Passage to India

A Report on the People’s World Water Forum and the World Social Forum

By Maude Barlow
January 26, 2004

Part One: The People’s World Water Forum in New Delhi,
January 12-14

I have just returned from a moving, exhilarating and exhausting two-week trip to India and want to share my reflections with you while the images and memories are still so fresh. Colleagues Bill Moore-Kilgannon and Anil Naidoo from The Council of Canadians accompanied me, and we teamed up with friends from the Polaris Institute, Kairos and Development and Peace from Canada, as well as Public Citizen and other friends from the U.S., to make a strong North American contingent.

In New Delhi, India’s capital, water activists from over 60 countries gathered at the India International Center for the first People’s World Water Forum. Plans for this forum started at the 2003 World Social Forum in Brazil, became more solid at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last March, and finalized in meetings in Cancun during the September ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It became clear to the many “water warriors” in Kyoto that the World Bank and the big water companies behind the World Water Council intend to continue to promote the commodification of water and deny that water is a fundamental human right. So we realized that there was some urgency for us to come together as a more formal international movement to counter this “global high command of water,” as Ricardo Petrella has so aptly named the World Water Council. Knowing that many water activists would be coming to India for the World Social Forum, we decided to hold our water forum in New Delhi just days before the big gathering.

Our tireless hosts were Vandana Shiva and her wonderful staff from the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. It was a hard-working two and a half days, with information and strategy sessions on bottled water, privatization of water services, dams and river linking, the World Bank, WTO and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), pollution and conservation, and water as a human right. Not surprisingly, as the forum was held in India, there was an emphasis on the struggles in that country, including the attempt by the transnational corporation Suez to privatize New Delhi’s water and the aggressive invasion of Coke and Pepsi into many parts of rural India. We were thrilled to learn of the fight back by the water workers of New Delhi against Suez, the formation of local activist groups against the bottled water companies, as well as the creation of a national network against Coke and Pepsi. You won’t be surprised to learn that we were infiltrated by “experts” in the workshops who were clearly paid by Coke to assure us that the drying up of water tables in the communities in which Coke operates is entirely coincidental and has nothing to do with the millions of litres being removed every day from these sites.

The forum ended with a unanimous vote to create a new network called the People’s World Water Movement and the adoption a declaration (see attached). For me, there were three highlights of our joint strategy that stand out and serve to guide our international water work in the coming years. The first is the need for a formal United Nations Convention on Water as a Human Right. It is time the people of the world had this guarantee locked into an international convention, which can then be used at the national and local level in our struggles against water theft. The second is the need to intensify our fight against the GATS, a deal that will be used as a weapon against local struggles if water is ever included as a service in this agreement.

The third clear goal is a very bold one: we decided to target two companies for upgraded fights – Coca-Cola and Suez. We chose these two companies not only because they are so flagrantly destructive of local communities and environments, but also because there are already on the ground struggles going on around the world against them. Coke, for instance, is being resisted for its terrible labour practices in Colombia and other places, its exploitation of groundwater in India and Latin America, and its invasion of schools all over North America. The goal now is to better link these campaigns and to set some common targets and strategies.

• Part One: The People’s World Water Forum in New Delhi, January 12-14
• Part Two: The World Social Forum in Mumbai, January 16-20
• Part Three: Solidarity Tour to Kerala, January 21-23

 

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