves, as a commons so that property rights don’t disrupt ecosystem health and a water-cooled planet.
3. We must push back on climate change mitigation strategies that don’t depart from a holistic understanding of the planet’s interdependent ecosystems. For example, it makes little sense to have a forest-based, carbon sequestration strategy unless the water necessary for forest life is safeguarded.
4. Ensuring that adequate water is available to cool the earth means to take a hard look at current water use and abuse. We must hold industry, agriculture, and sprawling municipalities to sustainable water use and non-contamination standards — which in many cases simply means implementing existing water and public health regulations.
5. Our actions ought to be informed by a worldview that holds that water is a commons shared equally by all of humanity and all of nature. That means proposing models of water ownership and management compatible with a commons concept — heavy on citizen engagement and light on privatization.

Water activists like Anil Naidoo of the Blue Planet Project were vocal in Copenhagen to make the climate-water link. The Copenhagen Water and Climate Justice Statement’s call to action begins, “Whereas the abuse, over extraction and displacement of water to promote a global economy based on unlimited growth and corporate power is a major cause of climate change … “

There’s clearly much to be learned from the Copenhagen experience. It’s a good time to step back and hammer out new strategies. Managing water as a commons is one important step towards a healthy climate. It not only makes a lot of ecologic sense, but may make good movement-building sense as well. Imagine the power of the climate change movement when it includes not only associations of water engineers — but 6 billion water consumers worldwide.

With their natural resources pilfered, have Native American gambling casinos been payback, a further pillage (described as Tonto’s revenge during the Abramoff scandal) or perhaps both? It’s a relevant debate for today’s global warming talks.

During these next weeks of climate change deliberations in Copenhagen, environmental service payment programs will be hammered out. What’s the fair way to compensate indigenous and rural communities for their help in stabilizing the climate?

Colonialism and its more modern forms haven’t been kind to rural communities and their ecosystems. Globalization and its trade agreements have tended to steamroll rural enterprises by flinging borders open to imports and making it cheap and easy to extract natural resources. With their land and water gobbled up by energy, mineral, and crop exports, communities’ forests and soils have been transformed into hydroelectric dams, gold, and baby carrots.

Insult to injury, this style of extractive economic development is half-justified by scapegoating communities for being lousy stewards of their natural resources, recklessly planting cornfields on steep hillsides or burning too much wood for cooking fuel. The logic has been something like: Instead of (unsustainably) growing food for family consumption, why don’t small farmers and foresters cash in on their comparative advantage and grow melons for export or lease land to transnational timber companies?

Yet, consensus is building that the gains for poor countries following this development advice have been few or negative. Enter a new revenue scheme.

The global market in climate change mitigation is still taking shape through environmental service payment instruments like carbon sequestration credits and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). Rural communities are on the cusp of being injected with a volume of foreign investment the likes of which may even surpass centuries of coffee plantations and gold mines. These new products not only offset the carbon footprint of “the man’s” unsustainable economic growth but will purportedly chip away at rural poverty. Many hurting communities — bleeding from failed farms, broken ecosystems, and their youth migrating away to find work — are happy to take the man’s dollars to plant his eucalyptus trees on their farmland.

As with the Native Americans, however, communities may have to exchange traditional livelihoods — which had put feeding the family and the nation first — for something different, say working for a wage at a biofuel or carbon sequestration plantation. Impulses towards autonomy and food sovereignty may dissipate as communities become integrated into this new economy.

It’s ugly out there at the climate change trough. On the opening day of the Copenhagen talks, a $10 billion mitigation fund was described on the BBC by a developing country representative as only “enough to buy our children coffins.” In preparation for the rain of resources, some countries are legislating how monies will flow — from environmental ministry to forest agency to landowners. Intra-governmental agency competition for the monies is shaping up to be fierce. Corruption antennae are perking up to detect misuse of funds as has been alleged in Mexico’s Pro Arbol reforestation program, in which up to 90 percent of planted trees have died and politically connected landowners received large cash payments.

