Using and Abusing.

Worldwide consumption of water is doubting every 20 years, so it should come as no surprise that there's a shortage now, and this is going to reach serious levels in a very short space of time. One place where the shortage is becoming critical is the United States, which is just a thick pipeline away from the world's greatest single store of high-quality mater -- Canada's

Poor water-treatment systems and factory farms are not the only threats to our water supplies.

As we stopped roaming the countryside in search of food and settled into an agricultural lifestyle, we found ingenious ways to grow crops with irrigated water. However, as author Jacques Leslie points out in Hater's Magazine in July 2000, the ancient civilizations in the Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow river basins "foundered when [their irrigation] systems collapsed, either because sediment clogged their canals or waterborne salt poisoned their soils."

With irrigation, less than a fifth of the world's cropland produces two fifths of the world's food. And, Mr. Leslie reasons that our dependence on irrigated crops can only go up because our fisheries have been overfished and our ranges overgrazed. That leaves cropland, but even that is diminishing "because of erosion, urbanization, and salination." There's a limit to agricultural land too: the amount of global per capita irrigated land peaked in 1978 and has dropped 5% since then. By 2020, it's expected to have dropped 17% to 28% from the 1978 peak.

Mr. Leslie says it's all very worrisome: not only does irrigated land eventually become depleted from producing two or three crops a year, the water it needs is becoming scarce as it is also needed for industrial, urban, and environmental use.

A report by the World Commission on Water released in March 2000 says that water-diversion schemes for irrigation have had devastating effects in Central Asia, where the Aral Sea has shrunk to a fraction of its original size. According to the report, excessive exploitation of groundwater, primarily for agriculture, is lowering water tables in the western United States, Mexico, India, Yemen, and China.

On top of heavy agricultural demands, industry also has been a major contributor to water pollution over the decades, and some continue to be. The Sierra Legal Defence Fund, an environmental group, found that water-pollution violations tripled in Ontario in 1998, compared to 1996 figures. More than 3,000 violations were reported, versus 1,013 in 1996, and two-thirds of the violators were repeat offenders, despite Premier Mike Harris' assurance that 70% of polluters had fixed the problems they reported in 1996.

According to a newspaper report in May 2000, Ontario stopped publicly releasing pollution reports in 1995, and the Sierra group said it has to get them through time-consuming public information requests.

The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that a quarter of all rivers in southern and eastern Europe are heavily polluted as well, some to the point that they are ecologically dead as a result of industrial waste.

Not only have we poured industrial waste into our waterways, we've caused billions of dollars of damage transporting oil to various markets. In 1979, the Atlantic Empress spilled 203 million litres of crude oil into the Caribbean waters near Trinidad and Tobago after crashing into a supertanker. Another 188 million litres spewed out near Barbados while it was being towed away. The same year, 254 million litres of oil escaped from the Amoco Cadiz off the coast of Brittany, destroying the region's oyster beds. More recently, the Exxon Valdez dumped 42 million litres of oil when it crashed into an Alaskan reef in Prince William Sound in 1989. Four years later, the Braer spilled 93 million litres when it crashed into the rocks around the Shetland Islands. In 1999, the Erika fouled France's northwestern beaches with another 16.6 million litres. There have been others, though these are some of the major spills, which caused a total of about $1.4 billion U.S. in damage.

While our supply of water is diminishing for a variety of reasons, many still see it as just another commodity to be exploited for profit. One Ontario park that needed money wanted to sell some of its water in 1999 to offset provincial funding cuts and tight municipal budgets. To the Hamilton Region Conservation Authority, it was a creative way to make money from conservation activities, without harming the environment. The Authority also sells its lumber and receives fees for camping and other recreational activities, so why not water too?

But, selling water for profit flies in the face of the more widely followed concept that water is a commonly held resource allocated for the general good. However, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA contain provisions that define water as a "good," subject to global trading and global trading rules.

An area of prime concern is the British Columbia watershed as parched Californians look north lustfully towards a resource they need desperately. This has prompted no less an entity than the Roman Catholic Bishops of British Columbia to wade into the debate. The bishops sent out a pastoral letter in which they said that water is a property that is a trust from God. It is placed on Earth for the common good and is not to be exploited for private gain.

A few years ago, in 1999, the idea of selling water was making headlines and the general feeling was that it shouldn't be for sale. According to presentations made in October 1999 to the International Joint Commission (IJC), water in the Great Lakes basin should not be made into a commodity to be bought by the highest bidder or diverted to parched areas of the globe. The Commission, a Canada-U.S. body overseeing Great Lakes conservation, held hearings in both countries to help it make recommendations on the threat of large-scale water diversions.

