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The water mandarins: turning water into global money.

Article Excerpt
About a billion people world-wide do not have access to reasonably clean water. Many of them live in the mega-cities of the developing world. While water is often readily present in abundant quantities, millions of people are embroiled in daily struggles for access to some sort of potable water. Access to water is indeed highly contested terrain, one replete with all manner of economic and political struggle and conflict. Problematic access to water has become one of the central factors causing premature death, ill health, and reduced life chances. As such, it constitutes a key global environmental problem. At the same time, water has become one of the central testing grounds for the implementation of global and national neo-liberal policies. The privatisation of water production and delivery services, particularly urban water-supply systems, has become an important arena in which global capitalist companies operate in search of economic growth and profits.

Accumulation through dispossession: privatising the commons

Water, together with other common-pool goods like genetic codes, clean air, local knowledge and the like, is rapidly becoming part of new accumulation strategies. Capitalism has, of course, always been and will continue to be a system that attempts to break down all existing barriers and to incorporate whatever it can lay its eager hands on into its own profit-seeking logic. Nature itself has long resisted full commodification, but in recent years, nature and its water have become an increasingly vital component in the relentless quest of capital for new sources for accumulation. Of course this privatisation of water does not take place in a vacuum, but involves centrally the transfer of ownership of water, infrastructure and the like from the public sector to globally organised private water companies. The new accumulation strategies through water privatisation imply 'accumulation through dispossession', in which nature's goods become integrated into global circuits of capital, local common goods are expropriated, transferred to the private sector and inserted in global money and capital flows, stock market assets and portfolio holdings. Local resource systems consequently become part of...

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