Common problems

The World Water Forum is underway, and even with Canada's general luck in having massive amounts of water resources, the problems being discussed are ones we've heard about at home:

Forum organizers set a goal of improving water access for the poor, but similar efforts in the past have failed: The poor pay vastly more money to private corporations for their water today than they did when the first global water forum was held in Marrakech, Morocco, in 1997...

Outright privatization of water systems has been a hard sell since 2000, when thousands of Bolivians protested rate increases in water contracts held by foreign companies. The protests left seven demonstrators dead and forced the companies out of the country.

Bottled water, on the other hand, has earned good profits and little attention.

"It's in some way sort of a stealth privatization," said Janet Larsen, research director for the Earth Policy Institute, a private, Washington-based environmental group. Larsen noted that the biggest gains in bottled water sales are in developing countries...

"The problem isn't that these (bottling) companies are supplying people" with water, Bogantes said. "The question is, given that governments have invested millions of dollars in water treatment and distribution systems, why aren't they supplying the population?"

We should be all too familiar with Canada's situations where bottled water was (or is) used in large quantities as a substitute for a functioning public water supply. And it surely can't be a positive example for developing countries that even as a country as wealthy - in money and in available water - as Canada hasn't made clean water a high enough priority to make it available to all of our citizens.