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One thing is clear from the Marseille conference: access to water and its benefits is a highly contested area of policy
By Megan Rowling
From corporate involvement in water provision to ministerial wording around the right to water, and standards for building large dams, many activists are far from happy with what’s happening at the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille this week.
Ahead of the huge triennial gathering, expected to attract up to 25,000 participants from some 180 countries, several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) raised the alarm that a draft declaration to be issued by ministers did not contain an unequivocal commitment to the U.N.-recognised rights to water and sanitation.
Amnesty International and WASH-United, an international partnership for safe drinking water and sanitation, said the communique would instead urge accelerated implementation of “human rights obligations relating to access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation”, adding that this phrasing had been insisted upon by a small number of states, including Canada.
This, the partnership argued, would allow states to determine individually whether their “human rights obligations” required them to realise the rights to water and sanitation for all, and could prevent people denied water and sanitation from holding their governments to account.
They warned that, unless the language was amended to reflect a full commitment to the rights to water and sanitation, “the Forum will have failed to even begin to meet its aspiration of providing solutions for those without access to water and sanitation”.
They did not succeed in getting an amendment to the declaration issued on Tuesday - an outcome that will also have disappointed Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N.’s first special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation.
She had also called for the language to be changed, saying it was an “unwelcome surprise” that the declaration did not “recognise the human right to water and sanitation that has been explicitly recognised at the UN”.
“If Governments spend one week discussing ‘solutions’ for water issues while failing to base them on the human right to water and sanitation, how could such solutions be for people who need water and sanitation most and are systematically neglected?” she asked in a statement.
“The outcome of the World Water Forum may become ‘solutions’ built on faulty foundations.”
At the ministerial section of the conference on Tuesday, Bolivia’s environment and water minister had his microphone cut off - supposedly for time reasons - after saying the text didn’t refer clearly to social justice and the right to water, AFP reported.
The 130 or so countries that supported the declaration did commit to speeding up access to safe drinking water and sanitation for all, focusing on the most vulnerable. They also said there was a need to boost efforts to cut water pollution and to reuse wastewater.
And they called for coherence between water, food and energy policies, as well as more flexible and integrated land and water resources management in order to build resilience to climate change.
ALTERNATIVE FORUM
Nonetheless, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch - a small U.S.-based NGO - described the declaration as “a step backwards for water justice”, noting that signatures had not even been collected from nations that endorsed it. “The entire event itself is a corporate tradeshow parading as a multilateral forum,” she added.
The Forum’s website says it is “open to all who want to contribute and participate in the resolution of global water challenges” – and its list of partners includes a wide range of U.N. agencies, international associations, trade bodies, companies and some NGOs.
The firms supporting the event include French energy giant EDF, Veolia Eau, Bouygues Construction, HSBC and JCDecaux. Its main organisers are the World Water Council, the French government and the Marseille city authorities.
But some civil society activists are refusing to participate in the main conference, saying the World Water Council “is a mouthpiece for transnational companies and the World Bank, and they falsely claim to head the global governance of water”.
They are holding a separate gathering elsewhere in the southern French port city, where they aim to create and promote an alternative vision of water management “based on ecological and democratic values”.
DAMS AND DATA
Meanwhile, on Wednesday morning, more than 50 protestors from China, Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam and France created a living river and inflated a large dam in central Marseille to call attention to the negative impact of large dams on freshwater ecosystems and indigenous cultures.
They said the forum has turned into an opportunity for corporate initiatives to put a positive face on the dam industry, including the “Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol”, which they called “a voluntary self-policing scorecard for dam builders”.
One of the World Water Forum's twelve priorities for action, “Harmonize Water and Energy”, calls for at least 20 countries across five major regions to apply the protocol by 2015.
“The (protocol) is a greenwash of the world's dam industry,” Zachary Hurwitz, policy coordinator of NGO International Rivers, said in a statement.
“(It) allows dam builders to claim they are sustainable while they continue to violate international and national environmental and human rights law.”
The demonstrators urged governments and international financial institutions to stop financing large dams, and to move towards more sustainable energy alternatives.
One thing is clear from events in Marseille: that people’s access to water and its benefits is a highly contested area of policy.
One hot topic right now is last week’s U.N. announcement that the world has already achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.
Yesterday in Marseille, French aid group Solidarites International presented a petition to the French international cooperation minister, calling for universal access to safe drinking water and signed by over 100,000 people.
At the top of its recommendations was “seriously revise the reference figures quoted by the United Nations”. Here it singled out an assertion in last week’s report by the U.N. children's fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organisation that at the end of 2010, 89 percent of the world's population, or 6.1 billion people, had access to improved drinking water - higher than the 88 percent MDG target.
“This is a very handsome announcement and one we could be delighted about if these figures reflected the real situation,” said Solidarites.
The scene seems set for these and other policy battles over water to grind on long after the Forum turns off its taps in Marseille this weekend.
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