World Water Day

Readers:

We bring you another Blog posting from a member of The Democracy Center staff, our assistant director, Marcela Olivera. Marcela is a long-time activist on water issues, not just in Bolivia, but globally. Marcela notes the significance of World Water Day, which is today.

Jim

World Water Day

“We are all water” -Yoko Ono

Today is World Water Day.

Last week, the Fourth World Water Forum was inaugurated in Mexico City. It ends today on World Water Day. A whole host of government officials, presidents and representatives of multinational water companies and international financial institutions have gathered to discuss the increasingly pressing issue of water around the world. But it was not only the officials who were present. Activists from all over the world met in a parallel forum to oppose the vision of water as a commodity-- as something to be bought and sold-- and to offer the alternative vision that everyone has a basic right to water.

At the official forum, Bolivia has been represented by the newly appointed Water Minister, Abel Mamani. He was previously the president of the FEJUVE (Federation of Neighborhood Boards) of El Alto—the group responsible for organizing the Second Water War in Bolivia in January 2005 that challenged the multinational company, Aguas de Illimani’s contract to privatize El Alto’s water system. Mamani, perhaps better than anyone, knows what it is like to live under privatization of a community’s water system.

Last year, FEJUVE used civil disobedience as their tool for action. Mamani was one of thousands of community members in El Alto who refused to pay his water bill and therefore lost all access to water services for several months. Now, the story has taken a 180 degree turn, putting Mamani as the main representative of the state.

In Mexico, the Bolivian delegation has proposed to withdraw water from all free trade agreements and firmly opposes any agreement that does not acknowledge that water is a human right. The difference between Mamani and the other high-level officials that are meeting at the Forum is fundamental: Mamani speaks from experience. He has lived the reality. He is trying now to bring policy together with the reality he knows in order to develop a plan that considers the impact of water services for everyone, not just a select few. If officials from the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank (IBD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) formulated their policies with the assumption that they, themselves, were to live under those policies, and suffer their consequences, things would be quite different.

Today is World Water Day and while it is being celebrated all around the world, in Cochabamba, Bolivia it is passing largely unnoticed. Here, the wars over water have not ended; the public company who took over from Bechtel when it left still confronts the million dollar question: how do you supply water to those who need it the most without extending a hand to privatization?

Check out more about World Water Day at its official web site here.

The official World Water Forum has laid out its goals here, on the website of the World Water Council, the body that organizes the Water Forums every three years.

Written by Marcela Olivera