International environmental NGOs are presenting their programs as Chambers of Commerce and their equivalents draw up their plans. It seems likely that farm and forest organizations will be secondary beneficiaries after governmental, business, and non-governmental intermediaries decide what activities and which actors qualify for the funding. Grassroots associations and their federations of producers may get scraps — but not before the big boys get fat.

With power relations so askew, it’s not hard to spin pessimistic scenarios. Is there a winning scenario for rural communities and the planet?

Conservation research is showing that forests tended by the rural communities that live in and around them are the best stewards out there. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we can provide rural communities with the technical and financial tools they need to better preserve both their livelihoods and ecosystems.

The Holy Grail of climate payments would be for communities to be compensated for what they do and know already — more or less. More or less because technological improvements are clearly essential — ones that many farm and forest organizations would be eager to make if they had the support. And there’s no reason to count only on the forest sector for its contribution, even as environmental payment programs tend to be singularly focused there. Greening the food system through agroecology can make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change — advances that land reform networks like the Via Campesina seek to make the norm. Inter-mixing annual crops with trees, reforesting watersheds, supporting local markets, reducing tillage, and backing off of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers all diminish agriculture’s substantial contribution to global warming. It is now widely believed that the same technologies that are good for climate stabilization are good for the soil.

Likewise, managing our water as a permanent commons and public trust — an ethos and practice ensuring that water is both everyone’s and no one’s — will have a profoundly stabilizing impact on the climate. Maude Barlow proposes declaring not only water, but watersheds themselves, as a commons.

These more thoughtful resource management systems and sustainable technologies might have been standard if the green revolution, water privatization, and U.S. Farm Bills hadn’t provided such perverse incentives and turned things so topsy-turvy. The repair will be costly — a perfect use of climate stabilization monies. Importantly, ensuring stable land tenure, including collective titles, is part of the repair. Implementing land reform programs, often discarded as failed and anachronistic, is a friend to climate stabilization.

This then is one scenario in which climate change monies could help rural producers and the environment — without pushing farming families off the land or turning them into forest rangers for a transnational plantation.

Are the chances good that climate change mitigation programs will play out this way? Despite the long odds, I’ll roll the dice, hoping against hope that rural communities can negotiate a fair deal here. It’s the winning ticket for rural communities and the planet.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

The stories are frequently troubling; they should be. Climate change is increasing the ferocity of floods and droughts and water privatization is drowning our democracy. But it’s about time that the seamy details of how we manage our water commons see the light of day.

Water binds all of nature and humanity together in one big (ailing) ecosystem. In our current legal framework, future generations of people and animals have a hard time getting their voices heard about how water ought to be managed with their health in mind. Public debates are essential. Recent articles on the public health disaster of sewage overflows, California’s new water barons and India’s watershed stewards inspire both head-banging outrage and hopeful ways forward.

In a recent National Geographic article, Crispino Lobo of India’s Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), describes basic steps for watershed repair. By constructing earthen dams and terraces, the WOTR slows down water so that it can be absorbed into the ground rather than wash away the soil. “Where the rain runs, we make it walk; where it walks, we make it crawl,” explained Mr. Lobo. Groundwater reserves are in turn recharged. “If people are able to improve the land and restore the soil,” Lobo said. “You start seeing a change in how they see themselves.” Imagine the ecological and spiritual remediation, not to mention staggering economic savings, when our watershed management practices follow this simple advice.

WOTR’s work is a close cousin to that of Ragendra Singh’s, the rain gatherer, whose work is described in a series of case studies entitled “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge,” complied by Our Water Commons. The Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) movement with which Ragendra works in arid Rajasthan has constructed similar dirt dams called johads and reforested the Alwar region’s watersheds. Just as ecology would predict, flow has returned to the area’s rivers as has groundwater availability.

While the WOTR and TBS stories might make water justice dreams seem within reach, Yasha Levine in “How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply” tells a story that gets your bile boiling.

