The privatisation of water “is an absolute perversion in the name of efficiency. A lie! It is in the name of business,” said Pedro Arrojo Agudo, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the human right to drinking water and sanitation. The Mexican La Jornada reports.
Pedro Arrojo Agudo warned of the risks of the commercialisation and financialisation of water in Mexico and pointed out that there are two major challenges to access to water: the recovery of natural engineering and the democratic governance of the liquid.
Arrojo Agudo took part in the forum “The challenges of guaranteeing the human right to water and its sanitation in Tlaxcala”, organised by the civil society organisation Centro Fray Julián Garcés, Derechos Humanos y Desarrollo Local, with the participation of community representatives.
The diplomat explained:
“Nearly 2 billion people who are terribly impoverished, who live next to a river or aquifer that is contaminated, often with toxins, have no guaranteed access to drinking water, and 4 billion do not have access to basic sanitation. What a disgrace”.
He emphasised that there are two major challenges:
“The first is to make peace with our rivers, with the nature that surrounds us, to learn the message of the indigenous peoples, of the peasant communities. Otherwise, it will be impossible for humanity to progress. It is necessary to recover the natural engineering that works well with solar energy”.
“Having a healthy river on one’s doorstep”cannot be a luxury for the rich, it is a vital need for the poorest people in the most vulnerable situation; it is a democratic and human right”.
The second challenge, he said, was to promote democratic governance of the resource, “understood as a common good, accessible to all, but not appropriable or privatisable by anyone”.
Pedro Arrojo stressed:
“Water must be managed responsibly and with effort, but not through the logic of the market, but through collective and community-based thinking, leaving no one behind”.
He stated that the supply of drinking water “cannot be cut off”, which is why he proposed the creation of appropriate legal measures to prohibit this action against a family in a situation of poverty or vulnerability, “because it violates human rights”.
The UN Special Rapporteur said that the supply of water is an obligation to which all States have subscribed;
“It is not a generous option for politicians or authorities, but it is the right of the population to demand it.”
Water, he stressed, is a necessity for a dignified life, ‘not a luxury or a whim’, and it must be cared for by all. He said that the commercialisation and financialisation of water, which is a public good, ‘is not so much a problem here (in Mexico), but it will become one’. He cited that in some European countries ‘only those who can pay the most end up with it’, which is unfair, ‘it violates human rights’.
He warned:
“Financialisation is ‘the greatest of all follies’ because it involves speculating with people’s lives on the financial markets.”
During the forum, experts and communities from Tlaxcala presented the serious problem of pollution in the Alto Atoyac basin and its effects on human health. They also analysed the initiative presented in the local congress for a law on the provision of drinking water and sanitation services in the state of Tlaxcala, which, among other things, tends towards privatisation and criminalisation and does not guarantee the human right to this vital liquid. World Water Day will be celebrated next Wednesday.
