Water

Water is obviously a common vital and irreplaceable resource. It happens that we are living in a historical period when the dominant and now globalized mode of production transforms literally everything into a commodity, even the most sacred and vital things. Unalienable human rights are reduced to human necessities. To satisfy them one has to obey the laws of supply and demand that are typical of the marketplace. Only those who can pay and be consumers have rights, not just any human being regardless of his or her socioeconomic condition. It’s a betrayal of the ideals of modernity.
Fresh water, because it is an ever scarcer resource – only 0.7% is accessible for human consumption, sells for more and more and has become an object of worldwide greed. Today there is a frenetic race among the huge multinationals to privatize water, transforming it into a hydric resource and a commodity from which much money can be earned. Care has been taken to destroy the humanist and ethical concept that access to water is a fundamental human right. As a consequence, it has been reduced to a need like any other, whose satisfaction must be met in the marketplace. This is what the Second World Water Forum effectively declared in 2000: water is no longer an unalienable right but merely a human necessity.
Now a fierce war for the control of access to drinking water has begun. Whoever controls it holds the power of life or death over millions and millions of people. Today 1,600 million people do not have enough water and by 2020 this figure will be 3,000 million out of a population of 8,000 million. These people may be denied access to water because they don’t have the means to acquire it and their lives will be in danger.
Some time ago Ismali Serageldin, the vice-president of the World Bank, rightly said: “if the wars of the 20th century were over oil, those of the 21st century will be over drinking water.” In fact, there are currently 50 conflicts in the world because of lack of water, since 40% of the world population lives near 250 river basins. The basin of the Tigris and the Euphrates is at the center of a dispute between Turkey, Syria and Iraq; the Jordan river basin, between Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon; the Ganges and the Indus river basins, between Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and the same thing is happening with the basins of the Nile and Zambezi rivers.
How to confront the “water mafias” and avoid water wars? In the first place by demolishing the materialist concept that underlies the rationale of water privatization. By viewing everything as a commodity, it destroys whatever ethical, ecological, and spiritual feelings are linked directly to water. Second, by recovering the original sense of water as the womb of all life forms on Earth. Water, like life, can never become a commodity. Third, as many are now proposing, by creating awareness that is necessary to make a worldwide pact on water since everyone needs it to live. Finally, in the name of this planetary consciousness, no right to privatize water should ever be conceded. It should be excluded from business negotiations at a worldwide level.
Water is a gift that nature offers to life and to each one of us. Seventy percent of our body is composed of water. Because of this, water is one of the most important metaphors for the Divine that is in us and in the universe and the sacredness of all life. How shall we care for it and not fight for it?