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CounterPunch
September
20, 2002
Greenwashing
the Marketplace:
A
Thirst for Water Profits
by
KYRSTAL KYER
President Bush, the United Nations, and the rest
of the "Washington consensus" are offering up privatization
as a solution to water and sanitation problems around the world,
as well as inside the United States. Worldwide, an estimated
1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and
2.4 billion people don't have adequate sanitation services according
to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
At home, the problem lays more with state
and federal budgets, and spending priorities emphasizing military
spending while cutting social services, including water.
The nation's largest aquifer, the Ogallala,
is being mined so fast by Midwestern farmers that a significant
amount of the groundwater supply may actually dry up by 2010.
The Ogallala contains 3.3 billion acre-feet of water, which
would take an estimated 6,000 years to refill if it were drained
completely.
Corporations claim that they can sustainably
manage precious natural resources--like freshwater--better than
public utilities currently do. Yet water companies face the
same trouble as oil companies--quick unsustainable profits,
fraud, accounting scandals, and collapse--leaving employees,
consumers, and taxpayers to clean up the mess. One-time oil
giant Enron may soon meet its water match in France's Vivendi.
Corporations, no matter the product,
all make decisions based on the same bottom line--short-term
profits. Before Aguas de Illimani won the water concession contract
for the cities of La Paz and El Alta, Bolivia in 1997, a series
of water tariffs were put in place. When the private company
took over operations, the company improved productivity, efficiency
and service (via employee layoffs). Yet the higher water rates
led people to decrease their consumption. As a result, the World
Bank noted earlier this year that Aguas de Illimani is actually
considering waging a campaign to increase per capita water use!
So much for environmentally responsible corporations.
Are corporations responsible enough for
us to trust them to take care of an infinitely complex and ever-changing
environment we call home? To answer that question, we need
only look at their aggregate track record:
Rapid deforestation in the Amazon, spurred
by over consumption of cattle and wood products by the world's
richest countries, is effecting global climate change leading
to habitat loss, species extinctions, and destruction of cultures
and knowledge systems. According to NASA, 230,000 square miles
or 16.5% of the Brazilian Amazon has been affected by deforestation.
All of the world's rainforests will vanish before the end of
the 21st century if the rate of deforestation remains unchanged.
Oil and automobile corporations have
marketed the consumption of fossil fuels that led to global
warming, and a rise in sea levels of up to three feet in the
next 100 years. Sea rise is already threatening the very existence
of dozens of small island nations, such as Maldives, Barbados,
Kiribati and Tuvalu.
The agricultural revolution of the 20th
century produced synthetic petroleum-based chemicals--pesticides,
insecticides, and herbicides--that lead us all down a path
of slow suicide. These powerful chemicals are double-edged swords.
Modern agricultural science and technology have increased food
production worldwide--thus feeding billions of hungry people.
Those same miracle chemicals are also powerfully destructive--poisoning
society's invisible farm workers and flaunted consumers, while
disrupting ecosystems, inadvertently endangering species of
birds, amphibians, and insects, while causing devastating crop
infestations. Thus, even as these man-made chemicals solved
one problem, food shortage, they created many more.
Why have corporations faired so poorly
in managing natural resources? The answer lies in their interests:
making money, not protecting the public interest. The marketplace
has its own set of rules for playing the corporate game, but
they aren't the same rules for survival of life on earth. In
some instances, especially when it comes to human necessities
such as water, the rules are mutually exclusive.
If companies don't operate efficiently--squeezing
the most money out of a product or resource--then their competition
will step in and drive them out of business. So, how can we
expect private corporations to sustainably manage our common
resources, given the market's rules? We can't.
The quotation, "the significant
problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking
we were at when we created them," has been attributed to
Albert Einstein. It doesn't take a genius to see the truth in
that statement. For the most part, corporations as a whole--capitalism
itself--has worked at steadily destroying our environment,
and that continues to be the case today, as we depend on fossil
fuels and chemicals designed to kill living organisms to fuel
our economy and feed us. We shouldn't look to them for solutions.
Improving public utilities is preferable
to privatizing common property resources like water, forests,
fisheries, and our atmosphere.
Private companies, through the rules
of their markets, and by their extensive track record, are not
capable of responsibly managing the planet, let alone their
own accounting systems. If we allow them to do so, we can be
certain that they will not be held responsible for any negative
results--nor will they be willing or able to repair or replace
the fragile ecosystems, natural resources, and human lives destroyed
by their profit motives.
Capitalism as a natural unfolding of
human history is a powerful myth. If we buy it, then we are
inclined to agree that privatization of publicly owned enterprises
is the best (and only) way to take care of our environment (i.e.
ourselves). And if some of us believe that, we're all doomed
to a worse fate then the Enrons, WorldComs, and Tycos of the
world.
Krystal Kyer
has a Master of Environmental Studies degree, and is a highly
unpaid activist writer. She can be reached at: klynn@nocharge.zzn.com
2002 Copyright 2002 Krystal Kyer
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
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by Alexander
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