In the mid 90s, behind closed doors, a large underground water reservoir in Southern California was privatized and became the property of the Kern County Water Bank, an entity principally owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick. These Beverly Hills “farmers” also own Paramount Agribusiness and Fiji Water. Levine reports that, “After the water enters the Kern County Water Bank, it stops being a public resource that could otherwise be used to irrigate crops locally.” Lubricating the deal was the creation of a “paper water” trading mechanism, a crazy Wall Street-type instrument not terribly different than those economy-exploding mortgage-backed securities. Paper water ended up fueling much of Southern California’s subdivision sprawl, satisfying developers’ requirements to show that water existed to satisfy families’ household needs even when there was no real water.

The Resnicks have added to their nearly $2 billion fortune by selling publicly subsidized water back to the state at a very nice profit. This modern-day horror story is beautifully reported in Levine’s story as well as in Public Citizen’s report, “Water Heist: How Corporations Are Cashing in on California’s Water.” The Public Citizen report recommends sensible steps to manage California’s water as a commons: return the Kern County Water Bank to public control, banish the paper water market, and ensure citizen oversight of water and irrigation districts.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Brooklyn’s sewage system overflows after just a 20 minute rain. Urbanization and sprawl has paved over so much earth that rain waters end up in storm sewers rather than reabsorbed in the ground. The old infrastructure just can’t handle the surge. Nationwide, such overflows result in 20 million water-borne illnesses each year. So tells an excellent report in the New York Times, “Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways,” part of a series entitled “Toxic Waters: A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators’ response.”

New York City officials warn that it would cost $58 billion to upgrade systems so that the overflows won’t occur, raising water and sewage bills by 80 percent. Is that a scare tactic, a feeble excuse not to do the work or just uncreative officials talking? I have no reason to believe the price tag is incorrect, but what about some imagination here with pro-environmental and pro-equity payment schemes? The article provides some terrific ideas — requiring parking lots to include landscaped areas to absorb rainwater and requiring porous pavement on sidewalks and roads. And what about pursuing more conventional policies like raising development taxes to pay for water infrastructure and cross-subsidizing rates?

Hmm, create jobs through upgrading antiquated sewer systems, restore ailing watersheds through the patient and persistent participation of community organizations or privatize our most precious liquid in a convoluted wealth-fare scandal? Readers are smart; I say bring the stories on and watch citizens water activism grow like a well-watered corn stalk. The grassroots revolt reclaiming our water commons won’t be far behind.

I was in El Salvador to meet with government officials and non-governmental representatives to mull policies to manage water as a commons — ensuring that future generations (humans, plants, and animals) will receive their fair share of water through sensible, sustainable management. Earlier this year, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) — the left political party that emerged from El Salvador’s civil war — took office. Expectations are high that he will correct centuries of policies of plunder that have impoverished El Salvador’s hillsides and El Salvador’s poor.

We discussed a lot of possibilities, but not how to stop a lethal wall of mud. That’s not a job one can do alone. Might any support be forthcoming from the upcoming climate discussions in Copenhagen?

Although the outcome of those deliberations is far from certain, best case scenarios would cap emissions and establish payment mechanisms for poor countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Those small but critical global steps mean that the onus for managing water in a time of global warming falls squarely back on the Salvadorans. What measures can the Funes administration and similar developing nations take immediately?

The principles of the water commons are useful guidelines here.

Think watersheds. Mudslides are aggravated by the inability of the soil to absorb water all along the watershed. Never has it been clearer how interconnected we are upstream and down. The implications of caring for a watershed holistically and as a commons are, however, quite daunting. El Salvador’s 262 municipalities share dozens of watersheds including some with Guatemala and Honduras. A comprehensive management plan that brings together often squabbling ministries and municipalities won’t be easy to forge and implement. But it is essential.

A happy slope will likely stay put. Managing water as a common means giving consideration to all the plants and animals that live from the water supply. This isn’t a matter of generosity of spirit, but pragmatic ecology. If the slope is managed to retain its vegetative cover and keep its soil intact, there will be less mud. It may sound obvious but is not frequently practiced: Water agencies must work side by side with environmental agencies which must work together with municipal governments towards environmental improvements.

