“I can make problems visible”
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo is the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation. Below, he answers questions posed by Helvetas editor Rebecca Vermot.
A new study by Eawag, the water institute of ETH Zurich, has shown that 4.4 billion people are probably without access to safe water. That is twice as many as previously assumed. Are you surprised?
To be honest, no. This estimate is probably close to the truth. In my travels, I see governments equating drinking water with tap water. But what comes out of the tap is not drinkable per se. Water resources are increasingly contaminated with toxic pollutants, such as pesticides or heavy metals from mining or irresponsible industries.
Water is also contaminated in the pipe network itself because it is not chlorinated enough or the pipes are old. Cities lose over 40% of the water in their pipe networks, which is why they try to supply residents in other ways. Due to the drop in pressure or if the water is turned off, pollutants penetrate the leaks.
Fifteen years ago, the UN General Assembly confirmed that water and sanitation are a human right. Can this ever be achieved?
Yes, but governments need to rethink how they manage water resources and water ecosystems and prioritize them differently. According to the World Health Organization, the minimum water necessary for a decent life is 50 to 100 liters per person per day. That is less than five percent of total water consumption; no river will dry up as a result. It would therefore be sufficient to prioritize the human right to guarantee access to water for all people, which is actually a duty of every government. To protect public health, strict laws would be needed that make it a criminal offense to pollute rivers and groundwater. Even poverty is no excuse for putting the human right to water on the back burner.
What has been achieved so far?
Less than is necessary. But there has been progress. More and more countries are including the human right in their constitutions, but few are enacting corresponding laws and regulations. There are countries that prohibit poor families from being deprived of water –– in France, for examples. In Spain, everyone has the right to 100 liters of water per day –– even those who cannot afford it. Despite its poverty rate, South Africa is a role model in terms of legislation and implementation. The cities that have made the most progress are those that regulate that families in precarious living conditions cannot have their water turned off –– such as Lyon or Medellín in Colombia.
What are the biggest challenges? And why?
Indigenous communities, farming families and people in the impoverished outskirts of large cities face the greatest challenges, with women and children being particularly affected. This is primarily due to a lack of investment in water infrastructure because the public sector has other priorities. Land and water grabbing and environmental pollution in rural and indigenous areas are another factor. The political and social marginalization of those affected means that their voices are not heard in decision-making bodies.
What can you do for people who report human rights violations to you?
I constantly receive complaints and reports of serious violations that exceed my capacities as a rapporteur and those of my team of two in Geneva. What I can and do do is write a letter to the governments. They are given two months to reply before I publish the letter.
Before the Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN General Assembly in New York, I can raise allegations and make suggestions. The international visibility of these reports and the media coverage in the respective countries undoubtedly generate pressure and at the same time strengthen the social movements fighting for the human right to water and sanitation. In short: I can make problems visible, and make suggestions and recommendations that benefit governments, but above all the affected populations.
How can civil society be involved?
Officially, the UN and countries want to promote dialog with those affected, without thinking about what that means. I often ask provocatively: Do we have a problem entering into dialog with large private operators of water supply and wastewater disposal facilities, with large mining companies or food producers? The answer is no, because they have well-organized lobbies with offices in New York and Geneva... Then I ask: What about the Red de Acueductos Comunitarios de América Latina, which represents more than 100 million severely impoverished people in rural areas? There is usually an embarrassed silence before admitting that there is no contact with them or that their existence is not even known. Therein lies the great challenge: to open a dialogue with those who have rights, to recognize them and to work with them –– mostly led by women who fight for these rights on a daily basis and are criminalized and oppressed for doing so.
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation
What can NGOs like Helvetas contribute?
Social movements and NGOs play a crucial role. They can strengthen civil society and make their concerns heard at all levels –– including by governments and international institutions. Such intercultural dialog is key to understanding and respecting traditional knowledge and practices from which we can learn –– both in terms of environmental sustainability and the democratic management of vital goods such as water, which must be understood and managed as a common good in order to leave no one behind.
What can individuals do?
We all have a responsibility. It is our duty to participate in the management of water supply and wastewater disposal in our city. We must demand transparency, accountability and participation from those responsible, as water is a common good. We can and should take care of water at home, but our contribution to saving water is far less than repairing mains. And when we all call on our governments to fulfill the human right to water, it is not an exercise in charity, but simply a question of democratic responsibility.
Is the human right of access to water and sanitation contradictory to the privatization of water services? Or are there shades of gray?
At the very least, there are shades of gray, and even serious contradictions with the necessary assumption of management approaches based on human rights. As I explained and defended in the last thematic report I presented in September to the Human Rights Council: Water must be understood and managed as a common good, accessible to all but not appropriable by anyone. This is a concept that is fully in line with the consideration of drinking water and sanitation as human rights.
I am not against the market, but I am against using the market as a tool to manage values that the market neither understands nor has to understand. The market is not the right tool to manage human rights and values such as ecosystem sustainability or equity that should govern water management. Therefore, I understand that it is a mistake to manage water and sanitation services from privatization strategies, both when these are direct and clear, and when they are masked with public-private partnerships, which is the dominant privatization model promoted by large European operators.
What consequences do you observe from the privatization of water services?
The dominant strategies for privatizing water and sanitation services focus on managing these services through contracts in which public institutions cede management of these services to the operator concerned for long periods of time. These contracts pose serious challenges for developing a human rights-based management approach. The concession periods, which used to be longer than 25 years, make it difficult to terminate without significant costs, since the operator would seek compensation for the expected profit over the entire concession period. Additionally, the concession fee, which is an advance payment to the public institution by the operator who recovers it through tariffs, is an incentive for privatization that takes advantage of the financial difficulties of local institutions since it is not used to improve the service.
The ability of the operator to make purchases and contracts with companies linked to its business group without public tendering disrupts market competition, leading to increased costs that are eventually passed on to the tariff. These problems are often aggravated by the lack of transparency and public participation, protected by the private operator's right to preserve information on its business strategy. In addition, local control institutions are often unable to effectively regulate operators, given the existing power asymmetries. And finally, all this is often aggravated by the lack of political will on the part of those in power, who are often co-opted or captured by the operators.
Are there successful examples of the role of the private sector in water services?
Public management by no means guarantees good management of water and sanitation services, and there are many examples of obscure, bureaucratic and inefficient public management. This leads to the possibility of improvements through privatization processes. However, I believe that in general it is a mistake to face these problems of opacity, bureaucracy and inefficiency through privatization, instead of democratizing public management, promoting citizen participation, transparency and accountability, based on an adequate professionalism that public administrations can and should be able to ensure.
In which countries or regions do you see the greatest risks of privatization of water resources?
The most active privatization processes have developed in the field of urban water and sanitation services through various privatization models. The Chilean model promoted by General Pinochet's dictatorship de facto privatized water itself and rivers, although its public character was formally maintained on paper. The British model promoted by Mrs. Thatcher's government privatized urban water and sanitation infrastructures, and of course their management. The so-called French model, based on strategies known as PPP (public-private partnership), is the most widespread, with the support of the World Bank.
In certain countries such as Australia, Chile, the USA or Spain, water rights markets have been imposed that in the absence of adequate and strict regulatory conditions end up marginalizing the most vulnerable producers, the human rights of the most impoverished and the sustainability of ecosystems, which cannot compete in these markets.
In recent times, extremely dangerous strategies of financialization of water management have been promoted, as occurred in the USA with the entry of California's rights of use in the futures markets, which are managed under the speculative logic that governs these spaces and the empire of the great financial powers.
