Water: public ownership, not “proper prices”

Capitalism is increasingly exhausting and despoiling freshwater resources, disrupting a key Earth system and risking tipping us into a new, more hostile geological age. At the same time it is failing to secure access to safe drinking water and sanitation for many billions.

The authors of new report,The Economics of Water: Valuing the Hydrological Cycle as a Global Common Good, include many of the same Earth scientists that worked on the planetary boundary analysis. They hope that this report will form a trilogy with the Stern Review into the Economics of Climate Change and the DasGupta Review into the Economics of Biodiversity. Like those reports, it combines a comprehensive assessment of the problem with some dubious “green capitalist” recommendations.

The problems intertwine: climate change and biodiversity loss will further disrupt the hydrological cycle, and changes to the hydrological cycle accelerate biodiversity loss and climate change.

Despite the escalating rate of extraction, capitalist society is unable to provide safe drinking water and sanitation to many billions. 70% of the world population live in conditions of “water stress”. Around two billion lack access to clean water and sanitation. 5,000 children a day die of diseases born from unsafe water and sanitation. 200 million labour hours a day are spent carrying water, a task almost exclusively done by women and girls.

Demand for water has led to the draining of groundwater reserves and major rivers running dry before reaching the sea. 2.9 billion people and 55% of the world’s food production are in areas experiencing drying or unstable trends in total water storage. On current trends the report predicts a 23% reduction in global cereal harvest by 2050.

Globally, more than 263 river basins and 300 aquifers span national borders. Controlling the flow and access to these resources is a major source of global conflict, including between major nuclear powers like Pakistan, India and China.

Report

But the authors of the report are stuck within a pro-capitalist worldview. They argue that “proper pricing” of water is key to restabilising the hydrological cycle. They peddle the green capitalist myth that the crisis is result of “market failure” and seek to tweak the market and generate “more symbiotic partnerships” between the private and public sector to secure freshwater resources for future generations. But the idea that water is mispriced and should be more expensive will not help the world’s poor and deliver safe water and sanitation as a human right. Further commodification will further limit access to fresh water.

The idea of a “proper price” for water, or indeed any commodity, is a fantasy. It is simply a misunderstanding of what money and prices represent. Or consider the question more broadly, what is the proper price for the absence of cholera? Or the avoidance of species extinction? How are we to know the “proper price” for a stabilised hydrological cycle that provides future generations with a chance of avoiding ecological catastrophe? Such questions show the absurdity of believing there is a “proper price” for water. The green capitalist mantra of “proper pricing” is the latest form of denialism that supports further commodification and profit-making and can only further escalate the crisis.

The same pro-capitalist ideology dominates the Labour Party leadership. They have been at pains to stress that their major review into Britain’s shit-filled rivers and leaky pipes will consider everything except renationalisation. In 1991 the UK’s nationalised water infrastructure was sold off on the cheap. The new owners loaded the companies up with debt in order to pay out large dividends, while neglecting to organise necessary maintenance and upgrades. Since privatisation, the UK’s 16 water companies have paid out £78bn in dividend payments, nearly half the £190bn the companies spent in the same three decades on infrastructure. At the same time they borrowed more than £64bn, despite being debt-free at the point of privatisation.

Labour has argued that renationalisation would cost the taxpayer “billions”. But Thames Water is already facing insolvency and the other water companies would soon follow if there was effective environmental regulation and enforcement.

For Thames Water, Starmer’s Labour, like the Tories, is contemplating temporary state-ownership until new owners can be found. The protest movement should demand permanent renationalisation without compensation. Not a repeat of the failed experiment to run an essential service for profit.

Unfortunately the main force protesting at state of Britain’s waterways is also struggling to imagine an alternative to private ownership. On 3 November a broad coalition of NGOs, environmentalist groups and river users (including the National Trust, XR and Surfers Against Sewage) is organising the March for Clean Water in Central London (11am from Albert Embankment).

The organisers recognise that private water companies, private agribusiness and private industry are destroying our aquatic commons, but they stop short of making the obvious demand for public ownership. Instead they call for tougher regulation and enforcement and an end to “pollution for profit”. The latter demand is based on green capitalist fantasies that the profit-motive can be reconciled with ecological sustainability. Private capitalists will always seek to dump waste as cheaply as possible in order to minimise their costs and maximise their profits. This cannot be wished away with empty slogans.

The revolutionary change that we need is to win collective ownership and democratic economic planning so we can allocate sufficient resources and labour building, operating, maintaining and administering an ecologically rational freshwater system that meets human need.