Water is the common good of all humankind. Access to quality water is everyone’s right.

Water is a resource that is essential to life itself and to various production processes. Although it is renewable, it is limited and its availability is irregular. Today, more than 900 million people do not have access to drinking water (including 322 million Africans and 234 million in South Asia) [2], and nearly 4 billion do not enjoy basic sanitation. Around the globe, only 3% of water is freshwater, of which just 1% is usable (the other 99% is in glaciers or in inaccessible groundwater layers). Furthermore, this water is not evenly spread across the planet. An American consumes an average of 600 liters of water each day, a Parisian 240 liters, and an African, approximately 50 liters per day.  Controlling water also means controlling people. In Palestine, Israelis living in illegal settlements use six times more water than their Palestinian counterparts. Palestinians who need more water must buy it from an Israeli company (Mekorot), which exploits the River Jordan in Palestine.  

The uses made of water also differ, according to the FAO: [3] 70% of collected water is used in agriculture, followed by 19% for industry and energy production, and 11% for municipal uses (households and public services).

Since the 1990s, the WTO’s rules and the neo-liberal policies driven by the IMF, the World Bank and free trade agreements have considered, and continue to consider, water as a type of merchandise like any other. This means that water, particularly in southern countries, can be considered the property of a company or an individual, who can choose to sell it at will.  In its debt reduction process for “heavily indebted poor countries,” the World Bank has set the privatization of water supply in cities as one of its conditions [4]. At the peak of the neo-liberalism of these institutions, as well as that of the European Union, it was proclaimed that the participation of private companies was a necessary condition for secure access to drinking water. In reality, the entry of private firms into water distribution services has meant an increase in abusive pricing and the deprivation of access, by means of the installation of pre-paid meters and the immediate cut-off of families unable to pay, for example.

The Dublin Principles, established at the international conference on water and the environment, held in Dublin in 1992, have been adopted, by governments, international organizations and NGOs alike, as the new, global consensus for water management, since the Principles come across – at least in appearance – as politically neutral and uncontroversial. And yet, the application of these principles has a variety of consequences. Principle 3 addresses the role of women, stating that women play a “pivotal role ... as providers and users of water and guardians of the living environment.” Women are presented as a single social category, as if they formed a politically, economically and socially homogenous group. In addition, the recognition of the “pivotal role” of women in this context paves the way for their instrumentalization [5].

The protests in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from January to April 2000, marked a moment of change in this history. Women and men from working class neighborhoods, along with peasants and indigenous women, mobilized against the privatization of services (driven by the US company Bechtel), which had resulted in price increases of more than 50%. This period, known as the Water Wars, not only revealed the perversity of the privatization of the Sub-Ministry of Water, but also highlighted the countless possibilities opened up for popular revolt. The victory in reversing this privatization fed the fight against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, defeated in 2005, and the change in government with the election of Evo Morales that same year. Bolivia defined nature and water rights in its Constitution, ratified in 2009, and proposed that the United Nations recognize the right to access to quality water as a human right, which was finally approved by the UN’s General Assembly in 2010.

In 2008, the Coalition Against Water Privatization in South Africa achieved its demand, ensuring the right to double the amount of tap water for families in Soweto. In 2010, the Paris water services were de-privatized. The European Union has begun to increase its experiments with public-private partnerships in the majority of water supply services. The Constitutions of South Africa, Ecuador and Uruguay also state that water is a human right. [6]

During the fight for public services that guarantee access to quality water, struggles against other forms of water stockpiling were on the rise elsewhere in the world. In the United States, communities in California, Maine and Michigan achieved a victory against preferential deals allowing Nestlé to pump water from rivers, lakes and reservoirs for the sale of bottled water. In 2005, the communities and local government in Kerala, India, managed to close a high-pollution, high-water-consumption Coca-Cola plant [7]. This victory was particularly symbolic, given that Coca-Cola is known for touting projects that foster its own interests, in the name of “social” projects. As part of its “gender washing” practices, Coca-Cola signed a partnership with UN Women in 2011, for the economic empowerment of women in small businesses, such as recycling plants.

In the Narmada Valley in India, on the Maya-Lenca territories in Honduras, in Omo Valley in Ethiopia, as well as on many other community lands, there is resistance against the construction of mega-dams and hydro-power plants that flood the land, displace populations and restrict the use of the rivers that are the foundation of the local people’s survival and cultivation.

In 2006, the women of Vía Campesina undertook an action at the plants of paper company Aracruz, against the single-crop cultivation of eucalyptus. The radical nature of the action threw into sharp relief the desertification caused by extensive plantations involving intensive water use and its contamination by pesticides or by intensive pig and chicken farming. When a country exports wood pulp or soy, it also exports the large amounts of water used in these production process.

