BARCELONA, Spain—Maybe it’s only natural, at a conference where activists propose something as radical as a universal declaration of the human right to water, that the tone turns preachy and we feel like we’ve heard it all before. Of course, we haven’t — we don’t know, for example, that half of Africa’s 784 million people suffer from water scarcity; or that agriculture absorbs 70 percent of the global water supply; or that 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day … wait a minute, yeah, we know that one. Everyone knows it by heart because the number hasn’t changed much in years.
But you get the point: It’s that feeling of sitting in a room where everyone shares your outrage, seeks the same common progress, and knows that for all the hollering and consternation expressed in unity, no one beyond the lecture or city hall walls — neither the powerful nor the ignorant — will hear a word. It’s been the downfall of progressives for years.
Jean Michel Cousteau reminded me of one of those progressives — old-school, with a long, thin, bird-like face, glasses, and a silvery mane of hair and beard. Like his father, the French sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, whose documentary films of underwater life inspired a generation of ocean activists and environmentalists, Jean Michel is wed to water. Right now his team is shooting a documentary in the North Pacific about gray whale migration, and his Ocean Futures Society is still celebrating the seven-minute environmental pitch it squeezed into Disney’s blockbuster animated movie for kids, Finding Nemo.
But when you talk to Jean Michel — who speaks a flawless, languorous English, in keeping with his Santa Barbara, Calif., dwelling — you can’t help but want to peel away his jargon and see what’s hidden underneath, because he, too, has fallen into the dry trap of preaching to the converted.
“Tell people to stop driving their SUVs, tell them to change their standard of living,” he huffs. I know, Jean Michel, and it’s true, but haven’t we heard it before, and from people less experienced and sophisticated than you? I’m glad Cousteau appeared at the dialogue on “Water for Life and Security,” but I think he could have given us more than a review of the 6,000 oil tankers roaming the seas each day, the 10 gallons of water it takes to refine a gallon of gasoline, and the “unimaginable billions of people who are thirsty right now.”
Diplomats and NGO spokespeople repeated a message over and over at the water conference: Rich and poor countries have an equal stake in a world where every person has access to water and sanitation. By investing in water, “the most important strategic resource of the century,” as they called it, we are investing in peace. Or, in the words of the U.N. Environment Program’s executive director, Klaus Toepfer, “sustainable development is nothing less than the peace policy for the future, and disarmament comes by bringing water to the people.”
“We cannot live in security when the vast majority live without the basic resource of life,” echoed his colleague, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, director of U.N. Habitat and the highest-ranking African woman in the U.N. system.
Access to water is not only a basic human right, activists said. It’s also part of our cultural heritage, unlike merchandise bought or sold on the free market. “You can’t treat water as though it were gasoline or Coca-Cola,” said Henri Smets of The Water Academy in France, an institute critical of the neoliberal policies the developed world has forced developing countries to adopt, resulting in the privatization of water systems worldwide. “One has to give water to those who can’t pay for it. It’s proportional to population — it’s not like meat, where the poorer you are the less you eat.”
For Senegalese activist Dame Sall, a tall, lean man with glasses and a broad smile, the water crisis is not just about the failure to distribute water and resources — it’s about the solidarity between wealthy and poor nations disappearing altogether. “Competition is winning the day,” he said in a subtle but impassioned speech. “We must want to share and live together if we’re attempting to make this a good world to live in.”
Literacy and education rates are also intimately tied to water and sanitation availability in the developing world, the experts said. Millions of girls, especially, are forced to leave school to spend their young and adult lives hunting for drinking water to sustain their families. There are direct links between poor sanitation and poor education in both rural and urban areas of the developing world, something Tibaijuka said has to change.
“Water is the crisis of the century, a war that must be waged in our towns and cities” where 900 million people, or 43 percent of the developing world, lives, Tibaijuka said. Opening trade barriers and relieving poor countries of vast levels of foreign debt is an appropriate place for Western countries to start, she said.
The frail and wrinkled form of 95-year-old Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, shuffled to the podium, dressed in black, to suggest a new approach to the global water crisis. Speaking in quavering but lucid Italian, she said the focus should be on decentralizing water management so that mayors and local leaders in developing and developed countries work together rather than giant state engines trying to solve the crisis on a large scale.
When things get bad, it’s time to make them smaller — that message applied to the trends in water use and agriculture as well. The policies of industrial agriculture, promoted by the Green Revolution of the 1950s and still in wide use today, have driven economic growth but have devastated drinking-water supplies and contaminated the African environment with untold chemicals, creating “a picture of gloom and hopelessness,” said Edward Oyugi of Kenya’s African Reference Group on Water. Oyugi stressed the importance of a social contract in creating a sustainable water use and management strategy in his country and across Africa — where small, family-scale farming has always been, and will continue to be, the basic form of survival.
The conference revealed a fierce, virtually unanimous reproach of Israel’s building of the wall, which activists claim is robbing Palestinians of key access to drinking water. Israelis consume vastly greater amounts of water than any of their Arabic neighbors — 300 million cubic liters per year compared to 23 million for the Palestinians, for example.
Activists walked away from the two-day talks with apparent hope for improvement in the way water and sanitation are managed, developed, and distributed around the world in years to come. But toward the conference’s end — before Gorbachev retook the podium and, as founder and chair of the nonprofit group Green Cross International, repeated his call for a global glasnost — Jean Bosco Bazie from Niger stood up again to speak.
He pointed out that when the World Bank or the IMF writes a declaration, they see that their goals are carried through. But U.N. workers, water experts, and NGO representatives keep coming to the same conferences and talking about the same needs — to give poor countries greater access to water and sanitation, to lift subsidies from agribusiness, or to relieve national debt — with no clear changes to show for it.
“And why is that?” Bazie asked the crowd in an aggressive voice, his stare poised out over their heads, as though the answer was hovering there. “Because the people in power are never here! We’ll all come back again and nothing will have changed.”