[Reader-list] ownership business

[Rana Dasgupta]

Further to Pradip and Patrice's emails on this subject
let me mention again ProjectCensored.org which rates
this issue as the number one censored story from 2001.

Here are some short reports from ProjectCensored.org
that give more background to the Bechtel case and to
the issue in general.

This is no doubt one of the most serious areas of WTO
activity at the moment, opening up new markets for
corporations to extract wealth from and in the process
forcing communities in rich and poor countries to find
ways to prove their right to - water.

R

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Global consumption of water is doubling every 20
years, more than twice the rate of human population
growth. According to the United Nations, more than one
billion people already lack access to fresh drinking
water. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand
for fresh water is expected to rise by 56 percent more
than the amount of water that is currently available.
Multinational corporations recognize these trends and
are trying to monopolize water supplies around the
world. Monsanto, Bechtel, and other global
multinationals are seeking control of world water
systems and supplies.

The World Bank recently adopted a policy of water
privatization and full-cost water pricing. This policy
is causing great distress in many Third World
countries, which fear that their citizens will not be
able to afford for-profit water. Grassroots resistance
to the privatization of water emerges as companies
expand profit taking. San Francisco’s Bechtel
Enterprises was contracted to manage the water system
in Cochabamba, Bolivia, after the World Bank required
Bolivia to privatize. When Bechtel pushed up the price
of water, the entire city went on a general strike.
The military killed a seventeen-year-old boy and
arrested the water rights leaders. But after four
months of unrest the Bolivian government forced
Bechtel out of Cochambamba.

Bechtel Group Inc., a corporation with a long history
of environmental abuses, now contracts with the city
of San Francisco to upgrade the city’s water system.
Bechtel employees are working side by side with
government workers in a privatization move that
activists fear will lead to an eventual take-over of
San Francisco’s water system.

Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians,
Canada’s largest public advocacy group, states,
"Governments around the world must act now to declare
water a fundamental human right and prevent efforts to
privatize, export, and sell for profit a substance
essential to all life." Research has shown that
selling water on the open market only delivers it to
wealthy cities and individuals.

Governments are signing away their control over
domestic water supplies by participating in trade
treaties such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and in institutions such as the
World Trade Organization (WTO). These agreements give
transnational corporations the unprecedented right to
the water of signatory companies.

Water-related conflicts are springing up around the
globe. Malaysia, for example, owns half of Singapore’s
water and, in 1997, threatened to cut off its water
supply after Singapore criticized Malaysia’s
government policies.

Monsanto plans to earn revenues of $420 million and a
net income of $63 million by 2008 from its water
business in India and Mexico. Monsanto estimates that
water will become a multibillion-dollar market in the
coming decades.

Update by Maude Barlow
This story is of vital importance to the earth and all
humanity. The finite sources of freshwater (less than
one half of one per cent of the world's total water
stock) are being diverted, depleted, and polluted so
fast that, by the year 2025, two-thirds of the world's
population will be living in a state of serious water
deprivation. Yet governments are handing
responsibility of this precious resource over to giant
transnational corporations who, in collusion with the
World Bank and the World Trade Organization, seek to
commodify and privatize the world's water and put it
on the open market for sale to the highest bidder.
Millions of the world's citizens are being deprived of
this fundamental human right, and vast ecological
damage is being wrought as massive industry claims
water once used to sustain communities and replenish
nature.

Recently, a civil society movement has been created to
wrest control of water back from profit-making forces
and claim it for people and nature. Called the Blue
Planet Project, this movement is an alliance of
farmers, environmentalists, Indigenous Peoples, public
sector workers, and urban activists who forced the
issue of water as a human right at the March 2000
World Water Forum in the Hague. The Project is holding
the first global citizens' summit on water in
Vancouver in July 2001. One major project has been
support of the water activists in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
who, led by union leader Oscar Olivera, forced the
giant engineering company Bechtel to leave the country
and stopped a World Bank–imposed privatization scheme
that more than doubled the price of water to the local
people.

The mainstream press has been reluctant to tell this
story. Our fight in Canada started with concern over
the potential of bulk water exports sought by some
politicians and corporations. Water is included in
both NAFTA and the WTO as a tradable good; once the
tap is turned on, corporate rights to water are
immediately established. But our mainstream press
generally supports economic globalization and these
trade agreements and will permit only selective
reporting on opposition positions. Blue Gold, my paper
on the commodification of water published by the IFG
in 1999, has been printed in several languages and
sold all over the world but has been ignored by the
North American media.

The story of the destruction of the world's remaining
freshwater sources is one of the most pressing of our
time; there is simply no way to overstate the nature
of this crisis. And yet when the mainstream media
report on it–which is not nearly often enough or in
sufficient depth–they seldom ask the most crucial
question of all. Who owns water? We say the earth, all
species and all future generations. Many in power have
another answer. It is time for this debate.

For more information on this story and the Blue Planet
Project, please contact The Council of Canadians:
phone, 613-233-2773; fax, 613-233-6776; address,
502-151 Slater Street, Ottawa, ON. Canada, K1P 5H3;
web-site, <www.canadians.org>.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the
Council of Canadians and a director with the
International Forum on Globalization.