The Great March for water and life, which took place in Peru in February 2012, drew attention to the excessive use of water and its contamination by mining companies. It denounced the damage caused by existing companies, opposed the implementation of the Conga Mines project, and demanded the prohibition of mining in headwater basins and glaciers and a moratorium on mining concessions.  Open-air gold mines using cyanide divert millions of liters of drinking water each day, for their own purposes. This action by the people of Peru was part of a larger context of resistance by communities affected by mining in various parts of the world, like Guatemala, Romania, Mozambique and many others.

Women in water management and in the fight against water privatization

In rural areas, especially in the southern hemisphere, women are responsible for fetching the water that is needed for the household and, insofar as they make sure that their families have a sufficient supply and they handle its storage in the home, they are, in fact, the ones that actually manage water in the household. Little girls are regularly deprived of an education, because their mothers need them to go and fetch water during the day. Women, especially from rural areas, loose their access to drinking water when it is industrialised and bottled for sale. They don't have the income necessary to buy water, and water treatment structures don't work properly.

 Women often also play a role at the community level, sometimes to the point of taking charge of the construction and maintenance of water access point facilities.  In addition, they are generally responsible for maintaining toilet facilities. They also assist children, the elderly and the sick with their health and hygiene needs. They worry about safety (primarily for children) and privacy: first and foremost, women want to be sure that their children will not fall into pits and they want doors with locks, to protect themselves from the eyes of passers-by. Moreover, in some countries, lack of toilets close to home poses great risks of violence to women, including rape, especially when it got dark.

In cities around the world, women manage water use for their families. Having to contend with limited access, due to high prices or rationing, they are the ones who manage the shortage and agree to store water in reservoirs. In Barcelona, during the drought of 2008, the community opposed mega-projects like the transposition of Ebro River and discussed ways to consume less water. Women, even more so, have paid the price of imposing stricter day-to-day rules on their children, such as, for example, shorter bath times.

Men and women the world over are resisting the idea of considering water and nature as resources in the service of corporate profit, as unlimited goods, or as more expensive ones as they become exhausted by improper use.  Women, in particular, are very active in these struggles.  Their experience of being rendered invisible and devalued in the work they do caring for others is very similar to the invisibility and devaluation of nature. The time and energy that women spend in care-taking, cooking, providing affection and listening, are not visible and are elastic. In most families, women are the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night. The time and energy required for nature to regenerate are hidden and treated as an obstacle to be overcome, in order for the machine of consumerism to continue operating at full throttle. Women continue to be pressured to adapt conflicting attitudes and times – between life and profit – and must then deal with the resulting tensions. Their work is instrumentalized, for entertainment and to conceal the injustices brought about by multilateral institutions, governments and corporations. If women walk farther to find water or wait for hours in line at the water truck, this is not seen as a problem, given that these agents justify this as being part of their role as mothers.

Capitalist, patriarchal society is organized with a gender-based division of labor, separating men’s work from women’s work, and promotes the idea that men’s work is worth more than women’s. Men’s work is associated with production (of items sold on markets) and women’s work, with reproduction (creation of human beings and interpersonal relationships). The representations of masculinity and femininity are double and hierarchical, like the association between men and culture, and women and nature.

At the World March of Women, we fight to overcome this gender-based division of labor and, at the same time, for the recognition that reproductive work is at the very core of the sustenance of human life and of relations, between members of families and between members of society. We believe it is possible to establish (or, in some cases, re-establish) a dynamic, harmonious relationship between people and nature, and that women, with their historical experience, have much to say on this topic and should be involved in the decision-making and water management processes.   

The challenge before us is to unite the struggles led by women in rural and urban areas, on the subject of the common good and public services, such as the protection of nature and the fight against the privatization of life. Our goal is to strengthen ties between women, encourage awareness of common problems and of issues specific to different areas, and to fight for changes in our consumption and production models.[8]

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[1]  The Alternative World Water Forum will be held from March 14 to 17, 2012, in Marseille, France. WMW’s International Secretariat has developed this text with the collaboration of activists from Marseille Collective 13 Femmes and WMW France to provide a context for the issues of water privatization and water monopolization. We invite all of the National Coordinating Bodies and the WMW’s participating groups to discuss this document and send their comments, reactions and additions to us at info@marchemondiale.org, to help us move forward with our analysis and to develop new proposals.
[2]  http://www.partenariat-francais-eau.fr/spip.php?article647
[3]  http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/water_use/index.stm
[4]  http://www.cetim.ch/fr/interventions_details.php?iid=185
[5]  Trottier, Julie, “Water Crises: Political Construction or Physical Reality?”, Contemporary Politics, Vol. 14, no. 2, June 2008, pp.197-214.
[6]  Bell, Beverly and the Other Worlds Collaborative, Who Says You Can’t Change the World? Just Economies and Societies on an Unjust Planet. Other Worlds, United States and Other Worlds, Mexico, November 2009, pp. 14-17.
[7]  Ibid.
[8] World March of Women – Action Area Text, “The common good and public services” – http://www.marchemondiale.org/actions/2010action/text/biencomun/en, February 2012.