The increasingly severe climate crisis, caused by capitalism, has made battles over acute water shortages and reactions to disastrous floods a daily event. The global atmospheric temperature this year has already risen to 1.62°C beyond the 1850-1900 average, above the 2045 target of 1.5°C set by the 2015 Paris Treaty. The dramatic changes in global water cycle patterns, with increased temperatures creating disastrous rainfall alternating with historic droughts, mean unmanageable flooding alternating with desperately hot periods. Climate change has proved that profit-driven use of water is a catastrophe for billions of workers and poor peasants across the globe. Capitalism’s antagonistic, socially destructive relation to nature, and so to life itself, is exposed for all to see. JAMES MARTIN and SOMA KISAN report.
Floods and droughts
November’s storm damage in Spain (with 220 deaths), in Britain, and even the entire year’s hurricane destruction in the US, which killed 396 people and cost more than $191bn, have been limited in effect compared to the tragic consequences of flooding that hit Cameroon, Chad, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Storms in Senegal displaced 55,000 people and damaged or destroyed 642,000 homes.
Yet abnormal dryness persisted in central Benin, central and eastern Cameroon, Ghana, parts of eastern and western Nigeria and central Togo. Extreme drought lasting at least one month affected 48% of global land area in 2023.
This development of extremes saw horrendous floods in Pakistan from June to October 2022, which killed 1,739 people, and caused $14.8bn in damages and $15.2bn in economic losses.
Worldwide, $70 trillion worth of output (31% of global GDP) will be exposed to serious water shortage by 2050, up from $15 trillion (24% of global GDP) in 2010. Imperialism has been preparing for this, however, by developing ways of protecting itself, and by planning to take advantage of the catastrophes it is causing with new types of private investment.
Capitalism’s demand for water
As the hydrological cycle becomes increasingly unpredictable, water access is no longer a given anywhere. Due to its centrality to commodity production, capitalists must now tightly defend water access to ensure uninterrupted capital accumulation and so monopoly capital arrogantly claims water to be ‘natural capital’. Natural capital accounts, or environmental-economic accounts, have been drawn up by all the major capitalist powers, to monetise their ‘assets’. Water is the most vital resource in the generation of profit. It must everywhere be privatised and priced. This should be no surprise; 75% of global electricity production needs water to generate steam for turbines, and as a coolant. The entire agricultural industry depends on the supply of water. Water’s use in generating profit makes it essential for every manufacturing process. Its control is an absolute necessity for capitalism.
In the recent period water consumption by the world’s most developed countries has massively expanded. In 2019 just 17 states, with 25% of the world population, consumed 80% of available global surface and subterranean water in the average year. Water courses and aquifers have been harnessed as sources of power and water storage. Between 1993 and 2010 more than two trillion tons of water were depleted from underground reservoirs, particularly for irrigation in northwestern India and western North America. So much water has been drawn from the world’s major rivers, such as the Rio Grande, the Yellow River, the Colorado, and the Nile, that they now experience periods where little or no water passes to the sea.
More than half of the world’s large lakes and reservoirs have shrunk since the early 1990s, chiefly because of climate change, intensifying the concerns of business about water for agriculture, hydropower, and direct human consumption.
Rivers across the world are heavily polluted by chemical run-off, creating huge dead zones off their coasts where sea life is extinguished. As polluted aquifers are closed others become emptier by the day. Millions of wells are now at risk of drying up if groundwater levels decrease by just a few metres. Northern China has some of the most overdrawn aquifers and over the last 15 years there has been a steady decline in water storage in the aquifers there through unsustainable groundwater abstraction.
Water extraction has become more difficult and expensive, raising the cost of all commodities dependent on water. Control of water supplies is an urgent matter for business, which relies on its state machinery to achieve it.
Seizing control of water
By the time of the first World Climate Conference in February 1979, the British bourgeoisie had realised that effective control of water was a route to super profits. By 1989 water in England and Wales was privatised, despite overwhelming public opposition. The government sold off ten regional utilities, converting state water companies into profit-hungry corporations. This change was accompanied by the launch of the fantastically profitable bottled water commerce by large drinks companies.
Some US states and the British government went for 100% private control. After Britain other countries followed; Argentina 1991-99, Germany 1999, and in the later 1990s, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. In Chile the dictator Augusto Pinochet had already privatised the water system. Today 90% of Chile’s drinking water supply is controlled by transnational corporations. The French bourgeoisie increased its ownership from 50% to 80% between 1975 and 2000. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and all the main ‘development’ banks promoted water privatisation as a condition of their lending. The Inter-American Development Bank promoted it in Colombia, Ecuador and Honduras; the Asian Development Bank and, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development promoted it in Eastern Europe; the German KfW bank supported it in Albania, Armenia, Jordan and Peru; the French government in Senegal; and British International Investment in Tanzania and Guyana. Ghana’s Water Sector Restructuring Secretariat is directly funded by the World Bank. Currently estimates suggest 950 million people must access water from private corporations directly, up from 681 million people in 2007.
