For the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, Inka Dewitz wrote this text, published on their website:
Water privatisation: thirst for profit.
Access to clean water has been recognised as a human right since 2010. Nevertheless, this vital resource is increasingly becoming the focus of private corporations. They pump groundwater and spring water and sell it profitably in bottles with brand labels – often at many times the price of tap water.
In 2024, 2.2 billion people worldwide lacked safe drinking water, 3.4 billion lacked sanitation facilities, and 1.7 billion lacked the ability to wash their hands.
Since 2010, the market for bottled water has grown by more than 70 per cent. Annual sales currently exceed 300 billion euros. Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo dominate the global market. In the United States, their market share exceeds 70 per cent. Bottled water is significantly more expensive than tap water. This particularly affects low-income households: people who have no tap water or only tap water that is undrinkable have to bear above-average expenses. According to estimates, less than half of global spending on bottled water would be enough to provide hundreds of millions of people with long-term access to clean tap water.
Large corporations often secure privileged access to water sources through long-term contracts, which is denied to local populations. One example is the Puy-de-Dôme department in France, where the municipality of Volvic is located. After the region experienced a drought in May 2023, the authorities restricted water use. However, the withdrawal bans did not apply to the mineral water company Volvic, a subsidiary of the food giant Danone, which was allowed to continue supplying its bottling plant with groundwater. Danone made a profit of 881 million euros in the same year and paid out 1.2 billion euros in dividends.
Danone with Volvic, Nestlé with San Pellegrino: with their brands, large corporations dominate a rapidly growing market that has turned water into a commodity.
According to the United Nations, the privatisation of water is hindering necessary progress towards Sustainable Development Goal SDG 6 – universal access to safe drinking water. Every year, up to 3 billion people experience water shortages for at least one month.
In Germany, too, the water supply is coming under increasing pressure due to rising demand and the climate crisis. The spring of 2025 was one of the driest in this country since weather records began. Nationwide, around one-fifth of the normal amount of rain fell in March, with the north and north-east particularly affected by drought. A new study shows that 201 out of 401 districts are now extracting more groundwater than can be replenished by precipitation. Nevertheless, multinational corporations continue to pump large quantities of groundwater. In many regions, this private use conflicts with the public interest. In Treuchtlingen, Franconia, Aldi Nord is drilling local wells, while the population has to obtain its drinking water from over 100 kilometres away – at correspondingly high costs. In Lüneburg, the Coca-Cola company has been extracting valuable deep groundwater at an extremely low price for years and marketing it as Vio water. Protests by the population have resulted in the well now being dismantled. And in the Brandenburg town of Baruth, the two large corporations Red Bull and Rauch took over the Brandenburger Urstromquelle mineral water factory in 2023, including extensive groundwater rights.
Red Bull and Rauch are permitted to use 2.5 million cubic metres: more than the average consumption of all people in a German town with 50,000 inhabitants combined. The two companies are entitled to around 92 per cent of the total annual withdrawal volume in Baruth. This leaves only 8 per cent for the population. Red Bull is currently planning to expand its production in Baruth with a new logistics centre. This is likely to further increase the company’s water consumption.
Environmental organisations and citizens’ initiatives criticise the lack of public participation and transparency: neither the town of Baruth nor the water supplier publish details of the water supply contract with Red Bull, citing trade secrets. The deal is also problematic because the millennia-old groundwater in the glacial valley, which was created by meltwater from glaciers during the last ice age, was approved for extraction on the basis of a 2006 expert report. Today, twenty years later, declining rainfall, droughts and other consequences of the climate crisis clearly show how real the threat of water scarcity is in Germany.
The Federal Environment Agency provides figures on this: it assumes that groundwater recharge in Brandenburg could decrease by up to 40 per cent by 2050.
The conflict over water use in Baruth exemplifies a key question for the future: how much water do we still have available – and who should have access to it under what circumstances when it becomes scarce? According to surveys, the German population’s stance on this issue is quite clear: one third are concerned about the water supply in view of the growing water crisis. Two thirds demand that large industrial consumers pay appropriately for the use of this vital resource.
Initiatives such as Right2Water and the Blue Community are campaigning worldwide to ensure that water is no longer treated as a commodity. They are calling for it to be protected as a public good that must be available to everyone in sufficient quantities and at an affordable price. A fair water policy in this sense requires clear political measures. Firstly, there needs to be greater transparency regarding the water consumption of corporations. Secondly, groundwater extraction must be much more strictly regulated and better adapted to natural recharge, especially in regions experiencing water stress. And thirdly, corporations must be given greater incentives to make their production more water-efficient, for example through adjusted water prices. Only comprehensive and consistently enforced protection and careful use of our groundwater reserves can secure the natural water cycle in the long term.
