by Piyush Mathur

According to the United Nations’ World Water Development Report 2019, more than “2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress, and about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year.” The report predicts “an increase of 20 to 30% above the current level of water use” within the next 30 years. Apart from water’s region-wide shortages, the world faces challenges related to its local distribution, usage allowance, wastage, pricing, and quality, among others.

Those who live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America hardly need to be told that the globe has been facing a water crisis. What they and their fellow earthlings may not realize, however, is that this crisis has been manifesting itself outside these three regions as well. By the end of 2018, for instance, the United States knew that lead contamination was one of its national problems relating to water. And way back in August 2010, the European Commission had already put out its report titled “Water Scarcity and Drought in the European Union.”

More recently—in a 2016 article titled “The Problems of Water Stress”—the European Environment Agency observed that the Mediterranean was estimated to have “over 2 million cases of gastrointestinal illness annually” owing to its bathing water’s microbiological contamination. Nevertheless, the global water crisis has not somehow caught the public’s attention enough to force the public to address it on a war footing. Indeed, as late as August 15, 2019, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Resources Institute was quoted to say that “Water stress is the biggest crisis no one is talking about.”

Against the above backdrop, I decided to walk down the memory lane—all the way back to Year 2002—and review what was very likely the first book-length articulation in English of an already advancing global water crisis: Vandana Shiva’s Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. I present below this retro-review for the benefit of Thoughtfox readers.

A retro-review of Vandana Shiva’s Water Wars:  Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (2002)

Immediately after I gave it my first reading, I realised that Water Wars would be a difficult book to review:  It would be hard to capture its factual riches; to do justice to its multidimensionality and political potency; and, most of all, to appraise the philosophical depths that Shiva’s simple, transparent prose has so eloquently measured and in so few words. That may seem a rather unwarranted literary start for the review of a book whose title and subtitle betray a critique of international water policies under the thrust of globalisation—and which indeed delivers exactly that.  But Water Wars far transcends the usual policy talk—claiming a place of pride also amidst the fields of environmental ethics, philosophies of technology and knowledge, and political and cultural theories. 

Lest I give the impression that the book is mainly of academic interest, let me add that Shiva is a full-time environmental activist whose currency with the global grassroots community had made the book quite popular outside the walls of the classroom soon after its publication. How could a book so short, poorly proofread by the South End Press, and admittedly often a meandering sally of Shiva’s previous activist and journalistic postings, be projected to command such a broad appeal? Well, Shiva’s breadth of scholarship, experiential wisdom, and global standing are certainly to credit; equally responsible, however, are the universalistic importance of water, the topic of her analysis, and her apposite handling thereof.

On the latter front, the primary contribution of Water Wars lies, ironically, in its fearless restoration of organic universalism and sacred holism to water.  On the conceptual level, such a restoration requires a certain liberation of water—its de-bottling and de-damming, if you will—from and within the minds of the global urban middle and upper classes (the book’s default readership). And, of course, it requires a whole lot else:  delivering which is quite a feat within the contemporary educated context, sliced up as it is by instrumental reasoning, cloistered academic research, and careerism on one hand, and naive materialism and commercial fantasies of atomised futures, on the other.

Shiva starts off with the observation that a massive water crisis is afoot in the larger part of the world—i.e., the availability of water there is “lower than 1,000 cubic meters per person per year”—and that it is likely to worsen and spread (1).  She places the primary blame for that crisis on “excessive water use”—rather than population growth:  insofar as “the rate of water withdrawal has exceeded that of population growth by a factor of two and one-half” through the past hundred years (2).  The rest of the book investigates and exposes how a culture of water waste has come about and acquired a certain fashionable legitimacy and whether and how it could be checked. 

As the first step in that direction, Shiva postulates that—and demonstrates how—free market capitalism has transformed water from a quasi-sacred and valued global commons prudently managed by local ecological communities to a scarce commodity that could be bought, sold, and controlled for pecuniary gains by corporations with the support of governments.  Viewing the monetized water market as the reason behind, rather than a solution to, the water crisis, Shiva rejects “the market paradigm” for explaining the crisis (14).  That paradigm blames the “absence of water trade” for the crisis and seeks to resolve it through free trade in water:  The assumption there is that the free market mechanism would allow water to “be transferred to regions of scarcity” whereas “higher prices would lead to conservation” (14, 15).

Shiva points out that the market paradigm is “blind to the ecological limits set by the water cycle and the economic limits set by poverty”:  Moreover, the logic of commodification that drives it falsely assumes that water could be substituted by something else (15).  In reality, “[o]ver-exploitation of water and disruption of the water cycle create absolute scarcity”—leading her to argue that the “water crisis is an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions” (15).  Alternatively, Shiva asserts that the “solution to an ecological crisis is ecological,” whereas “injustice” can be addressed by “democracy” (15).  The water crisis, as a mix of ecological imbalance and inequity, can thus only be addressed by “rejuvenating ecological democracy” (15).

