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Shocking! World Bank Wants Water Privatized!
Saturday, April 19, 2014 12:43
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It appears the push to privatize and control the most vital resource on the planet, drinkable water, is stronger than ever…a recent article release by AlJazeera America reports.
Clean and affordable water is the basis of life. Skyrocketing water prices, unsafe supply, failing infrastructure — these problems fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable among us. This is why public institutions, not private corporations, must lead the development of water systems and delivery. The World Bank Group is uniquely positioned to increase access to clean water for the billions who need it. Instead of using its position to line the pockets of water companies, it should support what is most needed: affordable and clean — and public — water for all.
The World Bank Group pushes privatization as a key solution to the water crisis. It is the largest funder of water management in the developing world, with loans and financing channeled through the group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). Since the 1980s, the IFC has been promoting these water projects as part of a broader set of privatization policies, with loans and financing tied to enacting austerity measures designed to shrink the state, from the telecom industry to water utilities.
The track record of publicly funded private water projects shows that the private sector doesn’t find it profitable to invest in the infrastructure really needed to ensure that communities have access to clean and affordable water. “Water companies have found that their niche is seeking efficiency solutions through hiking prices and cutting spending on infrastructure investment,” Naficy told me.
Even as the World Bank Group continues to promote water privatization, its own data reveal that a high percentage of its private water projects are in distress. Its project database for private participation in infrastructure documents a 34 percent failure rate for all private water and sewerage contracts entered into between 2000 and 2010, compared with a failure rate of just 6 percent for energy, 3 percent for telecommunications and 7 percent for transportation, during the same period.
In the decades since the IFC’s initial push, we have seen the results of water privatization: It doesn’t work. Water is not like telecommunications or transportation. You could tolerate crappy phone service, but have faulty pipes connecting to your municipal water and you’re in real trouble. Water is exceptional.
Private sector priorities
“Water is a public good,” Shayda Naficy, the director of the International Water Campaign at Corporate Accountability International (CAI), told me, “for which inequality has to fall within a certain range — or it means life and death.” When the private sector engages in water provision, greater disparities in access and cost follow.
Water is also different because it requires such huge, and ongoing, infrastructure investments. An estimated 75 percent of the costs of running a water utility are for infrastructure alone.
The track record of publicly funded private water projects shows that the private sector doesn’t find it profitable to invest in the infrastructure really needed to ensure that communities have access to clean and affordable water. “Water companies have found that their niche is seeking efficiency solutions through hiking prices and cutting spending on infrastructure investment,” Naficy told me.
Even as the World Bank Group continues to promote water privatization, its own data reveal that a high percentage of its private water projects are in distress. Its project database for private participation in infrastructure documents a 34 percent failure rate for all private water and sewerage contracts entered into between 2000 and 2010, compared with a failure rate of just 6 percent for energy, 3 percent for telecommunications and 7 percent for transportation, during the same period.
Instead of using its position to line the pockets of water companies, the World Bank should support what is most needed: affordable and clean – and public – water for all.
A look at projects deemed successes (PDF) by the World Bank Group shows they are not experienced that way on the ground. An IFC-funded private water project in central India’s largest city, Nagpur, for example, is the country’s first “full city” public-private partnership and has raised serious concerns among local residents. Worries range from high prices to project delays to unequal water distribution and service shutdowns. Allegations of corruption and illegal activity have led residents to protest, and city officials have called for investigations of contract violations. “In the last three years, the cost of operation and maintenance of the system has increased drastically and the price of water has increased manyfold,” Jammu Anand of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation Employees Union said in a statement released by CAI. (CAI details other examples like this one from Nagpur in its 2012 report “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The Case for the World Bank to Divest.” Full disclosure: I am a strategic adviser to CAI.)
What advocates, including Naficy and Anand, are reminding the IFC today is that significant and steady infrastructure investment is the only way to foster safe, affordable and dependable water supplies. And that is done more effectively by the public sector than by private corporations. Water systems need treatment facilities and a mechanism to channel water from its source in a stable way, usually through pumps, piping to households and individual connections from main pipes to households. According to Naficy, “There is no end run around building a strong public sector and building strong public oversight.”
In addition, financing by the IFC, which is both investor and adviser on these projects, poses a conflict of interest. On the one hand, the IFC is advising governments to privatize the sector; on the other, it’s investing in the corporations getting those contracts. “It’s self-dealing: setting up a project that it’s in a position to profit from,” Naficy told me. When the IFC was established in 1956, it was expressly prohibited from purchasing corporate equity to avoid this sort of conflict, but the board amended this rule a few years later, allowing these kinds of deals. The IFC insists there are interior barriers to such conflicts of interest, even as its own annual report touts “client solutions that integrate investment and advice.”
Opening up the spigot
Independent water advocates, from CAI to Anand’s group in India and others including the Focus on the Global South network, point to India today as evidence that privatized systems lead to underfunded infrastructure and unpredictable, often high prices. The IFC defends the private sector by claiming that these companies offer efficiency gains (PDF). But those gains come at the expense of lower-income households, advocates such as Naficy point out, as companies increase rates to subsidize their own profitability.
There’s a growing backlash against these projects. In 2000, headlines around the globe documented protests in Bolivia’s third-largest city in response to the privatization of the city’s municipal water supply and against the multinational water giant Bechtel, eventually pushing the company out of the country. The IFC’s own complaint mechanism reports that 40 percent of all global cases from last year were about water, even though water projects are only a small fraction of what the IFC funds. In 2013, CAI and 70 advocates from around the globe released an open letter (PDF) to the World Bank Group calling for “an end of all support for private water, beginning with IFC divestment from all equity positions in water corporations.”
“Corporations don’t have a social or development mission,” Naficy told me. “Right now we’re funding development to prop up private projects, instead of putting the decisions for funding in the hands of governments that are accountable to people.”
Read the entire article here: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/water-managementprivatizationworldbankgroupifc.html
These evil people must be demonically possessed. I cannot imagine anyone so evil that they would prohibit a fellow human being from having a necessary drink of water. Just because they want to make money for it. Did their mother teach them to be this evil? Does it run in their family? Is it in their genes? No, that’s why I surmise they are demonically possessed. We are living in a time now where just about every evil entity on God’s Earth is free to roam and people just are not aware of the danger they face. Demonic possession is very real. Get saved. Be right with the Lord, not just for your sake but for your children’s and all the people you know or will ever meet.
A high level World Bank Attorney Whistle Blower called Karen Hudes says that the Vatican Jesuits run all the Banksters, the lame street media, the politicians and the intelligence agencies (in the Video below)
So does this mean they will be selling Holy Water ? …oh my!
World Bank Attorney Whistle Blower Karen Hudes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owanSt6XnmM
Soon they will want to privatise oxygen, water should be cheap ,
We have private water throughout the UK and it has lost its way with high wages for the bosses and money not going to repair old delivery systems. Our prices since the changeover has increased while the service gets worse especially in the South and parts of the Midlands.
Now in the UK water meters are recommended for small families and couples, as our Water Rate has become higher and higher. So those with gardens now save every drop of rainwater and grey water from baths to get a double use for their plants, and gardens. Where every drop counts.
Meter water keeps the household, just keeping their heads above water and what was once a right has become a commodity. The Lord provides the rain companies sell the gift.