World water wars warning sounded at forum

The world must act now to head off water wars in developing nations, where the resource has become so scarce, polluted or threatened that people are willing to fight over it, activists at a protest forum outside the 4th World Water Forum said yesterday.

Water wars aren’t merely an apocalyptic vision of the future; conflicts here are coming close to that stage, said Maria Cruz de Paz, a Mazahua Indian who has carried a rifle – albeit a mock wooden one – in angry 2004 protests that temporarily shut off part of Mexico City’s water supply.

“Our wooden rifles are symbolic,” Cruz de Paz told the alternate forum. “They are symbols of the fact that we can still head off a war over water, there is still time to solve things through dialogue and compromise.”

The Mazahuas were angered “because pipes carrying water to the city cross our land ... but we didn’t have a drop to drink,” she said.

Others told of similar struggles over a liquid many people take for granted.

“We’ve been beaten, we’ve been jailed, some of us have even been killed, but we’re not going to give up,” said Marco Suastegui, who marched alongside about 10,000 protesters on Thursday outside the convention centre that is hosting the official summit.

Suastegui is leading the battle against a dam being built to supply water to the Pacific coastal resort of Acapulco. Opponents fear the dam will dry up the nearby Papagayo River.

“We will defend the water of the Papagayo river with our lives, if need be,” Suastegui said.

Protesters yesterday accused the official summit of serving as a cover for companies that want to privatise water services.

Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of late French President Francois Mitterrand, noted that “French cities have rejected this model of private water management,” even though many of the world’s largest water companies are French. “If in France this is no longer the model, why should we be promoting it in the rest of the world?”

“We are at an important moment, because everyone agrees that the current system of water management has failed,” Mitterrand told the protest forum.

“The 4th World Water Forum doesn’t represent us,” said Audora Dominguez of the non-governmental Mexican Committee for the Defence of Water Rights. “It’s a forum where you have to pay to speak. It’s a forum where the poor aren’t included.”

On Thursday, a small group of youths attacked a photographer and smashed a police car during an otherwise peaceful protest involving about 10,000 marchers, who chanted “No to Privatisation.”

Many of the water battles in Mexico don’t involve people who would otherwise be considered radicals. Those on the front lines are residents of low-income neighbourhoods in Mexico City who get in fistfights over water-truck deliveries, or housewives who can no longer stand the stench of untreated sewage flowing beside their houses.

Mexico City legislator Aleida Alavez Ruiz said the conflicts could intensify, especially here in the capital, whose combination of floods and water shortages, urban sprawl, pollution and wasteful practices make it a sort of poster child for the world’s water woes.

“It’s getting critical, and if we don’t recognise the problem now, when the dry season comes, the conflicts will get worse,” Alavez Ruiz said.

Residents of Ruiz’s district sometimes must stand in line for hours to sign up for truck deliveries when tap water runs out, and tempers have been known to boil over when someone tries to get water out of turn.

The concept of more serious battles breaking out in the future over shrinking water supplies is gaining credence. Loic Fauchon, president of the non-governmental group the World Water Council, and a co-chair of the official water forum, has proposed the creation of a peacekeeping force to solve water conflicts as they erupt around the world. The force would be modelled after the UN “blue helmets.”

“We don’t want to override national governments,” Fauchon said. “We just need a force that will take over in cases of water conflicts.”