Yesterday, one of the front page stories of the New York Times described the terrible and worsening situation of people in Bolivia’s whose water supplies are disappearing. As a land-locked country, Bolivia has relied on glaciers to provide water – and those glaciers are melting at a rate faster than anyone had predicted. The article explains:
“The effects are appearing much more rapidly than we can respond to them, and a reservoir takes five to seven years to build. I’m not sure we have that long,” said Edson Ramírez, a Bolivian glaciologist who has documented and projected the glaciers’ retreat for two decades.
The retreat has outpaced his wildest predictions. He had predicted that one glacier, Chacaltaya, would last until 2020. It disappeared this year. In 2006, he said El Alto water demand would outstrip supply by 2009. It happened.
While acknowledging that climate change is at the root of these dramatic changes, the article also places the blame on “checkered management” by the Bolivian government, saying:
Urban water supplies are also taxed by population growth as well as checkered management, in part because there is little money to manage anything, but also because the government nationalized the water company a few years ago, having declared water a human right. El Alto still does not employ a full-time water technician.
This logic suggests that the declaration of water as a human right, and the move away from privatized water supplies, has resulted in diminished access to water. The opposite has been true. Compared to the fuller history of Bolivian people’s fight to access water, we can see why.
In the 1990s, the World Bank and other international financial institutions pushed privatization of public services—including water provision—as a condition for countries to receive aid. In Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, the process of privatization meant that corporations like the US-based Bechtel Corporation gained control over the city’s water. As the cost of water doubled or more for many, in 2000 people across the city turned to the streets in protest, asserting that “The water is ours.”
The principle that water is a human right motivated people to demand access and to refuse to let their lives be threatened by the rush towards privatization. The citizens of Cochabamba were able to push Bechtel out of their city and reclaim their right to water. But now, largely through the carbon-emitting activities of industrialized countries including many of those same corporations, the water supplies of Bolivia are again compromised.
For more on why water rights are women’s rights, click here.
Update: This video, via GRITtv, has more.
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