[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 165 (Tuesday, December 14, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H8333-H8334]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GIVING THE GIFT OF WATER TO THE NEEDIEST THIS HOLIDAY SEASON
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker and Members of the House, I rise to point
out that a very important consideration is about to take place in the
next 3 days dealing with the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World
Act. Its main sponsor is the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer). It
has 97 cosponsors. And I want to commend the bipartisan spirit in which
this bill has been put forward, because we have no less than one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten Members of the House
that belong to the minority that are cosponsors. And in the other body,
we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight Members of that
distinguished body who are in the minority there, plus two Independent
Senators that have joined us.
And why? Because we've been working on this question of water for the
continent of Africa and the states and the millions of people there
suffering there and in Haiti. And we have a very rare opportunity in
these next several days. The other body has passed the measure, and I
stand before the House tonight to urge that it be taken up here as soon
as possible.
As we gather for the holiday season, we are giving thanks for family
and friends, but what may be unconsidered and unmentioned is
appreciation for access to the water and adequate sanitation, something
that's taken for granted in our great country.
And so I rise to remind us that there are 884 million people across
the planet who went without access to clean water this year, and 2.5
billion men, women, and many, many children who went without adequate
sanitation. Without access to these basic building blocks, many of the
people of undeveloped nations will likely have been left without the
ability to work because of health problems that hamper productivity and
discourage economic investment.
The countries of the world, including our great Nation, have come
together to say that we can do better. And so a set of shared goals,
entitled the Millennium Development Goals, have set specific targets
relating to increasing access to water and sanitation by 2015. With
these goals, we and the international community have pledged to halve,
by 2015, to cut in half, the proportion of people who are unable to
reach or afford or come into possession of safe drinking water. Think
of it. And many of these are children. That's the worst part of it all.
And as this Congress draws to a close, we have a sensitive
opportunity to make good on that promise. Important legislation,
entitled the Water for the World Act, H.R. 2035, has already passed in
the other body. We need it here. And, if enacted, this bill could help
50 million people over the next 6 years.
Please join me in helping move this legislation across the finish
line and provide millions of our fellow world citizens with the gift of
water.
In Historic Vote, UN Declares Water a Fundamental Human Right
Juan Gonzalez: The United Nations General Assembly has
declared for the first time that access to clean water and
sanitation is a fundamental human right. In an historic vote
Wednesday, 122 countries supported the resolution, and over
forty countries abstained from voting, including the United
States, Canada and several European and other industrialized
countries. There were no votes against the resolution.
Nearly one billion people lack clean drinking water, and
over two-and-a-half billion do not have basic sanitation.
Bolivia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations,
Pablo Solon, introduced the resolution at the General
Assembly Wednesday.
Pablo Solon: [translated] At the global level,
approximately one out of every eight people do not have
drinking water. In just one day, more than 200 million hours
of the time used by women is spent collecting and
transporting water for their homes. The lack of sanitation is
even worse, because it affects 2.6 billion people, which
represents 40 percent of the global population. According to
the report of the World Health Organization and of UNICEF of
2009, which is titled ``Diarrhoea: Why Children Are [Still]
Dying and What We Can Do,'' every day 24,000 children die in
developing countries due to causes that can be prevented,
such as diarrhea, which is caused by contaminated water. This
means that a child dies every three-and-a- half seconds. One,
two, three. As they say in my village, the time is now.
Amy Goodman: Bolivia's ambassador to the United Nations,
Pablo Solon, urging support for the resolution Bolivia
introduced recognizing access to clean water and sanitation
as a fundamental human right.
For more on this historic vote, we're joined now here in
New York by longtime water justice advocate Maude Barlow.
She's the chair of the Council of Canadians, co-founder of
the Blue Planet Project and board chair of Food and Water
Watch. Last year she served as senior adviser on water to the
President of the United Nations General Assembly.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
Maude Barlow: So glad to be here.
Amy Goodman: Talk about the significance of this. If you
asked people in this country, they would have no idea this
has passed.
Maude Barlow: I know, I know, which is why you matter, I
just have to say. This is very, very distressing to know
something this important happened and it's been blanketed.
There's no media here; it's just like it didn't happen. It's
had media in other places.
There's no human--there has been on human right to water.
It wasn't included in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.
And then, more recently, when people have realized that it
needed to happen, there were very powerful forces against
it--powerful countries, powerful corporate interests and so
on. But Ambassador Solon and a number of developing countries
decided that they were going to move this, countries from the
Global South, that they were going to move this through, and
they just tabled it a month ago, and yesterday, at the vote
at the United Nations, they won. Not one country had the guts
to stand against them, even though lots of them wanted to do
it.
And basically, for the first time, the United Nations
General Assembly debated the right to water and sanitation--
it's very important both were included--and acknowledged and
recognized the right of every human being on earth to water
and sanitation. And this matters because--as you know,
because we've talked so many times--we are running--a planet
running out of water. Brand new World Bank study says that
the demand is going to exceed supply by 40 percent in twenty
years. It's just a phenomenal statement. And the human
suffering behind that is just unbelievable. And what this did
as basically say that the United Nations has decided it's not
going to let huge populations leave them behind as this
crisis unfolds, that the new priority is to be given to these
populations without water and sanitation.
Juan Gonzalez: And the countries that abstained, could you
talk about--did any of them talk about why they were not
voting ``yes,'' or did they just remain quiet?
