Environmental issues scarcely make the top of the news unless a disaster occurs, such as Hurrican... Demands surfacing for wate
Environmental issues scarcely make the top of the news unless a disaster occurs, such as Hurricane Stan, or unless a homicide claims an activist, such as Parota Dam opponent Tomás Cruz Zamora.
But the minimal coverage belies the groundswell of interest in water issues that is building in the lead-up to the World Bank's Fourth World Water Forum set for March in Mexico City. The 16 groups that recently founded the coalition will sponsor an alternative to the event, featuring a tribunal that will bring to task three cases of water mismanagement in the hemisphere.
The main concerns of the water activists are unfair distribution of water, privatization of water services, and lack of mechanisms guaranteeing public participation in water decisions.
With the forum impending, official groups are taking a look at the issues, too. Among them, the federal Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat, its National Water Commission, the National Women's Institute and the U.N. Development Program scheduled an experts panel on Oct. 20, about gender and water.
The occasion followed on the heels of a discussion in Mexico's lower house of Congress about the strategic importance of government maintenance of the water supply as a national security issue.
Meanwhile, Danielle Mitterand, leader of the France Libertes organization and wife of former French president Francois Mitterand, has been visiting Latin American countries where citizens have been protesting the control exercised over local water by the large French water company Suez.
She has been speaking out for water as a "social good" that should be in the hands of public utilities rather than government contracts with the private sector.
The message has clear connotations for the Mexican municipalities of Aguascalientes and Saltillo, which were among the first in Latin America to contract water services, because the privatization in these cities has resulted in dubious equity in user access, as well as in higher prices.
It also resounds in the state of Guerrero in the wake of the fatal Sept. 18 shooting of Parota Dam resister Cruz Zamora, one of dozens of local residents who held a meeting that day to explain to state Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca who didn't attend that they wanted alternatives to the water privatization project being undertaken without adequate citizen input.
Parota's construction is one of more than 400 water conflicts around the country that highlight the problems of turning over water services to companies that by definition place profit above social benefits.
Official policy dating back to the presidential administration of Miguel de la Madrid has made privatization the goal of economic programs, with the upshot that some people are worse-off than ever. You see it happening with oil, with social security, with water.
The federal government's recently adopted water basin management approach that aims to achieve integrated planning, conservation and distribution for sustainable development is only paid lip service. Real participation in water decisions is still a dream. Corruption rules over available scientific methodology.
But it is not too late to exercise muscles that can control the process and ensure responsible use of natural resources by protecting public utilities or by instituting creative alternatives such as cooperatives run by water users.
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