The World Water Forum Comes to Mexico City

[Judi Lynn]

Marketing Fight
The World Water Forum Comes to Mexico City
by John Gibler
April 05, 2006

In Mexican water politics, poverty is good business. Eleven million people here live without access to potable water and another 25 million live in villages and cities with taps that run as little as a few hours a week. Most of those who do have in-door plumbing and supposedly potable water do not drink it. This all makes Mexico a $32 billion a year market for bottled water companies like Coca Cola and Nestle.

In 1992, as part of the constitutional reforms necessary to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), then-President Carlos Salinas pushed an amendment of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to allow concessions of water and water services to foreign companies. In the decade that followed, Mexico privatized twenty percent of its water services and became the second largest bottled water consumer in the world.

In Iztapalapa, Mexico City's largest neighborhood, residents say that tamarind water flows from the tap, generously comparing the brown liquid that waits in their pipes to a lunchtime beverage. Their water problems, however, pre-date the Salinas era privatizations.
(snip)

Nearly 2 million people in Iztapalapa live in the belly of a dried lake and depend upon a fast-sinking, contaminated aquifer for drinking water. The Churubusco River that used to flow into the lake is now caught on the edge of the Valley of Mexico and rerouted to the high-end neighborhoods of Las Lomas, where the fourth World Water Forum was held from March 16-22 in a convention center owned by Mexico's largest bank, Banamex.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=59&ItemID=10042

[sandnsea]

1. "Tales of Water" project

This is a really excellent project that was presented at the World Water Forum. They told the stories of children in 5 deltas around the world, how important water is to their lives, what they have to do to try to get clean water, etc. Very moving.

"The foundation visited the Mekong in Thailand, the Niger in Mali, the Pangani in Tanzania, the Zarqa in Jordan and theTacana at the border of Mexico and Guatemala.¼br /> Brothers Hasan and Suleiman, Jordanian nomads, carry buckets long distances to their tent while sisters Razan and her sister Marah, from a more affluent home, learn at an early age that they must drink only bottled water as tap water is too dangerous. In Tanzania, children must carry water to school in plastic buckets, there are no water taps, restrooms or kitchen facilities. They grow their own vegetables, watered by hand, and prepare the vegetables for eating with buckets carried from the village furrow."

Links:

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/?p=5