The public-private partnerships model promoted by the British government became common globally. Here, mixed ownership, management contracts, concessions and leases are presented to the working class as innocent sources of funds for new privately provided and managed infrastructure, seemingly under the eye of effective public supervision. In fact, these are schemes by which the tax payer guarantees private profit grubbing. In Britain, water companies have handed shareholders £2bn a year since privatisation, financed by borrowing against assets, while household bills have risen 40% above inflation since 1989.
Climate change will accelerate
Scientists have identified the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a section of which is better known as the Gulf Stream. This transports warm, salty surface waters from the tropics into the North Atlantic. As it cools it becomes denser, sinks, then flows south at deeper ocean levels. Redistributing heat across the planet, it warms climates in Western Europe. As polar ice melts and the North Atlantic experiences more rainfall, the extra freshwater reduces the salinity and so density of surface water, halting the sinking process and slowing the circulation. A full AMOC collapse by 2100 would see sharp falls in temperature in Europe, and shift the tropical rain belt south, converting current tropical forests into savannas, and triggering new tipping points.
Capitalist water management
Surging global bottled water consumption mirrors capitalism’s failure to provide safe ‘public’ water supplies. Bottled private water saw 73% growth from 2010 to 2020, and will increase from around 350bn litres in 2021 to 460bn litres by 2030. Developing capitalism now depends on bottled water, and its accompanying plague of plastic waste, to make up for unsafe public water.
Demand for water now exceeds what’s available. Globally, demand has more than doubled since 1960. Twenty-five countries, with one-quarter of the world’s population, currently suffer extremely high water stress. The worst hit are in the Middle East and North Africa, where 83% of the population is exposed to extremely high water stress. In South Asia, 74% is exposed. By 2050 an additional one billion people are expected to experience extremely high water stress, even if the world limits global
temperature rise to 2.4°C• by 2100.
In the financially oppressed and economically weaker states, global corporations target specific provision. They finance dams, water reserves and electricity generation for business, then scoop up interest and profits from their operations. The human failure of capitalism in these states sees water provision by the informal, non-corporate sector. Twenty-five percent of the population in Latin America and 50% of the urban population in Africa, primarily slums, only have water access through small-scale operators in tanker trucks or animal-drawn carts.
Water wars
International water disputes grew as the US and European states began to export capital again after the second world war. In 1958 India and Pakistan clashed over control of the Surma River; Egypt sent a military expedition into the Sudan, eventually leading to the Nile River treaty. After 1962 unilateral shows of military force by Brazil against Paraguay led eventually to a 1967 treaty over the Parana River waters.
Israel extended control over key water resources by diverting the Jordan River during the 1967 war. In 1969, 1970 and 2023 Israel cut off water supplies to Gaza, and severely restricted West Bank Palestinian farmers’ use of water, an imperative for Zionist expansionism.
Water and class struggle
In the last 20 years the climate disaster has led to intense class struggles over water control. In some states like Canada, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, or Scandinavia, private water companies have made no headway against the state monopoly because of popular objection. Nicaragua, the Netherlands, and Uruguay have passed laws banning water privatisation. In Italy, in a 2011 referendum, water privatisation was overwhelmingly rejected. In 2019, Baltimore, Maryland became the first major city in the United States to ban water privatisation.
In Bolivia in 1999 the World Bank forced the Bolivian government to sell Cochabamba’s public water system to ‘Aguas Del Tunari’ owned by US Bechtel. Water bills doubled. For the poor, water cost more per month than food. Poor working-class people resisted. In 2000 police attacked peaceful protests by the Coalition for the Defence of Water and Life (La Coordinadora) demanding an end to this privatisation, killing seven and injuring hundreds. On 10 April 2000 the water system was handed to La Coordinadora. This ongoing struggle against privatisation was closely bound up with a national struggle against privatisation of other national resources, especially gas. The resultant movement led to the election of Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. Bolivia’s subsequent political constitution established water as a common good.
As nature rejects capitalism, a habitable world can only be maintained through the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism – a system that can provision water according to the needs of the majority. The only force capable of this transformation remains the working and oppressed people of the world.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 303 December 2024 /January 2025