Update by Jim Shultz
Eight months have passed since the people of
Cochabamba forced the departure of a subsidiary of the
Bechtel Corporation and restored control of the
region’s water supply into public hands. The story has
brought unprecedented attention to the issue of water
privatization and important events continue to unfold,
both locally and internationally.

Locally, Cochabamba’s residents are working closely
with the newly reconstituted water company, SEMAPA, to
extend water service to more families. In Alto
Cochabamba, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, a
community water tank had remained uncompleted for
years and became a local trash dump. Today the tank is
in full operation, bringing public water into the
neighborhood for the first time. Civic leaders say
they are building a utility that is run by the people
rather than by corrupt politicians or an overcharging
corporation beyond local democratic reach.

As a direct result of the Democracy Center’s
reporting, Cochabamba’s water rebellion is also
drawing substantial world attention and solidarity. In
December, a delegation of leading citizen action and
labor groups from the U.S. and Canada came to
Cochabamba for an international conference on water
privatization. These groups and others have also
pledged their support against Bechtel’s latest attack,
a lawsuit for as much as $20 million—compensation for
losing their lucrative Cochabamba contract. It is an
action that pits one of the world’s wealthiest
corporations against the people of South America’s
poorest nation.

Bechtel has been actively shopping for the friendliest
international forum possible and apparently has
decided its best chances lie in a suit under a
Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) signed previously
between Bolivia and Holland. Late last year Bechtel
quietly reshuffled corporate papers to place its
subsidiary under Dutch registration, in preparation
for such action. International groups are gearing up
to help Cochabamba leaders fight Bechtel’s lawsuit.
"This is going to be the first major international
civil society fight against a corporate legal action
under such a treaty," says Antonia Juhasz of San
Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization.

The Democracy Center’s articles, which ran primarily
in the progressive press and were distributed widely
via the Internet, also attracted publication in some
dedicated city dailies, such as the San Jose Mercury,
San Francisco Examiner, and Toronto Star (thanks to
distribution by the Pacific News Service). Most
mainstream coverage of the story, however, was limited
to the dispatches of the Associated Press Bolivian
correspondent. AP correspondent Peter McFarren came
under fire for stories that eagerly repeated the
Bolivian government’s and Bechtel’s public line,
falsely blaming the water uprising on
"narcotraffickers." One reader of the Democracy
Center’s articles noted the difference in the
reporting and uncovered that McFarren was, at the same
time, actively lobbying the Bolivian Congress to
approve a controversial project to ship Bolivian water
to Chile. When that conflict of interest was reported
to AP, McFarren suddenly submitted his resignation.
More information on the story, including subscription
to the free e-mail newsletter in which the stories
originated, is available at "www.democracyctr.org".
Jim Shultz: JShultz at democracyctr.org

Update by Pratap Chatterjee
Engineering News-Record magazine ranks Bechtel as the
biggest construction company in the United States; it
is also the biggest private company in northern
California. It has built mega-projects from the Alaska
pipeline and the Hoover dam to the San Francisco Bay
Bridge, from natural gas pipelines in Algeria to
refineries in Zambia. Hardly a day passes without the
company signing a new contract somewhere in the world;
all told it has worked on 19,000 contracts in 140
countries in the past century, many of them with
taxpayer money. Yet an extensive review of Bechtel
contracts over the last 100 years shows that time and
again the company has been found guilty of sleazy
political connections. In fact, if there's a pattern
to Bechtel's public works projects, it's this: The
company works under cover of the utmost secrecy and
routinely jacks up the cost of projects far beyond the
original bid, sticking taxpayers with huge, often
unexpected bills.

If these cost overruns do generate some headlines, the
environmental and social impacts of the company's
construction activities rarely get a mention: managing
bombsites for nuclear testing in Nevada, helping hack
off the top of a sacred mountain on the Pacific island
of New Guinea to build the world's largest gold mine,
planning pipelines for Saddam Hussein in Iraq, drawing
up development plans for a man accused of killing half
a million Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo (former Zaire), building toxic refineries
for Chevron in Richmond that destroy the San Francisco
Bay.

Bechtel's management and spin doctors went into
overdrive when staff at headquarters read the San
Francisco Bay Guardian story and started to ask hard
questions. We obtained an internal memo that explained
why they had decided not to respond to the story:
"We're not currently considering legal recourse (for)
a number of reasons:

* To win a libel or defamation lawsuit, Bechtel would
have to show that the journalists, activists, or
politicians in question either knew that such
statements were false or entertained serious doubts
about their accuracy. This could be very difficult to
prove.
* A lawsuit would give Bechtel's most vocal critics
another public forum in which to reprise their claims.
Defense attorneys would be permitted to engage in
wide-ranging discovery into Bechtel's nonpublic
business affairs—including making substantial document
requests and taking depositions from Bechtel
employees—to probe whether or not the critical claims
were true.
* Bechtel would have to prove the amount of damages
suffered as a result of the alleged defamation.
Bechtel would have to demonstrate some monetary loss,
which might be difficult (and would, again, open us up
to discovery of data)."

The mainstream press regularly writes about the
contracts that Bechtel wins and completes but they
rarely ever dig deeper to find out about the impact of
these projects. No mainstream press has ever looked at
a broad overview of the company's history or been able
to probe into the company's inner workings: this is
partly because the company refuses to give the media
access to the company staff and management.
Pratap Chatterjee: pchatterjee at igc.org



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