The era of drinking water from the tap has been over for years, says Li Fuxing, director of the Beihing Institute of Public Health and Drinking Water. But there are no guarantees that the water you take from a dispenser is safe either. 

There are too many opportunities fo contamination, in every step of the process, from water source to the 19.9 liter container that is delivered to your home or office.

Choosing a relatively reliable brand can lwer the risk. But before that a thorough understanding of drinking water and the dispensing industry is more effective than buying by price or brand name.

"In China, people's level of knowledge about drinking water is unbelievably low", said Li, who has been conducting research in water and health for almost 20 years.

They don't know, for example, that they should drink eight to 10 glasses of water a day.

Please email us at admin@watermicron.com for a full transcript of this article.

Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people already lack access to fresh drinking water. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand for fresh water is expected to rise by 56 percent more than the amount of water that is currently available.

Multinational corporations recognize these trends and are trying to monopolize water supplies around the world. Monsanto, Bechtel, and other global multinationals are seeking control of world water systems and supplies.

The World Bank recently adopted a policy of water privatization and full-cost water pricing. This policy is causing great distress in many Third World countries, which fear that their citizens will not be able to afford for-profit water. Grassroots resistance to the privatization of water emerges as companies expand profit taking. San Francisco’s Bechtel Enterprises was contracted to manage the water system in Cochabamba, Bolivia, after the World Bank required Bolivia to privatize. When Bechtel pushed up the price of water, the entire city went on a general strike. The military killed a seventeen-year-old boy and arrested the water rights leaders. But after four months of unrest the
Bolivian government forced Bechtel out of Cochambamba.

Bechtel Group Inc., a corporation with a long history of environmental abuses, now contracts with the city of San Francisco to upgrade the city’s water system. Bechtel employees are working side by side with government workers in a privatization move that activists fear will lead to an eventual take-over of San Francisco’s water system.

Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy group, states, "Governments around the world must act now to declare water a fundamental human right and prevent efforts to privatize, export, and sell for profit a substance essential to all life." Research has shown that selling water on the open market only delivers it to wealthy cities and individuals.

Governments are signing away their control over domestic water supplies by participating in trade treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and in institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). These agreements give transnational corporations the unprecedented right to the water of signatory companies.

Water-related conflicts are springing up around the globe. Malaysia, for example, owns half of Singapore’s water and, in 1997, threatened to cut off its water supply after Singapore criticized Malaysia’s government policies.

Monsanto plans to earn revenues of $420 million and a net income of $63 million by 2008 from its water business in India and Mexico. Monsanto estimates that water will become a multibillion-dollar market in the coming decades.

Update by Maude Barlow

This story is of vital importance to the earth and all humanity. The finite sources of freshwater (less than one half of one per cent of the world's total water stock) are being diverted, depleted, and polluted so fast that, by the year 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will be living in a state of serious water deprivation. Yet governments are handing responsibility of this precious resource over to giant transnational corporations who, in collusion with the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, seek to commodify and privatize the world's water and put it on the open market for sale to the highest bidder.

Millions of the world's citizens are being deprived of this fundamental human right, and vast ecological damage is being wrought as massive industry claims water once used to sustain communities and replenish nature.

Recently, a civil society movement has been created to wrest control of water back from profit-making forces and claim it for people and nature. Called the Blue Planet Project, this movement is an alliance of farmers, environmentalists, Indigenous Peoples, public sector workers, and urban activists who forced the issue of water as a human right at the March 2000 World Water Forum in the Hague. The Project is holding the first global citizens' summit on water in Vancouver in July 2001. One major project has been support of the water activists in Cochabamba, Bolivia, who, led by union leader Oscar Olivera, forced the giant engineering company Bechtel to leave the
country and stopped a World Bank–imposed privatization scheme that more than doubled the price of water to the local people.

The mainstream press has been reluctant to tell this story. Our fight in Canada started with concern over the potential of bulk water exports sought by some politicians and corporations. Water is included in both NAFTA and the WTO as a tradable good; once the tap is turned on, corporate rights to water are immediately established. But our mainstream press generally supports economic globalization and these trade agreements and will permit only selective reporting on opposition positions. Blue Gold, my paper on the commoditization of water published by the IFG in 1999, has been printed in several languages and sold all over the world but has been ignored by the North American media.

The story of the destruction of the world's remaining freshwater sources is one of the most pressing of our time; there is simply no way to overstate the nature of this crisis. And yet when the mainstream media report on it–which is not nearly often enough or in sufficient depth–they seldom ask the most crucial question of all. Who owns water? We say the earth, all species and all future generations. Many in power have another answer. It is time for this debate.