Water and Trade
Misleading “CEO Water Mandate” Threatens Global Commons
Updated: 4/4/08
On March 20, a letter was delivered to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in New York urging him to withdraw his support from the CEO Water Mandate - a voluntary initiative promoted as a way for corporations to make progress toward protecting water resources. Laura Roskos of US WILPF was among leaders from more than 125 environmental, public health, water justice, human rights and corporate accountability organizations in 35 countries who signed the letter. The Letter was delivered by Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute (Ottawa, CA) and others to coincide with the U.N.'s World Water Day on March 22 to call attention to the threats posed by corporate control of public water resources.
Water As International Commerce
Preventing Massive Water Transfers
By Louis-Gilles Francoeur
By Louis-Gilles Francoeur
As of today, environmental, social, and union groups from all over Canada will try to block a North American pact on Canada's water resources and other natural wealth that a handful of private sector oligarchs and the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico are preparing behind closed doors in the framework of the North American Future 2025 Project.
For the Conseil des Canadiens [Council of Canadians] and the Coalition Eau Secours [Coalition for Water Aid] - two organizations that bring together dozens of union, social and environmental agencies - the Calgary meeting, which will bring together the partners in this project to "continentalize" resources, is, in reality, nothing but a disguised way for the United States to appropriate Canada's water resources, just as the country has already taken control of 50 percent of the Canadian gas and oil sectors - 70 percent of the production of which now feeds the energy bulimia of our southern neighbors.
Yesterday, the two big social and environmental coalitions partially divulged documents that describe the objectives of the closed meeting in Calgary. It is clear from the documents that the session is not an exploratory meeting between important theoreticians, as its promoters have asserted, but rather a meeting for preparation of policies that the three countries' private sector representatives are about to submit to their governments in the beginning of the fall.
