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GATS
Water out of GATS
[Water]
is a product which would normally be free and our job is to sell it.
Gerald Mestrallet, Suez Lyonnais
Just 5% of water services are currently supplied by the private sector. But under a set of international trade rules called the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the UK Government, as part of the European Union (EU), is pushing for water supplies to be handed over to big business the world over. And there will be no going back… unless we "pull the plug on it!" now.
Water is our lifeblood and the most basic of human rights. But the UK Government is currently backing proposals that will undermine the United Nations' pledge to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.
"Drink at least eight glasses of water a day" is the old adage. Yet while our fixation is with recommended daily intakes and dilemmas over sparkling or still, more than one billion people still do not have access to safe water.
For big business water is pure profit: global water markets, worth up to £480 billion, are dominated by European companies. In fact the world's top two private sector water companies, Vivendi and Suez (both French), control 70 per cent of all private water services between them.
Private
sector companies are never going to make money out of poor people, since
poor people can't afford to pay.
John Lane, Chairman of Business Partners for Development
It goes without saying that big business cannot be trusted to guarantee such a basic human need as water. Foreign companies, who are primarily responsible to their shareholders back home, are unlikely to make the cuts in profits that are necessary to ensure universal access to water. In contrast, not-for-profit water providers use the profits made in more affluent areas to subsidise water supplies to poor communities - a mechanism called 'cross-subsidisation'.
Foreign company involvement in water provision has caused grave problems in many countries, as the examples overleaf show. Typically, water rates have risen far beyond the reach of poor households, leaving them without access to clean water.
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