The Last Drop

Marianella Yanes, Mike Gonzalez

Description

Indispensable for human existence yet increasingly owned and controlled by private capital; the last decade has witnessed an intensifying battle for water. The Last Drop is a wake-up call to everyone who takes for granted what comes out of their kitchen tap.



This book traces a path through the arguments that surround the question of water, setting out to make the scientific arguments more accessible and the political questions more urgent. The exploding profits of the multinational companies which dominate the water industry are testimony to how high the stakes are - by 2012 it had become a worth a trillion dollars.



Against the market fundamentalists, the authors argue that it is both possible and necessary that considerations of equity and social justice prevail. They call for our water supply to be saved from subordination to the whims of the multinationals and placed under direct democratic public control.
List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. A Floating Planet

2. How Water was Privatised

3. Disasters, Natural and Otherwise

4. A Short Trip through Amazonia

5. Bitter Harvests

6. Virtual Water

7. Water and Global Warming

8. Ya Basta! Enough Is Enough!

9. What Is to Be Done?

10. A New World Water Order

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Dams
• Environmental Economics
• Industries
• Sciences et techniques
• Water crisis
• Natural Resources
• Drinking water
• Dam
• Energy
• Énergie
• Amazon
• Nature
• Industrie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715213
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Last Drop
The Last Drop
The Politics of Water
Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes
First published 2015 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes 2015
The right of Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN   978 0 7453 3492 9   Hardback
ISBN   978 0 7453 3491 2   Paperback
ISBN   978 1 7837 1520 6   PDF eBook
ISBN   978 1 7837 1522 0   Kindle eBook
ISBN   978 1 7837 1521 3   EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Text design by Melanie Patrick
Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometimes health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes […] it is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still […] In time and with water, everything changes .
Leonardo da Vinci
Contents
List of Figures, Table and Boxes
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
   1.   
A Floating Planet
   2.   
How Water was Privatised
   3.   
Disasters, Natural and Otherwise
   4.   
A Short Trip Through Amazonia
   5.   
Bitter Harvests
   6.   
Virtual Water
   7.   
Water and Global Warming
   8.   
Ya Basta! Enough is Enough!
   9.   
What is to be Done?
10.   
A New World Water Order
Notes
Index
List of Figures, Table and Boxes
Figures
0.1     
Preparing for a land occupation, Machachi, Ecuador
1.1     
In Africa water will often be a long walk from home
2.1     
Testing the waters of the Yangtze for contamination
3.1     
The world’s largest dam; the Three Gorges Dam
5.1     
‘Beware the Water Laws’, on a wall outside the headquarters of CONAIE, Quito, Ecuador
5.2     
The disappearing forest. Sumatra
5.3     
‘Multinationals out’, Quito, Ecuador
7.1     
Coal mining is polluting China’s Yellow River
8.1     
Cochabamba: the ‘water war’ that drove out Bechtel and reclaimed water for the public sector
8.2     
Man over nature; the destruction of mountains by coal companies
Table
6.1     
Water Footprints
Boxes
Hydraulic societies
The last journey of the goldfish
Water beyond the state: a letter from Cochabamba, Marcela Olivera
Resisting water charges – Ireland, Richard Boyd Barrett
Preface The Road to Machachi
In the distance, an eternal snow melting on its slopes, was Cotopaxi, the volcano whose name in Quichua means ‘the soft throat of the moon’. Poetic and menacing, it was ahead of us all along the road to Machachi. It still wasn’t clear to us where we were going. We were travelling with various indigenous organisations, moved by that concept of ‘good living’ that we still hadn’t fully absorbed, to a land occupation.
What the comrades from ECUARUNARI and CONAIE, Ecuador’s indigenous federations, were describing to us was an everyday activity for them, but we were uncertain what to expect. As the days of the revolution slipped by, these people were still condemned to poverty. And they pursued their unfulfilled demands with machetes hidden in long skirts and steel in the soul.

