French Corp Giants Push for Water Takeover

by Julio Godoy

Vivendi Water calls itself "the world's leading provider of outsourced and privatized water and waste water treatment services and systems," a characterization that Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux also uses.

Vivendi claims to have 110 million customers in more than 100 countries all over the world, while Suez says it supplies water to 115 million people in 130 countries on five continents.

This expansion is the result of an aggressive strategy that has led both companies to secure contracts to supply and treat water around the world.

In recent months, Suez obtained contracts in Shanghai, China, Senegal and Burkina Faso. Vivendi has expanded in Northern and Eastern Europe, with several contracts in Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany and Sweden.

And yet leaders of both firms also proclaim that "water is not a commodity."

Gerard Mestrallet, CEO of Suez, said as much in March during the company's preparations to celebrate the World Water Day. Immediately after the events of Sept. 11, Mestrallet had urged the leaders of the northern world to "provide water to the whole world."

"Drinking water must be available for every inhabitant of our planet as soon as possible, as water is a key for development and peace," he said.

Mestrallet now goes even further. He condemns the privatization of water, because "it forces the poorest of the world to pay twice for water."

"When water is privatized, the enterprises that take over the water supply don't invest in the renewal of the infrastructure," he says. "That worsens the quality of water supplied, and additionally, the prices increase."

Therefore, Mestrallet says, "cooperation between the private sector and the state is the best solution to manage water." The infrastructure should remain in public hands, and only the service should be privatized, he adds.

Suez has been following this strategy in Santiago de Chile, La Paz, Bolivia, in Mexico City, New Delhi, Gaza, and Amman, Jordan.

Critics of the privatization of water recall, however, that Suez -- Mestrallet's company -- and Vivendi are on the World Water Council (WWC), which, together with international institutions like the World Bank, has been advocating precisely that: the privatization of water.

Ricardo Petrella, a professor at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and one of the world's leading researchers on the subject, recalls that the World Forum on Water that took place in The Hague in March 2000, organized by the WWC, openly proposed the commercialization of water through a global private consortium.

This consortium already exists and is formed by Suez, Vivendi, along with eight other private British and U.S. companies, including Thames Water, Biwater, and others.

"During the 1990s, an international committee on water was established around the WWC, on which the private multinational enterprises belonging to this consortium are represented," Petrella said.

"This means that the international committee that studies the global problem of water is at the same time partially controlled by the companies that eventually would profit from the solutions the committee proposes," Petrella added.

Petrella recalled that the so-called "integrated water resources management" proposed by the WWC strongly advocates "handling water as just another commodity whose fair price can only be set by the market."

Another critic of the privatization thesis, Mohammed Larbi Bouguerra, a Tunisian researcher and water expert at the Paris-based non-governmental organization ATTAC, recalled that the World Bank has even advanced the increase of water prices to force a reduction of demand.

"Of course," Bouguerra said, "an increase in water prices would only force the poorest people to reduce their water consumption. The richest consumers will always have enough money to wash their cars and fill their swimming pools."

According to the World Water Forum's Hague declaration, access to water was defined as a universal need as opposed to a human right.

"The participants thought that defining access to water as a human right would restrict the freedom of the private institutions involved in the resource's management," Petrella explained.

In a communique issued on the celebration of World Water Day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) emphasized that access to water has always been a crucial element of any development strategy.

At any given time, about half the people living in developing countries suffer from water-related illnesses such as diarrhea, parasitic infections, river blindness and malaria.

"These diseases kill about five million people each year, especially children under the age of five," UNESCO added.

UNESCO's Director General Koichiro Matsuura warned that a water crisis is looming, and urged "scientific, ethical and sound social principles (in the global management of water) to secure a sustainable world for generations to come."

UNESCO noted that the global demand for water has increased more than six-fold over the past century -- more than double the rate of population growth.

This disproportionate growth illustrates the water crisis, UNESCO says: "Without sound management of water resources and related ecosystems, two-thirds of humanity will suffer from moderate to severe shortages by the year 2025," which might lead to new wars.

Critics of the privatization thesis concede that in the past, state jockeying over water sources has led to conflicts. But on the other hand, the privatization of water has been plagued by rampant corruption, the critics said.

They recalled the long history of collusion between the French water companies and the country's leading political parties.

Therefore, Petrella said, the solution to the water crisis can only be "to create a new public water utility beyond national territorial levels, based upon a world contract in which ethical criteria reign over business, to guarantee that the local communities directly define the orientation of water services."

Petrella admitted that this new global contract would only be possible "if there is a strong mobilization of the people."