Water For Capitalism Is Merely Another Commodity

Imagine the swift and fierce government response if Al-Qaeda took a precious resource out of a delicate environment, sold it for profit and endangered 40 million people in the process. Now compare that example to the nonexistent government response to American energy companies, golf courses and corporations like Nestlé taking 75 percent of the groundwater out of the Colorado River Basin at a time when the American West is facing a record drought.

Nestlé has two plants on the Colorado River Basin that take in water to bottle and sell under its Arrowhead and Pure Life brands. According to annual reports filed up to 2009, Nestlé bottles between 595 and 1,366 acre-feet of water per year – enough to flood that many acres under a foot of water – from the California source. The company takes 200 additional acre-feet per year from the Colorado source. This means altogether Nestlé is draining the Colorado River Basin of anywhere from 250 million to 510 million gallons of water per year, according to the acre-feet-to-gallons conversion calculator.

The Colorado River Basin is an especially critical water resource, responsible for supplying municipal water to 40 million Americans and irrigating 5.5 million acres of land. As the US Bureau of Reclamation has documented, 22 federally-recognized tribes, seven national wildlife refuges, four national recreation areas, and 11 national parks depend on the basin. In a new report by NASA and the University of California at Irvine, researchers discovered that between December of 2004 and November of 2013, the basin lost 53 million acre-feet of water. 41 million acre-feet, or 75 percent of that loss, came from groundwater sources, like those pumped by Nestlé. That’s more than twice the amount of water contained in Lake Mead, America’s largest freshwater reservoir. In the meantime, Nestlé, with 29 water bottling facilities across North America, pocketed $4 billion in revenue from bottled water sales in 2012 alone.

But Nestlé isn’t alone in abusing the main water source of the Western United States. Expansive golf courses in desert areas, like those in Arizona and Southern California, require hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day to maintain. According to the United States Golf Association (USGA), 2 million acres of American golf courses are irrigated, or 80 percent of the country’s total golf course acreage.Between 2003 and 2005, the USGA estimated that 2,312,701 acre-feet of water was used to maintain golf courses, amounting to over 2 billion gallons of water per day. An NPR report from 2008 put that in perspective, comparing the average daily water usage of one golf course to the amount of water used by one American family over the course of 4 years.

The nonprofit CNA Corporation recently released a study, according to which, 41 percent of American freshwater consumption came from energy production alone. Energy sources like nuclear and coal power were responsible for the bulk of water consumption, though the process of hydraulic fracturing – better known as fracking, where jets of water mixed with chemicals are blasted underground to break up shale formations that produce natural gas – was also high on the list.
 A prime example is Texas, where the population is expected to skyrocket from 25 million to 55 million in the next 35 years. Texas currently draws 91 percent of its electricity from natural gas, nuclear and coal power. And in the summer of 2011, Texas experienced its worst drought in history.

Outdoing Texas, California is now facing its worst drought in 1,200 years. Latest numbers from the National Drought Mitigation Center show that 80 percent of California is in “extreme drought.” A full 31 percent of California is experiencing “exceptional drought” conditions, including population centers like Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Food prices have gone up by an average of 2.5 percent since last year, and are expected to increase by another 3.5 percent before year’s end. No less than 85 percent of the lettuce Americans eat comes from drought-ravaged California. Fresh fruits and vegetable prices are projected to increase by 6 percent in the coming months as a result of the drought.

Corporate executives are quickly making moves to privatize water resources, declaring the resource to be the next oil. Peter Brabeck, chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, has openly said that “access to water is not a public right.” This is in spite of UN Resolution 64/292, which declares that water and sanitation are both basic human rights.

full article here

P.S.

'The U.S. could supply all of California with water if we fixed our leaky pipes'

As if California didn’t already have enough water issues to worry about right now, last week Los Angeles lost more than 20 million gallons – a day’s worth for at least 100,000 people – when a pipe that was installed a century ago finally broke. But it turns out geriatric pipes aren’t just a problem for the City of Angels. Aging infrastructure means that nationwide, pipes hemorrhage seven billion gallons of treated drinking water each day; enough to meet the daily water needs of the entire state of California.

from here

 It is merely dreaming to think these problems can or will be fixed all the while we accept existence within capitalism. We all need water, every single one of us every day. The answer is in our hands. Together we must work for the abolition of this system that works against all of us for the duration of our lives and replace it with socialism - inclusive and democratic with people, not profits as a vital element.
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