Seek the cheapest solution first — public participation. When it comes to financing water infrastructure, whether flood control or potable water pipes, policymakers get nervous about the numbers. It’s certainly true that this work can be very expensive. However, in places like Tamil Nadu, India, facilitating planning between water users and water engineers has resulted in low-cost solutions that build on communities’ expertise and labor. Of course these new public spaces — watershed councils for example — carry their own challenges. Are they legally recognized bodies with decision-making authority? Is the water public? If it’s private, communities may have little influence over shareholders’ plans. By inviting citizen stewardship of a public resource, President Funes has the chance to show communities that they have real say-so about how to manage their natural resources.

Join a worldwide call for a high-level U.N. sponsored summit on water. Upcoming climate change discussions will focus on emissions reduction. They should. They must. But the planet also needs a debate at the highest level about how to manage our shared water commons — the realm in which climate change will hit hardest. Mirroring the creeping trend towards water privatization, the private World Water Council has taken to convening recent World Water Forums. However, the Council’s many directors working for for-profit water companies undermine the World Water Forum’s legitimacy. Countries can come together in Copenhagen to ask the U.N. to convene a non-partisan global water forum as a follow up to the climate debate.

The good news is that we are getting smarter. We have to. Needing to effectively face disasters like the Salvadoran mudslide don’t give us a whole lot of choice. Opportunities to act smarter are also on the rise. Progressive governments like El Salvador’s and Bolivia’s are willing to rethink water policy and institutional arrangements. They offer an extraordinary real-time laboratory to get water commons management right.

Rain clouds gathering on the horizon, fanned by climate change, hurry this work along. There is no more urgent time than now to encourage the flourishing of progressive water management experiments.

The commons is what we share together. From parks and clean water to scientific knowledge, and the Internet, some things are no one’s private property. They exist for everyone’s benefit, and must be protected for future generations.

Instead of proposing turning over our shared natural resources — water and forests for example — to corporations, Dr. Ostrom has reached an opposite conclusion. Ordinary citizens can effectively govern their commons and ensure their health for generations to come.

Is that simple insight worth a Nobel Prize? I think so. There’s a lot of wrong-headed posturing out there — free marketers insist that the market is the only entity that can, for example, manage water — even as corporations pollute it with impunity (see the Oct. 12 NY Times cover story). But that doesn’t sit so well with folks who recognize water as a right and commons belonging to all people and all of nature. From Asia to Latin America, Ostrom’s research shows us examples of citizens groups successfully governing their abundance.

Dr. Ostrom has had her detractors. When we hear the term “commons,” many of us remember Garret Hardin’s 1968 article in Science magazine, “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He describes a chaotic, unmanaged commons that ends with people pillaging each other and the environment. That happens in some cases, Dr. Ostrom would concur. But that’s a very limited view. While some commons are poorly managed, many thrive. Communities come together to prune their forests and shovel debris out of irrigation ditches, frequently in collaboration with government entities.

Today, Dr. Ostrom has good company. On the Commons, a U.S.-based non profit, publishes a frequent blog on “commons heroes” — people and organizations proving that shared resources can stay public and be governed by ordinary folk. Maude Barlow on Our Water Commons, describes 10 visionary principles to manage water as a commons.

“A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner,” writes David Bollier of On the Commons, “with a special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability. It is a social form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture, but which is now on the rise.”

The prize to Dr. Ostrom couldn’t be more timely. With the biggest commons of them all — our atmosphere — painfully mismanaged, Ostrom’s work injects hope that we can and must manage our commons better. The commons is rising.

As part of my own personal battle against under-estimating people, I’m betting that a little bit of knowledge would go a long way. That high environmental cost, which goes hand-in-hand with a slew of human rights abuses, is not likely to sit right, even if that average U.S. citizen is comfortably sipping a Coke in an air-conditioned movie theatre.

Come for a quick tour south of the border to hear how the Mexican countryside is being flooded to beef up our grid and what Mexican grassroots organizations are doing about it.

