Southern states seek water truce

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Drought pushes states to find new fixes

A dispute over a precious water supply forced three Southern governors Thursday (Nov. 1) to turn to Washington, D.C., to seek a truce — offering a vivid example of how states are grappling this year with a drought that has touched nearly every state in the country.

Discussing the issue as a group for the first time, Republican Govs. Bob Riley of Alabama, Charlie Crist of Florida and Sonny Perdue of Georgia met with U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and other Bush administration officials to work toward a compromise over the diminishing water supply.

Drought conditions have become especially dire in the South, where the three states are struggling to balance competing interests that rely on water from Lake Lanier in Georgia. The reservoir provides water for the nearly 3 million people in metropolitan Atlanta, allows a nuclear power plant in Alabama to operate and provides a home for wildlife in Florida.

“We have reached a point today where we have to make some decisions,” Riley said. “If we go through another year like we did this year, then we cannot continue to operate under the same system that we’ve operated under for the last 40 or 50 years.”
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These guys got the answer, if you got the money.

World Water Forum

There are ten major corporate players now delivering freshwater services for profit. Between them, the two biggest - Vivendi and Suez of France - deliver private water and wastewater services to over 200 million customers in 150 countries, and are in a race, along with the others such as Bouygues SAUR, RWE-Thames Water and Bechtel-United Utilities, to expand to every corner of the globe.

The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, little transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption. They are aggressively accelerating their operations in Third World countries where debt-struck governments are forced to abandon public water services and hand over control of local water supplies to private interests. Based on the market policy known as "full cost recovery," the water companies are able to impose rate hikes that are devastating to millions of poor people who cannot afford privatized water.
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“About 60 percent of the renewable fresh water in the world has its origin in 261 international basins,” said OSU’s Marcia Macomber, the director of program development for the partnership. “This means most of the world’s water is shared water.”