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March 19, 2006
Two venues like two worlds lapping and overlapping in one
In the days that followed, the World Water Forum has carried on inside a massive convention center. Free buses taking delegates to the forum tell the story: I boarded the bus outside the Sheraton – one of Mexico City’s most extravagant hotels, located next to the barbed wire bailiwick of the US Embassy – and I shouldn’t have been surprised when the bus made the circuit of several other luxury hotels picking up handfuls of smartly dressed delegates. To be fair, watershed educators, filmmakers and press from around the global south made up a strong percentage of the crowd on my particular bus. I spoke with an Oxford PhD candidate from San Cristobal, Chiapas, a film critic from Manhattan and two photographers from Angola. Arriving at the Banamex Center where the WWF takes place, we were let off at the security gate where my pass was scanned before I passed through a metal detector and underwent a brief search of my bags before walking into the bright lights and techno-madness of the what seems to be essentially an enormous trade show.
Endless booths, all competing for attention with lights and sounds and running water and posters and flashy models (both live human models of the made-up high-heeled variety and less sexed-up scale models of watersheds, dams and irrigation systems). On display for your high-tech consumer excitement: Water filtration systems, beachy tourist destinations, pumps and pipes and water storage systems, universities and companies and products and products and products. Here and there, amidst the eye candy and bombardment of sound, a handful of stalls promoted rainwater catchment, ecological sanitation, rope pumps and pedal pumps and other locally controllable, sustainable technologies.
The contrast between the WWF and the alternative forum – held in the Telephone Workers’ Union Hall and other peoples’ venues around the City (of which, more later....) – is the contrast between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, between the restless idealists of civil society organizing themselves to promote environmental and social justice and the monied technocratic utopians organized by consumption and circumscribed by capital`s ever forward flight toward bigger better faster finer ways to f*&# the world’s poor.
At least, that’s the feeling I get just at the moment, sitting among the bleeps and echoes and flashing lights of the convention center.
This morning at the alternative forum, the Minister of Water of Bolivia, Abel Mamani, gave a statement about the World Water Forum: “The Bolivian government will not sign the Declaration that comes out of the Forum,” he said. “We have read the draft document, and it says nothing. It doesn’t take a position. It would be good if it said something – even if this something was something we do not agree with. Even if this document came out in favour of privatization, that would be better, because we would know better what we are talking about. But in a moment of such crisis in the world as we are living today, a document that says nothing is the worst outcome we could expect….”
He went on: “Our role as human beings is to take care of the natural world, and for this reason water cannot be treated as a commodity – because then we are not taking care of the natural world, we are taking care of our pocket books.”
“The World Bank says States have no money to fund public water. But there is money. Where is the money? The money is in weapons, in defence, in war. If a proposal to take 2%, 5%, 7% out of defence spending and put it into public sector water, if such a proposal were taken seriously, the problem of public water could be solved tomorrow.”
And speaking of `defense,’ a rare report by AP posted to the New York Times –- the only notice about the events in Mexico City that has yet appeared in the US commercial press, to my knowledge -- tells us this: “Water is so scarce or polluted in some parts of the world that the poor might actually go to war to get their hands on it.” I`ll buy a Cherry Coke with a bendy straw for the first person who can tell me what the HELL that means.
Posted by jeff at March 19, 2006 03:15 PM