In order to back up her position, Shiva analyses a diversity of cases from around the world, laying out well the constitutive nature of the crisis—its economic, legal, social, cultural, and ecological dimensions through the history.  Simultaneously she adjudicates among key policy solutions to the crisis and the principles behind them and lays bare the aggravating roles of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, governments, and the ideologies of privatisation and corporatisation.  She also makes visible the linkages between the crisis and such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the Green Revolution, climate change, damming, food famines, modern technology, agricultural biotechnology, and international conflicts.  

One also gets some well-worked out exposés in Shiva’s account of the manipulative transactions of such water giants as Vivendi Environment, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaus, Aguas de Barcelona, Thames Water, Biwater, and United Utilities—and their sly relationships with various governments and international financial bodies.  Typically, Shiva follows up on those depressing stories with her insightful, though sometimes equally sad, reports on a range of localized opposition to the capitalistic marketing of water.  In fact, she reasons out those struggles both epistemologically and politically, and provides the rationale for why they deserve and need a much broader support.

Outside the realm of economics, and at the level of international law and governance, Shiva discusses—and illustrates through some of the more famous historical cases of their invocation—the following four dominant theories of “water rights”:  the “territorial sovereignty theory” (also called the “Harmon doctrine”); the “natural water flow theory” (also called the “territorial integrity theory”); the equitable apportionment theory; and the community of interest theory” (77-81).  The Harmon doctrine “holds that riparian states have exclusive or sovereign rights over the water flowing through their territory”; the natural water flow theory mandates that, beyond its reasonable use, the “upper riparian owner must allow the water to flow in its natural course to the lower riparian owner in its ordinary channel” (77); and the equitable apportionment theory (akin to the community of interest theory) “holds that international rivers should be used by different states on an equitable basis” (78).  

Shiva acknowledges the utility of the above theories to the articulation of a basic legal framework for water rights but maintains that none of them has, on its own or in combination with the rest, “ensured justice” (80).  The United States and India, for example, conceded rights to Mexico and Pakistan—their respective neighbours—even while asserting their riparian ownerships of specific rivers; Egypt and Sudan have conflicted over the natural water flow theory; and defining “equitability” is contentious, methodologically intricate, and “further complicated because water use is normally determined by the needs and economic development stages of the nation—factors that are constantly changing” (78).  

As if as a way out of the above limitations, Shiva points up the factors of ecological diversity and uniqueness of each basin.  Here, she criticizes the United Nation’s proffering of purely political solutions to international water conflicts through its 1997 Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Water Courses (75, 76).  Such solutions, she notes, have been based upon “the rule of equitable and reasonable use and the no-harm rule”:  the former referring “to water sharing on an equitable basis among multiple users,” the latter to “not causing harm to co-riparian states”  (76).  Both of these two foundational rules, she concludes, neglect the “most basic law related to water—the natural law of the water cycle”—and thus respond inadequately to the “ecological and political challenges posed by water conflicts” (76).

On the whole, however, Shiva’s narrative goes beyond the criticisms of specific laws or political solutions.  She manages to sensitise us to the larger preoccupation of the framework of modern water laws with rights, ownership, and consumption; she also alerts us to the fact of their having been derived, erroneously, from private property laws and the ideology of free marketing rooted in particular moments in European and American histories.

As a counterpoise, Shiva reminds us of the traditional logics of conservation, responsible usage, and sharing (even within old Europe and pre-Colonial America)—which she believes are under serious attack from the modernistic principles and thus need a reinforcing and even a reviving.  As such, on the visionary level of cultural praxis, hers is a plea to return to the sacred, the spiritual, the prudent, and the organic; on the social front, she would like people to reclaim their older, traditional communitarian rights over local waters and to exercise their conservation ethics; on the political front, she discourages a dependence on the state, the market, and legal structures, citing their inadequacy, even counterproductive roles, as guardians of water; and, on the technological front, she favours time-tested, indigenous mechanisms and methods for agriculture and for the procurement, storage, and distribution of water (whose living examples dot her narrative).

Perhaps it would help to conclude by making it clear that Shiva’s penchant for the sacred in her philosophy of water is no superstitious diatribe or fundamentalist rant; instead, it is an empirical thesis that illustrates that belief, devotion, and mythical respect for water inspire local communities to “save and share” it (139).  Contrarily, the same communities tend to become indifferent “if external agencies—bureaucratic or commercial” become “the only beneficiaries of their efforts and resources” (31).

So on the level of activism and policy, Shiva’s advice is to promote “a dialogue between the movement against dams, the movement against the ecological hazards of intensive irrigation, and the movement for water rights” (82).  Water Wars is clearly a bold and most welcome step in that direction.

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External Reference: https://www.unwater.org/publications/world-water-development-report-2019/

Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).

Shiva, Vandana. (2002) Water Wars:  Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2002). 156 pages. Library of Congress Control Number:  2002100340.