Food Sovereignty: Resistance and a Way Forward

Just outside of the city of Oaxaca, I spoke with Aldo Gonzalez from the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO). He hikes through the Sierra Juarez mountains, lending a hand to Zapotec communities seeking food sovereignty. On the one hand, UNOSJO keeps an eye out for companies preying on community resources — whether water, timber, minerals, or seed stock. On the other hand, UNOSJO promotes agroecological techniques so that families can grow adequate food for themselves and, in good years, sell surplus in local markets — core principles of food soverignty. This work, supported by organizations like Grassroots International includes educating children and adults in simple terms about globalization’s threats, the policy environment that has eroded public support to small farmers and Zapotec techniques and traditions of caring for shared water and land.

Aldo was one of the first indigenous leaders in Mexico to detect genetically modified corn strains in Oaxacan fields and has seen firsthand that dams, mining, and maize don’t mix. “For the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, corn is our blood, our bones, our flesh,” Aldo told me. “Without corn, we’re nothing. For that reason, we’re not going to let anyone disfigure corn, rob it of its essence, kill it or kill us.” UNOSJO shares a vision of autonomy and sovereignty with other indigenous and peasant allies across Mesoamerica with which they work.

Increasing Pressures on Land and Territory

Judging by statistics of foreign direct investment, Mexico is “enjoying” a development boom. But who’s really enjoying it? The country’s economic upsurge is powered largely by transnational industries scouring indigenous lands for mineral-rich veins, windy plains and floodable canyons.

At a recent water and energy strategy forum, Professor Octavio Rosas Landa from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), presented a global energy matrix to farmers seeking to learn about how worldwide energy consumption threatens their natural resources.

Among the 400 farmers in attendance was Carlos Beas, director of UCIZONI, a Grassroots International partner working on food sovereignty in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. “What do we get in exchange for our resources?” asked Beas, before he then answered his own question. “We get divisions in our community. Some people agree to rent their land. Other people are dead set against it. The government and the companies divide up our communities and where we used to live well together, now we fight.”

Raising questions about the costs of green energy, UCIZONI’s members are particularly concerned about the environmental impacts of a giant wind farm on Oaxaca’s isthmus that has ruined thousands of acres of agricultural land and provides meager revenue. As poor farmers that lead low-consumption lives, UCIZONI’s members have no need for increased energy supply.

Recent Mexican governments have chosen to put their increasingly imported eggs in the megaproject basket. Megaprojects are grand infrastructure works that tie Mexico into the global economy, offering a way for Mexico to sell its abundant natural resources and cheap labor around the world.

What broke Mexico’s farming economy and opened the floodgates to megaprojects?

Dammed if they Do…

Professor Landa described policies of the 80s and 90s, when Mexico was instructed by foreign creditors to abide by neo-liberalism and structural adjustment principles. The formula, replicated throughout the developing world, demanded that Mexico shrink its public spending by — among other budget cuts — removing public support for small farmers. Mexican farming families split apart when fathers and sisters had to leave for Mexican cities and the U.S. to seek work. In the 1990s, when constitutional reform broke up collective lands and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) inundated Mexican markets with cheap U.S. corn, even more farmers went broke.

The water and energy forum was held outdoors in a rural schoolyard in Aguacaliente, Guerrero, a community slated to disappear under the rising waters of the proposed La Parota dam. In the eyes of the visitors that had come from afar to the forum to sleep on the hard ground under tarps in a schoolyard, Aguacaliente’s community organization, the Council of Communities Opposed to the Parota Dam (CECOP) is an inspiration that has thus far held back construction of the dam.

What’s behind the interest in Mexico’s land and minerals? You can probably imagine that it has a lot to do with Mexico’s insatiable neighbor to the north. In the U.S., economics and the environmental movement have prevailed to tear dams down rather than construct new ones. “In the U.S., if they propose a dam, there’s nearly a riot,” Professor Landa explained. “Energy companies look elsewhere to fulfill U.S. energy demand. Free Trade agreements like NAFTA make that a lot easier.” Poor and marginalized indigenous communities with little political power are easy targets for the world’s energy and mineral companies.

