To meet the Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction, water must be a priority - Morales
By Chris Arsenault
ROME, Oct 31 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Bolivian President Evo Morales blasted water privatization and urged governments to fight poverty by doing more to support small farmers during an address at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on Thursday.
Morales, an Aymara Indian and former coca grower who became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2006, comfortably won a third term on Oct. 12 with an estimated 60 percent of the vote.
His anti-poverty programmes and prudent spending of funds from the nationalisation of natural gas and oil businesses have earned him wide support in the country long dogged by political instability.
"A government which privatizes water is not respecting individual or collective rights," Morales said to raucous applause from delegates at the meeting in Rome. "If you don't have water, you don't have life."
Social movements in Bolivia fought protracted battles against water privatization in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which were eventually successful.
"To meet the Millennium Development Goals (on poverty reduction), we need to make water a priority," Morales said.
He touted his government's support to small farmers through low-interest loans, and grants to create incentives for more food production in the Andean nation.
He also criticised traders and speculators, who he said, exploit farming families.
"Before, the state was not present in the agricultural sector," Morales said.
"Intermediaries would push prices down at harvest time and then sell the food on at higher prices ... as a small producer myself from an indigenous family, I witnessed this."
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During his first two terms, Morales won plaudits from Wall Street for delivering economic growth averaging more than 5 percent a year and running fiscal surpluses even as he spent heavily on anti-poverty programmes.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the percentage of Bolivia's 10 million citizens living in extreme poverty dropped from 38 percent in 2005, the year before Morales took office, to 24 percent in 2011.
Morales said giving women legal rights to farmland has been crucial for improving food security.
Up until 2012, women did not have legal recognition of land ownership in Bolivia. But after his government changed the law, nearly half of the country's land titles now belong to women, Morales said.
Morales has said he would stick to his brand of pragmatic socialism, respecting private property while expanding the state's role in the economy.
Gaining approval from Wall Street for his prudent fiscal management has not stopped Morales from launching blistering attacks on the global financial system.
"As long as we have capitalism, there won't be solutions to structural problems," Morales said. "The worst sin of humanity is capitalism." (Reporting By Chris Arsenault; Editing by Katie Nguyen)
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