Is the privatization of water the right thing to do?

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 34 Comments

Public water systems promote waste and deprive the poor

The market solution Back in 1999, when Bolivia decided to privatize water services in Cochabamba, the country’s third-largest city, it didn’t bargain for the backlash that would unleash. Mobs of angry Bolivians, some armed with Molotov cocktails, took to the streets in protest. Martial law was declared, and in the ensuing violence one person was killed and several others were injured. Eventually the government withdrew the private water contract, and Bechtel, the U.S. engineering giant overseeing the water system, was run out of the country. Since then, documentaries such as The Corporation, Blue Gold and Flow have used footage of the riots to highlight the perils of water privatization. But it’s too bad the filmmakers didn’t stick around to see how things turned out.

Since water delivery has been returned to the state-run utility, things haven’t improved at all. Fully 80 per cent of the new management is “not qualified to perform their responsibilities,” according to one former senior staffer. Two directors of the water authority have since been sacked for corruption, several managers have been fired for similar charges, and the utility is now hobbled by inefficiencies, nepotism and “blatant company corruption,” according to a recent study by the Transnational Institute. Now, party politics and electoral concerns determine “who gets service and when,” and the “fragmented hodgepodge” of expansion projects is neither coherent nor technically viable. Fully half of Cochabamba’s people are still without water, and those who have service only have it sporadically—for some, as little as two hours a day. “I would have to say we were not ready to build new alternatives,” admitted Oscar Olivera, who led the Bolivian protests that forced Bechtel out. Continue…

Canada’s sickest lake

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 34 Comments

Living, toxic goo is killing lakes the world over. It may be too late for Lake Winnipeg.

Cisco! Walleye! Whiteﬁsh! From the foredeck of the MV Namao, a scientific research vessel on Lake Winnipeg, student-scientists in rubber boots and banana-yellow hard hats are calling out the catch. They’ve also landed troutperch and emerald shiners, whose weight, stomach contents, skin tissues and isotopic concentrations will help gauge the health of the huge prairie lake. The trawl net—which looks like a bright blue tube sock with a nine-metre hole—was hauled aboard by a yellow crane just before the skies went suddenly dark, unleashing a heavy wall of rain like only the prairies can. Walloped by wind and rain, even the Namao—at 34 m, the biggest ship on the lake—is rocking and rolling on Lake Winnipeg’s dangerous, ocean-sized waves.

Perfect storm conditions are also brewing below the surface. Ironically, the isolated prairie lake, ringed by pristine Boreal forest, tucked far away from industry and major population centres, has become the sickest big lake in the country. What was once a small patch of algae, first noted in the 1990s, now grows to smother more than half of the massive 24,500-sq.-km lake most summers. In 2006, the pea soup blanket covered almost the entire lake, home to 10,000 cottagers, a $100-million tourism and recreation industry, and a $25-million commercial fishery. It’s “like sailing through a sea of green paint,” says Namao head biologist Alex Salki, one of a handful of concerned local lake scientists who founded the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium. The putrid green mat, twice the size of P.E.I. and clearly visible from space, is jaw-dropping evidence of an ecosystem in deep trouble. Already, Lake Winnipeg, the world’s tenth-biggest lake, is in worse shape than notorious Lake Erie, says David Schindler, one of the world’s top water authorities, based at the University of Alberta. Continue…
An ocean of poison

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 9 Comments

B.C.’s majestic killer whales are dying as their ocean home surrenders to the stress of pollution, global warming and carbonic acid

Eight hours on a zodiac inflatable boat on the Juan de Fuca Strait off the coast of B.C., and Dr. Peter Ross has yet to spot a killer whale. At this time of year, the animals are hardly elusive. They return to the waters between Vancouver Island and Washington state every summer to hunt big, fat chinook salmon, which make up 60 per cent of their diet. In July, Victoria’s whale tour operators—which send out a new boat every hour—claim a 93 per cent success rate. Spotting a pod is “pretty much a guarantee,” says Ross, a crew-cut, fortysomething marine mammal toxicologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But B.C.’s 85 southern resident killer whales have not been seen in three days, and it’s putting some people on edge.

Last year, seven southern residents disappeared, the biggest recorded one-year loss in a decade. (They’re called residents because they come back here every summer for the chinook.) In some cases, scientists had noted a condition known as “peanut head,” a dip in the blubber below the blowhole, indicating probable starvation. The die-off coincided with a low year for chinook returns on B.C.’s south coast, and Ross believes the southern residents are going hungry again this summer. Led by the matriarchs, the oldest females, who retain a corporate memory of area fishing grounds, he figures the whales have left their summer stomping grounds to hunt chinook elsewhere—wasting needed energy in the chase. Continue…
Water fights

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, July 6, 2009 at 8:46 AM - 26 Comments

Much of the world is desperately short of fresh water. Are future water wars inevitable?

Every few days, another farmer commits suicide in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, the agricultural heartland. Many, according to Australian evolutionary biologist Tim Flannery, haven’t had any water in almost four years—in places, the allocation of irrigation water has been cut to zero. Their farms have dried up, leaving a dusty, wind-whipped scrubland. Cattle bellow from hunger through the night. “Despair is an enormous problem,” says Flannery. “There is no sign the situation will ever improve.” Government has compiled a suicide watch list.

The world’s flattest, driest and most vulnerable inhabited continent is gravely low on water. The “Mighty Murray”—Australia’s Mississippi—is on the verge of collapse: in places, children can hop over it. National production of rice has fallen from a million tons annually to 21,000 tons last year, contributing to soaring global food prices. Cotton and citrus are also crashing. The problem is now creeping into the cities. Earlier this year, the national water commissioner announced that, as of 2010, he could no longer guarantee security of supply of water for critical use to Adelaide, says Flannery, author of the acclaimed book The Weather Makers. “That’s Australia’s fifth-largest city.” Two years ago, the prime minister urged Aussies to “pray for rain—literally, and without any irony.” Continue…