Participants at the forum learned that Mexico exports 40 percent of the energy that it produces. Through megaprojects like the Plan Puebla Panama, the U.S. seeks to fulfill its energy appetite through a regionalized electrical grid, stretching from Mexico to Colombia,. Sarah Gonzales, a leader of a growing resistance to high electrical rates, traveled 25 hours from Campeche to participate in the form. She said, “I came here upset about my high energy rates. Now that I see that we’re giving up our lands and minerals to produce energy for the U.S., I’m more convinced than ever that our fight is right. We’re proposing a fair “social” price for electricity.” Increasingly, communities are withholding electrical payments to the Federal Electrical Commission and using the funds to maintain their local energy infrastructure.

Sarah’s grassroots organizing doesn’t come without high costs. For her activism work, she went into hiding shortly after the forum and at the time of this writing is under arrest. Similarly, in the state of Oaxaca, Father Martin Octavio Garcia Ortiz, a priest whose parish sits close to the San Jose El Progreso mine has been slandered in the press of subversively applying liberation theology to his pastoral work. That is, he has encouraged parishioners to ask hard questions of a Canadian mining company, La Fortuna, whose mining operation threatens parishioners’ clean water. Dozens of farmers were recently beaten and arrested for peacefully blocking the entrance to the mine.

Insult to injury to the indigenous communities pillaged for their resources is that they are often criminalized for what might be considered upstanding citizen watchdog work. There was a strong feeling at the forum that the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexico’s police and military forces for its war on drugs contributes to the repression and violence.

A Hopeful Alliance Emerges

Given the necessity to work together towards food sovereignty, Oaxacan organizations like UNOSJO and Ser Mixe, a powerful land rights organization serving Oaxaca’s Mixe peoples, have recently joined hands to form a “Collective for Defense of Territorial Rights.”  There was a hopeful tenor to their inaugural forum entitled, “Weaving Resistance”. People saw silver linings in the negative economic trends, which they feel acutely as family members working in the U.S. send home less help. What will happen to these megaprojects if worldwide consumer demand drops? People expressed interest in working closely with United States’ organizations like Grassroots International to pressure the Obama administration to put international human rights ahead of “the American way of life.”

A participant in the “Weaving Resistance” forum shared, “When we take on a transnational mining company, they call us crazy. But what else are we going to do? It’s a big sacrifice; we have less time for our kids and work. So we can’t leave here without beginning to construct our own government, without proposing laws that protect us and our natural resources, and without working together to grow food for our families.”

It’s a long process of resistance and proposal to create a global economic system in which a hot summer day in New York doesn’t mean that another nameless Mexican village is targeted for inundation. Bless the Mexican activists in their resource rights struggles that place tortillas above air conditioners.

With the impacts of climate change, water waste, contamination and mismanagement driving us ever closer to the edge of a cliff, ensuring clean and plentiful water to both people and nature becomes tougher and more urgent each day.

A seemingly broad variety of water management strategies was on display at the recent 5th World Water Forum (WWF), confusing participants with repackaged policy prescriptions and technological bells and whistles. Helping people sift the wheat from the chaff were discussions of how to manage water as a commons. A concise set of principles offered a hopeful roadmap forward.

The forum was a mostly a civil affair, with the notable exception of riot police beating and arresting 25 Turks protesting peacefully for public water and against its privatization. The World Water Forum is convened by the World Water Council, a private, French non-profit whose board of governors tilts towards water privateers.

It’s a tri-annual gathering of government delegations, non- governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry representatives. This year’s forum featured an advocacy effort by 16 governments to move the forum to the U.N., presumably a more accountable institution. The well-subscribed conference – over 30,000 people in attendance – seemed to demonstrate not only that the water crisis is a shared concern, but also, perhaps, the amount of money that can be made trading this precious fluid.

Ragendra Singh, known as the rain gatherer, travelled across Asia to Istanbul to address the forum. Working in arid Rajastan, India, Singh has revived the ecology of the Arwari river.  After twenty years of building small earthen dams called johads and a movement called Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), flow has returned to the once dry river, providing sustenance to thousands of families.

