Big Is Ugly: Corporate Enclosure and the Global Water Supply

"Just Say No to H₂O" sounds like the kind of advice one gives to someone suffering from polydipsia, a horrible psychiatric disorder that causes its victims to drink water from any available source—the ocean, the toilet—at an uncontrollable rate. In fact, as Robert Glennon points out in Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), the slogan is part of a campaign by the Coca-Cola Company and the Olive Garden restaurant chain to put an end to what they call "tap water incidence" and sell customers on the virtues of the Dasani brand of bottled water marketed by Coke. The logic behind the soft-drink giant's move into the bottled water business was nicely summed up by a former principal of Perrier, that most venerable of water bottlers, who is quoted by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke in Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World's Water (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002): "It struck me . . . that all you had to do is take water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter, oil" (p. 142).

In 1973, when the bottled water industry was just getting off the ground, E. F. Schumacher, the visionary economist and entrepreneur, published his iconoclastic book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Really Mattered. He wrote: "The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear" (pp. 26-27). It was the creation of new needs by big business that Schumacher presumably had in mind. As he argued, the pursuit of wealth through a model of industrial organization founded on the credo that bigger is better led to unexpected consequences. These included declines in efficiency and environmental and working conditions as notions of limitless economic growth ran up against various social and ecological constraints. Published the same year as the first "energy crisis," the book included an analysis of fuel consumption that predicted trouble to come as those nations with vast reserves of oil came into conflict with countries eager to share in that wealth. What Schumacher did not predict, however, was that as the twenty-first century began to unfold, water, not oil, would wrench nations apart. Barlow and Clarke quote a 2000 article from Fortune: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."

According to Diane Raines Ward's Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), the ranks of the water poor are simply staggering. Roughly 1.4 billion people in the world today do not have an adequate supply of this precious resource. Thousands of children die every day from water borne disease. A report by the United Nations reveals that thirty-one nations across the globe are currently mired in some stage of water crisis. Even in the United States, nearly 20 percent of the public sips from a water source polluted with lead, feces, or some other toxin.

The crisis spans the globe, but the perils are felt most sharply in developing countries. About three-quarters of those living under the threat of water scarcity, according to the United Nations, reside in the Third World. People living in North America use about 160 gallons of water per day. Europeans use 80 gallons. But in parts of Africa, per capita water use is less than 5 gallons a day.¹ The United Nations claims that what Europeans spend each year on ice cream (some eleven billion dollars) is more than enough to provide adequate water and sewerage...