Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 237

was built for a much smaller population, yet the city had no choice but to use the obsol-
ete eighty-year-old tanks and a twenty-nine-year-old section of pipe that moved water
from tank to tank by gravity. The solution, Camargo said, was to develop high-altitude
reservoirs in the mountains that ringed the city. But with an annual budget of only $5
million, SEMAPA couldn't afford to build the project. Instead, many of Cochabamba's
poorest residents rely on small, cheap, unreliable wells or the freelance water dealers.
“I was hoping water would get here,” said Rafael Rodriguez, a citizen with little good
to say about either Bechtel or SEMAPA. “But it just has not happened.”
Addressing the debacle in Buenos Aires, and privatization in general, André Abreu
of France Liberté, a nonprofit water program, told VanityFair,“his is one of the hidden
costs of privatization. It's very hard to reverse. If a poor city makes a mistake, it is worse
off than when it started.”
A 2006 UN report judged that privatizing water in developing countries led to price in-
creases that were “ creating social and political discontent, and sometimes outright viol-
ence . ” Courts in Brazil, India, and South Africa had reversed decisions by private con-
tractors to disconnect pipes when customers didn't pay. Remunicipalization of water
systems had taken place in Africa, Uruguay, Argentina, and Canada. “It now seems like
this trend of increased privatization is reversing,” the UN report concluded.
Perhaps the most telling development came from France, the ancestral home of Big
Water. In June 2009, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë , announced that ater more
than a hundred years of “private monopoly” by Veolia and Suez, Paris would remuni-
cipalize its water services. This was greeted as near heresy. In fact, more than forty other
French municipalities had shifted control of their water from private to public owner-
ship over the preceding decade. “We want to offer a better service, at a better price,”
Delanoë said.
In “Private Water Saves Lives,” an essay in the FinancialTimes, Fredrik Segerfeldt ,
of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, admitted, “Many privatizations have been
troublesome. Proper supervision has been missing. Regulatory bodies charged with
enforcing contracts have been nonexistent, incompetent or too weak. Contracts have
been badly designed and bidding processes sloppy.” But, Segerfeldt wrote, such mistakes
should not preclude privatization per se, only “bad privatizations.” Instead, he and oth-
ers argue, citizens and companies should focus on how to improve the way the market-
place deals with a commodity that is essential for survival. In addressing the issue of wa-
ter as a human right, Segerfeldt noted, “Access to food is also a human right. People also
die if they do not eat. And in countries where food is produced and distributed 'demo-
cratically,' there tends to be neither food nor democracy. No one can seriously argue
that all food should be produced and distributed by governments.” He pointed to Chile,