Figure 0.1     Preparing for a land occupation, Machachi, Ecuador © Mike Gonzalez
They gathered on open ground then climbed into a line of open lorries; it felt like a prelude to conflict. It wasn’t far to the land they were about to occupy, land taken by a man called Jaramillo from its original inhabitants. In the beautiful little town square, at its centre a tableau of men and women cultivating the land, the women waited under the trees, their children beside them. The men gathered to confront the landowner. Around the square the wind blew dust from the earth streets into the air. Some of the women who lived in the town looked out and their children came to point and laugh and ask who we were. Did they have water in their houses? No, was always the answer. It was in barrels that stained the water brown. How did they manage with cooking, washing, bathing the kids? Mr Jaramillo opens a standpipe every evening and lets us take some water. And at Christmas he leaves it open so we can fill the barrels and he gives us a pig and a sack of potatoes each. He’s a good man. But didn’t he take the land by force? ‘Some people say that, but he lets us live here in peace. There’s no point protesting. He’ll never go.’ A young woman with her kids smiled and gave me a bottle of Orangina. It was welcome. It was midday and the heat was rising.
People rushed towards a corner of the square. The landowner and his daughter, illegitimate occupants of this fertile land they had fenced in and called their own, had arrived. The spokespeople for ECUARUNARI showed him the document that gave them the right to take back their land. Jaramillo waved his title deeds with their seals and signatures. The National Guard and a representative of the mayor arrived to prevent a violent confrontation. Jaramillo insisted ‘my lands are productive, we work hard.’ The man from ECUARUNARI said ‘you grow flowers; you can’t eat flowers.’ The crowd pushed towards him, all speaking at once, aggressive and challenging. The woman from the mayor’s office couldn’t make herself heard above the shouts from both sides. I moved away from the circle. A man stood looking towards the crowd, his face tense with rage. He was one of Jaramillo’s workers.

He’ll never leave Machachi, because he owns the water.
The water? Isn’t it just the land he owns?
He looked back at me. The water is in the land. The spring is up there and he controls it.
To water his flowers?
For his flowers and for Orangina. He sends the water to the bottling plant. The tankers come every day to collect it.
And the people here? Aren’t they thirsty?

At that moment a guard came towards us. The man stopped. ‘If I say any more I’ll lose my job,’ he said, and walked away, still thirsty and still angry. I moved to follow him but the crowd moved in on Jaramillo, his daughter and the mayor.
The guards formed up in front of the gate that Jaramillo to keep the community away from his empire. ‘This land is my father’s. That’s a lie; it says here that he has to give it back to its original population, to grow food. I’m mayor here; now calm down and listen to me. When the court order gets here you can go.’
How long will that take?
They said we’d have it tomorrow.
In one voice they shouted back. ‘Then we will stay here and wait until it gets here!’
Acknowledgements
This is for David MacLennan, for many reasons, and for our children Dominic, Anna, Rachel, Ezequiel, Eleazar and Ernesto and our grandchildren Amara, Max, Luca and Martha Lucia, for putting up with us.
We would like to thank the many people who in one way or another have helped to make this book possible, especially Carlos Zambrano of Camaren in Quito, the comrades of CONAIE and ECUARUNARI in Ecuador, the community of Tzarwata in the Rio Napo in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Wilmer who risked his safety to show us what was happening in Yasuni, Oscar Olivera and Marcela Olivera of the Coordinating Committee for Water and Life, Cochabamba, Tom Lewis, Richard Boyd-Barrett, Paul O’Brien and Brid Smith of the Right2Water Campaign in Ireland, Marcelle Dawson who shared her work on the South African Movement so generously, Trevor Ngwane for his inspiration, Pueblo Nasa, La Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres, No a la Mina, Icíar Bollaín and Paul Laverty for their film Even the Rain , Manuela Blanco for her film El río que nos atraviesa , Alex Bell, Alex McCall and June Toner, with an apology, Frank Poulsen, Peter Archard and Ayesha Usmani, Jonathan Neale, Pat Collins and Magdalena Villalobos, Scott Donaldson, Claudia Abache and Carlos Rivodó for their solidarity, Pepijn Brandon and Willemijn Wilgenhof for their friendship and insights, Paddy Cunneen for nearly everything, and David Castle of Pluto Press for his confidence in us and his quiet encouragement.
Introduction
Where there is water, there is life. Without it, there is nothing. Our collective nightmares about the future always seem to centre on worlds turned into deserts. Some 85 per cent of the planet’s surface is water. And much of what is not, from the land to the people who inhabit it, is also largely water. It sustains the body, nourishes the land, drives the wheels of industry, and transforms itself in many unexpected ways.
So why is it that in recent decades, the talk of a water crisis has risen to a cacophony, when for so much of our history we have assumed its availability and its continuing flow? How can there be a shortage of something that is everywhere we look, and that regularly cascades over us. Why has the talk of crisis suddenly become so insistent?
The reality is that there is not one crisis but several, however, according to the World Water Report of 2014, ‘the crisis is essentially a crisis of governance’. In other words, it is not a natural phenomenon we are discussing, not simply that there is so much water and the world’s population is growing. The problem is one of the management and allocation of the water that exists on earth.
It is clear that climate change is happening; it is by now part of e