This was a discussion at the Australian Sustainability Group on LinkedIn staarted by Erin O’Donnell, of DSE Victoria, who asked:
International water ‘barons’ are starting to emerge – is this a good or bad thing for water resource management? Liquidity for farmers versus market dominance by non-water-users? The Weekly Times -Water Barons
My answer:
I think it is a really bad idea for communities. While in the short term, it may solve a few farmers financial woes and get them a retirement bonus, on the longer term I see nothing but difficulties.
The economics I like and have observed as effective and people sized is that of EF Schumacher, “Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered”
Corporatism (the big version of what used to be called Capitalism) is after a milk cow of guaranteed income, it wants modern day serfs and peasants dependent on their GM Seed or communities buying their toxic bottled water. The amoral ideology coming out of right-wing thinking (an oxymoron?) university economics departments and spun by PR firms who sold their souls eaons ago, is to privatise the utilities, based on the mythologies that only the private sector can be efficient, and that is not the business of government to ….. do whatever suits their agenda.
But what is not a mythology is that pushing profit margins by big corporations without any moral restraints and strong regulation, backed by unmovable politicians (another oxymoron), leads to a break down of regulation through the lobbying and corruption of the democratic political process, increasing risk-taking and non-accountability, corruption of the regulators and the company, and a potential breakdown of the reliable provision of what used to be an essential service. Then with changing weather patterns, food shortages, and a growing global population, there is the other unspoken matter of what happens when an increasingly scarce resource like water is owned by corporations.
I had a good view from the inside when I was a technician with Telstra while it was “corporatizing” before it went private. I left, before the slide in standards & service was too bad, but heard from my former technical colleagues unfortunate enough to be working in an organisation that told its employees to lie and fudge figures going to the minister or the market. We saw technical standards fall and backup systems removed for reasons of economic efficiency. The new profit culture was the antithesis of the good engineering standards for the provision of service, where lives were dependent on the phone system infrastructure. Just the same as when Telstra consolidated Triple 0 in two places in Australia, to save dollars, all the technical staff knew that such decisions would eventually cost lives, and we were right.
Water barons have no connection to the country, no loyalty to community structures and groups, and are not grounded in a meaningful engagement with soil or people.
Jefferson said that “merchants had no loyalty to the soil” and nothing has changed. So unless we are talking about the new Corporation Version 2.0 ready to run for the Green Economy where people and planet count, where they practice and believe in codes of ethical conduct and do their Corporate Sustainability Reports and mean it, then the water Barons will be the old unreformed corporations whose “raison d’etre”, reason for being, is maximised profit, anywhere, at any price.
If we sell the water to the “barons” the short term gain for a few, will be at the long term pain of the many. We need a third way that looks after people and ecosystems.