Maude Barlow: Oh, it was the usual gang. It was the United
States and Canada, the European--not the European Union--the
United Kingdom some of the European countries voted to
abstain; some were wonderful--Australia, New Zealand. So it
was all of the Anglophone, neoliberal, you know, bought into
this whole agenda that everything is to be commodified,
countries who are able to continue to supply clean water to
their citizens, which makes it doubly appalling that they
would deny the right to water to the billions of people who
are suffering right now.
They used procedural language about this and that. There's
another process in Geneva with the Human Rights Council,
which we support, and they used the excuse that we have to
wait for that. But that's a long-term process, and it could
or could not end in something very specific. So they just cut
through it. A bunch of brave countries from the Global South
said, ``We can't wait. We need this now.'' And it's not a
surprise that it came from Bolivia, because, remember,
Bolivia is suffering double whammy with a, you know, dearth
of water, dearth of clean water, but also melting glaciers
from climate change.
Amy Goodman: Well, let's go back to Bolivia. I want to go
back to Bolivia's UN representative, Ambassador Pablo Solon,
at a
[[Page H8334]]
speech he gave in Toronto, the event that you organized,
Maude, last month, shortly before the G20 meetings. He
outlined the need to support a UN declaration on the human
right to water, referencing the long struggle for water
rights in Bolivia, which successfully fought against
Bechtel's water privatization efforts ten years ago.
Pablo Solon: In those days, I was a water warrior. Now I'm
a water warrior ambassador. We have to have water declared as
a human right in the UN. It is not possible to see that we
have declared in the UN food, the right to food, the right to
health, the right to education, the right to shelter, the
right to development, but not the right to water. And we all
know that without water, we can't live. So nobody can argue
that it's not a basic and fundamental and universal human
right. But even though, until now, it's not recognized as a
human right. So, we have presented, two weeks ago, a draft
resolution so that this coming month, in July, we expect to
have a vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations.
And we want to see which countries are going to vote against
that resolution. We want to go to vote to see which
governments are going to say to the humanity that water is
not a human right.
Amy Goodman: That was Bolivia's ambassador to the United
Nations, Pablo Solon, speaking in Toronto. Which nations are
not going to say that water is a human right? Well, you said
the United States didn't vote for this. Canada didn't, though
they didn't vote against. What is their rationale?
Maude Barlow: Well, it depends on the country. The United
Kingdom says they ``don't want to pay for the toilets in
Africa.'' That's a direct quote from somebody who wouldn't be
quoted, from a senior diplomat in the government of Great
Britain, that was in--quoted in a Canadian paper.
Canada hides behind the false statement that we might have
to share our water, sell our water to the United States,
which is nonsense. We're in way more danger from NAFTA, which
declares water to be a commodity.
The United States, as you know, has not been supporting
rights regimes for decades now, so this is just a
continuation. And I have to tell you, listening to the
statement from the United States yesterday at the United
Nations, I wouldn't have thought there was any difference
between George Bush and Barack Obama's administrations. It
was haughty language. They scolded Bolivia. Bolivia came
under a lot of heat, a lot of insults yesterday from these
countries.
New Zealand and Australia are both going private. Australia
has privatized its water totally, and basically it's now for
sale. And there's a big American investment firm that's
actually buying up water rights. It was supposed to be,
originally, just to get the farmers of the big farm
conglomerates to share, to trade, but now it's all gone
private and international, so they're hardly going to support
something that says that water, you know, is a human right,
when they've commodified it and said it's a market commodity.
So, really, what you're seeing is a split between those
countries that see water as a public trust, although that
wasn't in the language of the legislation, but that see water
as a public trust and a human right and that should belong to
all, as opposed to those who are going to move to a market
model. And I think that's the truth behind what happened.
And it's very important for you to know that they did not
allow the inclusion of the words ``access to,'' and that was
one of the demands. I think some of those countries would
have said yes to something that said ``access to.'' And it's
very important. It's not semantic, because if you say you
have access to it, then all the country--all the government
has to do is provide you access. Then they can charge you, or
they can have a private company come in and deliver it and
charge you. And if you can't afford it, they provided you
access, it's not their fault if you can't pay it. So it's
very important that Bolivia and the other sponsoring
countries held on to the language of the human right to
drinking water and sanitation. They wouldn't drop sanitation.
They wouldn't add the words ``access to.'' And those were the
sticking points.
Juan Gonzalez: And in practical terms, what will be the
impact of this resolution on those efforts to continue to
commodify or privatize water supplies in countries around the
world, especially in the third world?
Maude Barlow: It's a fight we're in. You know, I'm not
going to say that suddenly everything is going to be fine
tomorrow or today, today being the day after the vote, that
anybody woke up in a different situation today, anybody had
more water today than they did yesterday, or more access to
sanitation.
What it is is a moral statement, a guiding principle, of
the countries of the world--and basically the UN is the
closest thing we have to a global parliament--that they have
taken a step in a direction of saying that water is a human
right and a public trust and that no one should be dying for
lack of water, and they shouldn't have to watch their
children die a horrible death for lack of water because they
cannot pay. And that was a statement that has taken us years
and years to get the UN--they hadn't even debated the water
issue. They hadn't even debated it in the past. They've done
all this work on climate and absolutely no work on water. So
it was a huge step forward to establishing some principles
that we need if we are to avoid the crisis that I honestly
see coming, that I think is going to be worse than anybody
can imagine, in terms of the suffering.
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