At a WWF trade booth, a representative of a Spanish desalination company projected powerpoint slides of barges docked off of coastal cities, sucking in sea water and spitting out drinking water (and brine and emissions). Over 60,000,000 people worldwide drink desalinated water.

The two faces of water technology couldn’t have been more dissimilar – and more caricatured. Ragendra Singh wore a long white kurta. He spoke of water with a mystical air, a grin spreading beneath his ragged beard. The balding desalination representative wore a grey suit, his lips pursed in grim determination to sell his technology.

Both men claim to fulfill a critical need in getting water to those who need it – in Ragendra’s case, beneficiaries include plants and animals. Is there a way for the average person, simply looking to get water to the thirsty, to evaluate if these two strategies are complementary or contradictory?

As a society, we can perhaps agree – although I may be overly optimistic here – that in its broadest conception, water is a commons, a public good to be shared by all and passed on undiminished in quality and quantity to future generations.

In a session on this topic entitled, “Water Commons: Global Experiences in Progressive Water Management”,  Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the UN General Assembly, suggested ten principles to manage water for the common good. The principles seem a useful measuring stick against which strategies of water management can be assessed. Does the strategy do the following?

1) Affirm water as a commons, that is, it belongs to everyone and no one, passed onto future generations in sufficient volume and quality;
2) Ensure the earth and all of its ecosystems rights to water for their survival – indeed it is on those ecosystems that human life depends;
3) Conserve water as society’s first course of action (enforced by law), including suggesting drastic changes to industrial and agricultural practices;
4) Treat watersheds – the source of water – as a common as well and not simply the water itself;
5) Encourage local, community management while legally binding communities to respect upstream and downstream neighbors’ rights;
6) Forge or affirm trans-boundary agreements that respect water sovereignty for both communities and nations;
7) Provide water as a basic principle of justice, not as an act of charity;
8) Ensure public delivery and fair pricing of water;
9) Promote enshrining the right to water in nation-state constitutions, laws and a UN covenant;
10) Employ innovative legal tools to protect water and manage water as a commons, including through public and community trusts.

International panelists presenting alongside Ms. Barlow, all participants in the Peoples Water Forum, a pro-public water gathering of international activists, described how these principles are applied in their communities. 

Oscar Olivera spoke of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s post-Bechtel experiments with community-managed water utilities to deliver quality water at fair prices. Adriana Marquisio, president of Uruguay’s water workers union, proposed a “new public” in which the public utility for which she works measures efficiency not just in terms of liters per second but via public oversight of how water fees and system improvements are spent, public health indicators, partnerships with communities and ecological health of groundwater reserves. New learning occurs through relationships with sister utilities called public-public partnerships.

V. Suresh of the Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies in Chennai, India, described training programs for water engineers and local governments to work more effectively with the communities they serve. His colleague, Vibhu Maher, manager of Tamil Nadu’s water supply, offered insight into alternative pricing schemes that are not based on “full cost recovery” – a mantra of the World Water Forum to saddle users with all system costs – but progressive cross subsidization, much in the way public schools are financed. Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch narrated the failures of water privatization in the U.S. and Mr. Singh himself described how water governance can be organized around natural hydrological contours.

What do these water commons cases and principles reveal about how to think about desalination and rain water gathering?

Rain water gathering for aquifer recharge seems to fit well within the commons paradigm, although begs for measures to avoid monopolization or commodification of harvested water. A persistent challenge is scaling up this kind of ecological recovery to densely populated urban areas and delivering the water efficiently.

Desalination clearly has a number of hurdles to cross. Who owns the water that comes out of the desalination plant, who receives it and at what cost? What are the impacts on ocean ecology? Does the technique – which presents oceans as a limitless water supply -offer any incentive for conservation? These hurdles may not be insurmountable, but water advocates ought to insist that concerns be answered.

Managing water as a commons requires trial and error experimentation. Some of these local experiments are featured in a new publication launched at the forum, entitled “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge.” With principles in hand, the creative work of building just and sustainable water management systems becomes just a bit easier.