[News] Thousands Have Lived without Love, but Not One without Water
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Apr 4 10:44:04 EDT 2024
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*Thousands Have Lived without Love, but Not One without Water: The
Fourteenth Newsletter (2024)*
Diego Rivera (Mexico), /El Agua, Origen de la Vida /(‘Water, Origin of
Life’), 1951.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had
begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. ‘Every hour that
passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in
the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at
risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe
drinking water’, said
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Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe
drinking water and sanitation. ‘Israel’, he noted, ‘must stop using
water as a weapon of war’. Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza,
97 percent
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of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human
consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the
course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed
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Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials
and chemicals needed for repair.
In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use
their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a
genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the
Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said
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on 10 October, ‘Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has
imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage.
You wanted hell, you will get hell’. On 19 March, UN Humanitarian
Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted
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that Gaza needed ‘spare parts for water and sanitation systems’ as well
as ‘chemicals to treat water’, since the ‘lack of these critical items
is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis’. ‘Malnutrition
crisis’ is one way to talk about a famine.
Faeq Hassan (Iraq), /The Water Carriers/, 1957.
The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is ‘currently facing high
levels of acute food insecurity’, according to Oxfam
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and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification
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– has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with
force. A UN report
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released on World Water Day (22 March) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2
billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that
four out of five people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and
that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems. As a
consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of five
die
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from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These
children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to
these deficiencies. The UN report notes that, since women and girls are
the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding
water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent
infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has
resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school.
Newsha Tavakolian (Iran), /Untitled/, 2010–2011.
A 2023 study
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by UN Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls:
Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not
affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during
menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people
who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less
frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of
urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure
facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often
limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.
The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious
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danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh,
where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people.
Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), /Les trois amis II /(‘The Three Friends II’), 2018.
Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate
catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which
lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground
aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water
in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture.
Already, as the UN Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts
that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly.
According to the United Nations
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half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at
least part of the year, while one quarter faces ‘extremely high’ levels
of water stress. ‘Climate change is projected to increase the frequency
and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability’,
the UN notes
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The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing
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tens of millions of people into flight and starvation.
Ibrahim Hussein (Malaysia), /The Game/, 1964.
Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so
is the rules-based international order
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Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical
notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in
creating the water crisis. For instance, over the past several decades,
governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater
treatment facilities. Consequently, 42% of household wastewater is not
treated properly
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which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact
that only 11% of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused
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Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of
pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of
the freshwater available to us on the planet. There are several sensible
policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis,
such as those proposed
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by UN Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest
rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are
precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed
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by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of
nature.
In March 2018, we launched our second dossier
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/Cities Without Water/. It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed
then, six years ago:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI
(IPCC, June 2008
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is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this
document is that the changes in weather patterns – induced by
carbon-intensive capitalism – have a negative effect on the water
cycle. Areas where there will be higher rainfall might not see more
groundwater due to the velocity of the rain, which will create a
rapid movement of water to the oceans. Such high velocity rainfall
neither refills aquifers (natural water sources), nor does it allow
water to be stored by humans. The scientists also predict higher
rates of drought in regions such as the Mediterranean and Southern
Africa. It is this technical report that put forward the number that
over a billion people will suffer from water scarcity.
For the past decade, the United Nations Environmental Programme has
warned
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about the growth of water-intensive lifestyles and of water
pollution. Both of these – lifestyles and pollution – are
consequences of the spread of capitalist social relations and
capitalist productive mechanisms across the planet. In terms of
lifestyle use, the average resident in the United States consumes
between 300 and 600 litres of water per day. This is a misleading
figure. It does not mean that individuals consume such high amounts
of water. Much of this water is used by water-intensive agriculture
and by water-intensive industrial production, including energy
production. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends
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per person usage of 20 litres of water per day for basic hygiene and
food preparation. The gap between the two is not accidental. It is
about a water-intensive lifestyle – use of washing machines and
dishwashers, washing of cars and watering of gardens, as well as the
use of water by factories and factory farms.
Water pollution is a serious problem. In Esquel, Argentina, the
people saw that the contaminants from corporate gold mining were
ruining their drinking water. ‘Water is worth more than gold’ (/El
agua vale más que el oro/), they said. Ruthless techniques of
extraction by mining corporations (by use of cyanide) and of
cultivation by agribusiness (by use of fertilisers and pesticides)
have ruined reservoirs of clean water. Their blue gold, say the
people of Esquel, is more important than real gold. They held a
public assembly in 2003 that asserted their right to their water
against the interests of the private corporations.
It is worth pointing out that the amount of water it would take to
support 4.7 billion people at the WHO daily minimum would be 9.5
billion litres – the exact amount used every day to water the
world’s golf courses. The water used by 60,000 villages in Thailand,
for instance, is used to water one golf course in Thailand. These
are the priorities of our current system.
In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing
piped water to the thousand children under the age of five who die every
day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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