In August 1999, the IJC issued an interim report. It recommended all governments on both sides of the lakes apply a temporary moratorium on new bulk sales or diversions of water from the basin, while it compiled its final proposals on the subject. The Commission said Canada and the United States do not have a surplus of water, and even the removal of small amounts from the natural basin threatens the surrounding habitat.

At the time, Ontario expressed concern that the province could face water shortages because of population growth and high usage. Ottawa planned to have all provinces ban water exports for at least six months. Quebec supported that plan with a temporary ban on the export of bulk water, ending an attempt by a Quebec businessman to export about 10,000 tonnes of water a month.

However, in December 1999, five provinces - British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec - rejected a national accord that prohibits the bulk export of Canada's water. The country's Environment Minister David Anderson said that dismissing the accord could direct our water to corporations and thirsty Americans. The proposed national water accord would commit each province to prohibiting large-scale removal of surface and groundwater from major drainage basins. Earlier, Ottawa introduced an amendment to the International Boundary Water Treaty Act of 1911. The change was aimed at stopping anyone from removing water in bulk from Canada's boundary waters, such as the Great Lakes. That bill was never passed. Ottawa has jurisdiction over international waters, but the provinces control the water basins within their own boundaries. That's why Ottawa said it asked the provinces to sign a voluntary national accord.

The idea has its critics, including Maude Barlow, national chairperson of The Council of Canadians, and the author of Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply. In her opinion, the federal government was simply trying to pass the buck with the voluntary accord: because it was voluntary, the accord would not bind any province in any meaningful way to protect its water resources, she said. That would create a patchwork of policies and regulations across the country. Responsibility for fresh water may largely be under provincial jurisdiction, but international trade is entirely under the federal government. In an article in the Globe and Mail, Ms. Barlow wrote: "Only the federal government has the jurisdiction to impose a meaningful national ban on water exports and only the federal government can deal with the trade threat it has unleashed on the provinces." What she says we need is "a full, binding, federal ban on bulk-water exports." As well, she says, water should be exempt from "pernicious trade deals that would privatize, commodify, and put our precious water on the open global market for sale to the highest bidder."

The government countered that argument, saying that the proposed federal-provincial ban treats water in its natural state and not as a tradable commodity, thereby excluding water from trade agreements under NAFTA (the North American Free-Trade Agreement).

An article in This Magazine in the summer of 1999 agreed with Maude Barlow's logic, saying that "if any province begins exporting water with a NAFTA partner, the trade agreement kicks in, and the Canadian water industry is forever open for business ... Ultimately, the water trade could be driven by the whims of the highest bidder." In other words, as soon as bulk water is treated as a tradable commodity, several NAFTA provisions are triggered. This also applies to pacts Canada has signed under the World Trade Organization; that is, water would no longer be protected against challenges under NAFTA and the WTO agreements.

Ottawa's concern over Canada's fresh water supplies goes back to 1988, when the federal government considered legislation to prohibit large-scale exports or diversions for the purpose of exporting water in large volumes. But, legislation was never passed, and there continues to be pressure from commercial interests to export fresh water in bulk. In 1998, Nova Group, based in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, got a permit from the Ontario government to ship up to 600 million litres of Lake Superior water to Asia by 2002. Angry opposition from both Canadians and Americans led to the withdrawal of the permit. Similarly, the Newfoundland government backed away from approving a much larger shipment to the Middle East. But in March 2001, the province's newly-elected Premier Roger Grimes again proposed exporting water from Gisborne Lake, despite the widespread belief that water shouldn't be sold at any price.

Nova isn't the only corporation that would like to have control of the world's water supply. Global Water Corp. of Canada has a contract to ship 58 billion litres of Alaskan glacier water every year by tanker to be bottled in a free-trade zone in China.

Corporations are in business to make money. Critics say the profit motive promotes increased consumption by those who can pay the price, not conservation, resource protection., or ecological concerns. Corporations argue that private companies can deliver water more efficiently than public operations. Opponents say business is simply using the growing world water crisis to promote acceptance of the corporate control of water. There are fears that privatization might lead to higher prices, enormous corporate profits, lower water quality standards, overuse, and supply cutoffs to the poor.

FACT FILE

In Canada, according to a 2000 study by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, industry is the largest user of water, accounting for 73%, with households using 11%, and agriculture 9%.

FACT FILE

Water in the Great Lakes is not viewed as a renewable resource: less than 1% is renewed each year through precipitation and inflow from streams.

