As the community of communes de Fontainebleau-Avon has to renew its contract for water distribution, we publish excerpts from a forum written in March 2010 by Alexander Fabry, spokesman for the PS and Utopia Nicolas Pagnier, National Secretary of Utopia. The issue presented is that we live every day in our city. The community elected are they going to work and renegotiate the contract?
"The management of water supply is currently a challenging issue in all communities. (...)
That large multinational water companies have the experience and know-how of capture and distribution of water, nobody doubts. They do better than public facilities, it remains to be demonstrated. Surveys of consumer associations show that on average, prices are higher by 20-44% in the municipalities that have delegated their water service and sanitation to the private sector! When you know that 75% of French users grouped in 60% of communes are powered by three multinationals, we measure the magnitude of this additional cost ... Whether capacity to provide a sustainable resource, it is permissible to doubt, because these large groups are structurally short of this. The purpose here is not to blame: under capitalism, this is simply not their role. Their role is the realization of a profit within a service-profit water supply.
And that is the heart of the problem: the water should it be a source of life and a source of profit? Can we ethically accept that water used to enrich the shareholders of these large groups (mainly in France, Veolia, Suez and Saur)? Especially when families lack access to minimum water necessary for life and that this resource is far from inexhaustible on the planet. We know that desertification continues to rise and water becomes scarce. Meanwhile, consumption rose structurally by the double impact of increased population and growth of our requirements related in particular to the way we produce food. In this context, today, 1.5 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 2 billion have no sanitation and 2.5 billion drink polluted water.
The return on the history of this water management provides an interesting perspective, since this system has experienced a relatively recent expansion outside France, at the time "revolution" conservative and neo-liberal 80's including the award of the water market to private companies in the United Kingdom Mr. Thatcher and Chile A. Pinochet! The first argument was so much the ideology of the supremacy of the market. (...) We affirm
today: That the right to a minimum of water is a fundamental and universal right, whatever his country or its means. We therefore call for the establishment of free slices of raw water, funded by a progressive rise in the cost of the following bands and calculated per liter of water per person and preserving families numerous. This principle combines social and ecological justice, as large consumers will pay for those who are stewards of the resource, the use misuse funding. South Africa has entrenched this principle, providing its population 25 liters per person per day. A mouvement.Que we follow this water is a universally shared well and can not therefore be a profit. We therefore call for management by a system of public ownership or CICS (Cooperative Collective Interest), allowing consumers and politicians unite in a collective and rational management of the resource.
There is in these positions no trial or no a priori suspicion, but an ethical reflection combined with a pragmatic desire to meet a global challenge of the twenty-first century: managing water balancing social justice and ecology
Alexander Fabry, spokesman for Utopia in PS, Nicolas
Pagnier, National Secretary of Utopia,
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