Author : Charles Santiago, Monitoring Sustainability of Globalisation, Malaysia
Introduction
Water Security will be the divisive issue of the 21st
Century. Water corporations, together with multilateral agencies, are
transforming scarce water resources into a profitable commodity. Given
the acute state of the water crisis, there is a fear that if water
corporations take control of this essential and scarce resource, more
people will go without and there will be a loss of livelihood. It is an
irony that water corporation are making huge profits in the context of
water scarcity. Companies view scarcity of resources and environmental
degradation as an investment and business opportunity.
The Asian poor - indigenous communities, farmers, women and the urban
poor - face the negative impact of water privatization. Indigenous
communities are displaced from their ancestral lands when dams are
built; farmers' yields decrease and their livelihood threatened as a
result of water corporations' indiscriminate mining of ground water;
women have to walk kilometers to get water and return in time to get to
work and some continue to depend on contaminated water leading to
dysentery and other health problems; rural water wells are unfit for
drinking, cooking and bathing as a result of contamination or have
dried-up as a result of excessive extraction of water. The poor state of
the Asian water supply system is being exploited by water corporations.
