Water for profit
I watched an interesting programme a few weeks ago, about water shortages in Detroit and La Paz, Bolivia. Before I’d travelled around South America, I probably wouldn’t have known where Bolivia was or indeed cared for more than two seconds what happened there. But I have, and now I do.
This TV programme highlighted essentially how underprivileged families in both the world’s richest and poorest country are being faced with expensive water bills that they just can’t afford to pay. In both cases, the water companies simply turned off each families’ water supply. If that wasn’t devastating enough, the black American family was faced with the real risk of having their children taken into care because her house was now deemed ‘uninhabitable’ due to no water supply. The real irony being that the Bolivian family benefited from living in a poorer, and apparently more free society.
On the domestic front this also ties in to what’s happening now in southern England, where I currently reside. One of the English ‘For Profit’ water companies has issued a drought order which bans the use of hose pipes. As a Scot I’m glad that Scotland chose not to privatise our water companies, as I support society as opposed to shareholders. However, I’m now lumped in with a few million English people trying to live with a finite supply of water in an ever more populated area of the country.
Already homes are being fitted, and being forced to fit water meters. In doing so we’re quickly trundling down the road towards the danger zone described in the TV programme: the rich can fill their swimming pools while the poor families are squeezed and squeezed until they have to break the law in order to literally survive.
The bottom line is whether water should be for profit or whether water is a right?
Perhaps, surprisingly, I strongly believe that neither case holds the answer. As in parts of England, the US and elsewhere water is increasingly become a finite resource. The idea, we seem to be pusuing, that water companies simply crank up the unit price at every turn hits the poorer families very hard, as already observed. At the same time, however, the situation can’t be a free for all. Thus, it seems to me that the only sensible solution is: every household receives a guaranteed quota, to cover reasonable usage, which can never be disconnected. Usage over and above this basic level would be paid for as always. This way children aren’t taken into care simply because of company shareholders’ demand for more profit.
