Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation
Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation book. Happy reading Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation Pocket Guide.
Contents:
Before her election she worked as a legal advisor to a department of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. Steven P.
He is also an advisor to the Socialist Party of the Netherlands and editor of Spectre, a radical left on-line magazine. He has worked within the European Parliament since Convert currency. Add to Basket. Condition: New. Language: English. Brand new Book. Seller Inventory BTE Growing dissatisfaction with many neo-liberal reforms in the water sector in recent years, especially privatization, has fueled an explosion of popular protests that advance the claim of water as a human right Bakker , ; Conca ; Veiga da Cunha ; Khadka In , the human right to water captured the international stage when both the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly affirmed the right to water and sanitation as a basic human right.
Increasingly, human rights and equity issues are permeating discussions around development and the role of the private sector in the provision of Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in.
To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In.
Advanced Search. Article Navigation. Climate change of the scale and rapidity currently being experienced is a violent, disruptive and destructive process, a response to which demands careful decision-making, careful planning and meticulous implementation of the decisions and plans which result. Total war, in which entire populations are involved, has produced a response in modern times characterised by the socialisation of markets, a high degree of state intervention and planning, and the perception of the community as a single entity which must be nurtured and preserved.
Such an approach in Britain and other combatant nations during the Second World War ensured a widespread acceptance of the need for burdensharing and equitable treatment, as well as for the direction of economic and social activity towards a common goal. It is potentially disastrous that climate change should become manifest at a time when 30 years of propaganda have led to the hegemony of concepts which reject and contradict any idea of solidarity or common purpose. Given that top-down, dirigiste socialism has failed to solve the problems created by capitalism, the authors recognise that new and innovative forms of social ownership and economic planning will be needed.
We remain, however, unashamedly in favour of the socialisation of essential services, the social control of production and of a high degree of economic planning to meet our needs and our legitimate, life-enhancing desires. Climate change is beginning to have a tangible impact in an era when the huge commitment of public investment and endeavour which offer the only possibility of a mitigating response seem unlikely to be forthcoming.
The dominant economic ethos in Brussels and almost every EU capital is neo-liberalism, an orthodoxy embodied in every treaty since Maastricht. This has been dented by the financial crisis for which neo-liberal economics is entirely responsible, but hegemony is not so easily dislodged.
Having no evidence to back it in the first place, more than evidence will be required to dislodge neo-liberalism from its throne.
We've detected unusual activity from your computer network
Its spread at a time of rapid climate change has created a dangerous synergy which threatens to undermine global social and economic stability, leading to ecological catastrophe, disorder, epidemic and eventually possibly even war. The Problem of Uncertainty Dealing as we are with the highly complex systems which produce the weather, precise forecasting of the future of the climate is impossible.
While the likely extent of the problems associated with climate change may be difficult or impossible to gauge, the fact that such problems will occur and that they will be significant enough to demand an international, coordinated response is certain. Recent research suggests, for example, that by five times as much land will be suffering under extreme drought as is currently the case, while million people could be displaced.
Water, Health and Development The problems related to water are matters of quality as well as quantity. In other words, people who do not have sufficient access to safe water supplies will be forced to drink, cook and bathe in unsafe water, and many of then will get sick as a result. Yet all that would be needed to eradicate such problems is the application of simple technologies well-known in Victorian times and costing what are in truth risible sums of money.
It costs far less to keep people alive than it does to kill them. Significant pollution by nitrate, pesticides, heavy metals and hydrocarbons has been reported from many countries. It sets out a list of targets and target dates, covering groundwater quality, drinking and bathing water, flood control and drought avoidance, waste management and pollution. However, progress towards the achievement of these goals has, in most areas of policy, been less than impressive. This is, in some limited areas, inherent in the WFD itself. In far more cases it is a product of the corporate domination of EU decision-making.
Evident since the Treaty of Rome was signed in , growing stronger every year since, this domination has intensified massively since the turn of the century and now amounts to a virtual dictatorship of the corporations. Even though public ownership continues to dominate water supply in Europe and most of the rest of the world, utilities providing essential services are often forced to behave like private corporations. Measured by the proportion of the affected population gaining access to clean water, privatisation of water supply and deregulation of the market surrounding it have failed to record a single success.
Public ownership does not guarantee that problems will be effectively addressed, but it is the sine qua non of a successful approach. Seen in this light, the Millennium Development Goal for water, which includes a commitment to halve the number of people in the world who do not have ready access to a clean and adequate water supply, becomes nothing more than a business proposition. The problem goes beyond this, however, as a whole range of EU policies in effect deprive developing countries both of water itself and of the means to tackle water shortages.
Internationally, water supply reflects global inequalities, and in the most grotesque fashion. Extravagant sporting and leisure facilities, many built with European capital by corporations featherbedded by EU policies, are built alongside barrios lacking any safe water supply.