FACT FILE

There are 40,000 large dams (more than four stories high) on Earth and about 800,000 small ones, which have shifted so much weight that geophysicists think they have slightly altered the speed of the planet's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field.

FACT FILE

By the time China's Three Gorges Dam is completed (in about 2009), it will have become the world's largest and most expensive, with an estimated cost of up to $75 billion.

FACT FILE

In December 2000, according to one report, the governors of the eight Great Lakes states called for a binding agreement with Canada by 2004 to protect the lakes from excessive withdrawals.

FACT FILE

Less than two weeks after it was re-elected in June 1999, the Ontario government lifted its ban on new water permits for large commercial consumers, a ban which was announced a month before the election.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. Have students do a report on industrial pollution in your province and what is being done to correct it. Beyond Canada, find out how global industries, such as gold mining, are having an impact on the world's water.

2. Investigate the granting of exploration licenses recently given to two oil and gas companies to start developing the coastal waters of Cape Breton by the governments of Nova Scotia and Canada: the Sierra Club has a lot to say about the environmental impact of such operations on the area's rich marine lift, fisheries, as well as tourism.

3. The Council of Canadians' Maude Barlow says water must be seen as a human right, not just a human need. "If water is a human need, it can be supplied by corporations," she says. "It is hard to make a profit on a human right." Discuss.

Websites

Global Water Corporation
http://www.
globalwatercorporation.com/

Great list of water links
http://www.tisdaleschooldiv.
sk.ca/kanuski/teachers/
web_assign/webquest/water/
links.htm

UN Food and Agriculture
Organization - http://www.
fao.org/default.htm

International Development
Enterprises
http://www.ideorg.org

RELATED ARTICLE: DAM DAMAGE

Dams can be a mixed blessing. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River makes it possible for 20 million people to live an affluent lifestyle in the American southwest. Take away the Hoover Dam and the land returns to shrub and cactus desert that can only support a few thousand people. But, the water in the Colorado River that used to flow into the ocean is now used to irrigate millions of hectares of cropland. That's good you might think, until you realize that river water also carried salt to the sea, salt that is now sprayed on cropland, slowly poisoning it.

According to an article in the World Press Review in December 2000, Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, a series of 22 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, "will flood traces of early human civilization and displace more than 100,000 people. Large dams underway on the Yangtze in China, the Narmada in India, and the Mekong in Southeast Asia, [are] among 1,600 dams currently under construction in 40 countries, [which] will displace millions, damage the environment, and cause a colossal loss of the world's cultural heritage."

Critics say the most obvious beneficiaries of the giant structures are politicians, bureaucrats, and builders, who profit from their huge price tags. Building them creates lots of jobs for people who happily throw their support behind the political leaders who approve them.

RELATED ARTICLE: BOTTLING IT ALL UP IS BIG BUSINESS

Residents in Grey County, Ontario were shocked when the provincial government gave one of Canada's largest water bottlers the right to take 176 million litres a year of clean, fresh spring water from part of the county where wells and ponds were drying up. The company, Echo Springs Water Co. Ltd. of Mississauga wanted to bottle the water from the headwaters of the Rocky Saugeen River, which ultimately empties into Lake Huron. That was in 1999, by which time commercial bottlers in Ontario had been given the right to take more than 18 billion litres a year from Ontario's water supply. (Canada allows the export of bottled water because quantities are not large enough to be considered environmentally threatening, which bulk sales of ocean tankers full of water would be.)

According to one newspaper report, dozens of bottlers operate across the country tapping "everything from icebergs in Newfoundland to rivers tumbling off the coastal mountains of British Columbia." In 1999, Canadian bottlers had permits granting them volumes of water that could supply the entire U.S. bottled water market (one of the largest in the world) two times over. In 1998, the provinces exported almost 272 million litres of water to the U.S., more than double the amount exported in 1996. That made Canadian bottlers the largest suppliers to the huge American water market, sending about 100 times as much bottled water south as the U.S. sends north into Canada.

Domestic bottlers have the legal right to take about 30 billion litres a year (1,000 litres a year for every person in the country) from the country's springs, lakes, icebergs, and aquifers. British Columbia is the only province that charges anything for the resource: it receives a miniscule amount - $25,000 a year - in user fees, but the other provinces give it away.

Canadian water bottlers earned $200.2 million in revenue from their export sales in 1998. Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia account for 99% of domestic exports of water to the United States: Quebec has the biggest share of the market, accounting for 90% of exports on its own.

A study by the International Joint Commission estimates the value of the U.S. market for bottled water is about $4.3 billion (U.S.) annually, and during the 1990s Canada's share of that market increased from 6% to 45%, while France's share fell from 82% to 43%.