Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 230

companies' rates, she said, they are forced to make a Hobson's choice: either drink con-
taminated water or face death by dehydration. “ No one has the right to appropriate wa-
ter for proit while other people are dying ,” Barlow writes. “Water is the most important
environmental and human rights issue of them all … [but] you can't have a human right
to water if there is no water.”
This position has gained a widening audience, not only in developing countries but
across the United States.
“Why does somebody need to make money on your water?” asked Dick Hierstein ,
the city manager of Pekin, Illinois, a small city that sold its water system to American
Water Works, a private company owned by the German firm RWE AG, but then repur-
chased it. “Does somebody need to make money on the air you breathe? It is as simple
as that.”
T. Boone Pickens has a quick rejoinder to that: “People always say to me, 'Water is
like air. Do you charge for air? Well, no, course not, and you shouldn't charge for wa-
ter, either.' I say, 'Okay, go ahead and don'tcharge for water and see what happens. You
won't have any water left.' “
Water privatizers have had some laudable successes. The city of Bucharest, Romania ,
where the French company Veolia took over the water system in 2001, used a combin-
ation of infrastructure repair and price incentives to reduce per capita water use from
four hundred liters a day in 2001, to two hundred liters a day in 2007. But in other cases,
Big Water has promised more than it could deliver or has taken advantage of people,
causing protests to spring up in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Ghana, India, Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa, among other places.
The United States has had many private water successes and a few well-publicized
failures. After bitter town meetings, editorials, and lawsuits, contracts with private water
companies were canceled in Atlanta, Georgia, Stockton, California, and Puerto Rico.
New Orleans scrapped plans to privatize its water system just before Hurricane Katrina
struck, in 2005. And community groups in Lexington, Kentucky, Indianapolis, Indiana,
and Felton, California, have campaigned to regain control of their municipal water sys-
tems from private firms.
In the summer of 2008, Akron, Ohio , was gripped by a debate over a plan by Mayor
Donald Plusquellic to sell or lease the city's wastewater business for about $200 million.
The plan was to use $75 million to pay down existing debt and the remaining funds
to support student scholarships; the buyer would recover its investment through reven-
ues from a ninety-nine-year lease. But resistance to the plan was strong from the start.
Demonstrators accused the mayor of “disguising” water privatization as “a scholarship
program” without explaining to voters that it would benefit “for-profit business corpor-