Privatization Watch - 03/2018
Agricultural regions in easy reach of airports are adapted to serve the tastes of rich consumers in the north, producing fruit, vegetables and flowers. The EU has the means to tackle these problems, but chooses instead to transform itself into Fortress Europe, as more and more people from societies squeezed dry of resources attempt to migrate into Europe in search of work. This process has been proceeding for hundreds of years.
There is, neo-liberalism admits, certainly an area of life where market relations would not be appropriate. There is simply no area of public life for which relationships determined by the market are unsuitable. Looked at in this light, water is very far indeed from being anything special.
Like health care, it is something which people most definitely need and therefore the ideal commodity, better even than tobacco or heroine, as the need is inherent and does not have to be created. Whilst it is important for each and every one of us to conserve water as individual consumers and small producers, to lay too much emphasis on this would be at best to miss the point.
At worst it would offer a deliberate distraction from that point. Individual behavioural changes are perhaps most important as a constant reminder of the need, at the levels where authority is exercised — locally, nationally and internationally — for the kind of policies needed to avert catastrophe and save lives. Such policies can only be achieved, moreover, if the kind of radical thought and action necessary to win the war against climate change, against drought and flood, is taken into every area of political, economic and social thought, reordering priorities and attempting to create structures that would make such a reordering effective, undermining, reorganising or getting rid of those which prevent this from occurring.
Structure of the Book This book is a call to activism, as only active and well-informed citizens capable of organising systematic campaigns against the existing power will prove effective in the global resistance so urgently needed. It will not, however, be mere rhetoric, but will provide also a handbook of the problem as well as some pointers as to where to look for more detailed information. We will look at the effects of a failure of water supply on plants, animals, and the ecosystems, the natural and created systems of which each forms a part. And we will examine the economic and social consequences of drought in the context of these changes, and discuss the extent of the problems of inadequate water supply and sanitation.
Having given this broad introduction to the contours of one major aspect of the problem, in Chapter 2 we will do the same for that other extreme water event, flood, and again we will look at its effects on plants, animals, ecosystems and economies and societies. We will also sketch out the political, economic and practical similarities and differences between drought and flood and look briefly at the particular situation of the Netherlands as a country which lives under constant threat of inundation.
This book is the first independent attempt to provide, in lay terms, a critical survey of EU water policy, both internal and external. In the particular context in which. Vast numbers of people have no access to safe drinking water, and even more lack any kind of effective sanitation. Most of the world's water supply remains in.
The chapter will end by looking at the controversial business of flood control, how it has been managed to date and how it might be better approached in the future. Chapter 3 will look at conflict and cooperation in the face of water-related problems and crises on the global, regional, national and local levels. Climate change is, as we have noted above, only one factor feeding into the current crisis, so in this chapter we will look at other elements of the broad background: population pressure, spreading prosperity alongside persistent and deepening poverty, urbanisation and the failure of political will and economic planning.
Chapter 4 will look more directly at climate change and its effects in the face of this failure. We will examine in some detail the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their implications for water supply, as well as more generally on human societies and the ecosystems on which they depend.
Chapter 6 looks at the broad range of water-related policies pursued by the EU, which principally means those grouped under the Water Framework Directive. We will see how the positive aspects of this measure are being undermined by vested interest and the kind of short-term thinking inherent to parliamentary democracies in which power has been skewed towards those who control concentrations of capital.
In conclusion, Chapter 8 will consider the effectiveness of resistance and of mitigating measures in the face of the deadly synergy of climate change and neo-liberalism which is threatening all of our futures. It was like war. It was about despair, depression, powerlessness The answer rests on four broad definitions. These are complementary rather than being in conflict with each other, identifying different types of drought, though ones which will often occur simultaneously, or in sequence, one provoking the other. The interplay of these definitions also reveals the multiple nature of drought, which is both a natural, meteorological event and a highly political phenomenon.
Almost all droughts which afflict human societies are avoidable. They result from the failure to solve a problem, a failure to marshal resources in the service of human beings when and where they are needed. This may be a result of incompetence, corruption, or bad luck. However, as capitalism, which is now the global economic system, cannot exist without structural shortages, there must be a suspicion that some droughts in some places occur because somewhere somebody powerful wants it that way.
We will return in due course to the relationship between global capitalism and drought, which is one of the major themes of this book. For the time being we want to go into those four definitions in more detail.
The government met public protests with deadly force. Secondly, the cost of putting this right, of ensuring complete protection against all floods, using either dams or other structural measures, would be unacceptably high. Evident since the Treaty of Rome was signed in , growing stronger every year since, this domination has intensified massively since the turn of the century and now amounts to a virtual dictatorship of the corporations. Include data citation:. Abernathy, Peter Lassovszky, George Hallberg. Solar water disinfection is a low-cost method of purifying water that can often be implemented with locally available materials.
Drought is not merely an absolute shortage of water, but is the relationship between supply and demand, where the former falls short of the latter.
- The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
- Quantification of Circulating Proteins: Theory and applications based on analysis of plasma protein levels
- Deals of the Century: Wall Street, Mergers, and the Making of Modern America
- Bugs Bunny and Klondike Gold
- Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 (Autodesk Official Training Guides)