-
ADVICE
Japan Tells India Not to Nuke Test
-
RARE BOOKS DEPT
Yu Jie on Wen Jiabao
-
HOLY MACKAREL!
The Second Cod War?
Posted By Elizabeth Dickinson
Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 12:28 PM
Share
The United Nations General Assembly voted yesterday in favor of an international human right to water -- something that activists have long been calling for and a few countries (most notably, South Africa) have already instituted. Asserting this unalienable human right, some argue, is the best way to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their location, economic situation, or anything else, have access to what is literally the world's most indispensible commodity.
I'm all for that. But a right to water is not something that can simply be drafted into law, poof! Unfortuantely, getting clean water to every human on the planet is a question of getting water markets and delivery systems up to snuff -- and if an universal human right to water was ever adopted, it could actually be a deterrant to that ever happening.
Bear with me, I am not a heartless westerner, I promise. Here's the conundrum: All humans need water. But companies, industries, governments, power plants, and nearly everything that creates economic wealth also requires water. And for those entities, water has an economic value. (Water also has an economic value to humans, the way food does.) And like all things that create economic value, we don't have an unlimited supply of water. That means that no matter what, there will limits about how much any one person or business can use.
Here's where the right complicates things. Rights to something like water usually imply that there is also no price -- and often no limits. This is the situation in much of the world today, actually -- and in much of the world, there isn't clean water to go around. Elsewhere where the price is too low, for example in the United States, commercial over-use is a real problem. In the U.S. case, underpriced water in the Western states, particularly California, has boosted agricultural use of water and discouraged conservation -- to the extent that the state faces an impending water crisis.
Countries that have dramatically improved access to clean water in recent years, on the other hand, include those who have put a pricetag on it -- Chile, for example, as well as Britain and Australia. Giving water a price (and certainly one that is bracketed by economic group, with different rates for private and commercial use) encourages conservation and smart use. Moreover, it gives private companies a real incentive to provide the stuff to more consumers. (In some communities, a push -- like a subsidy or a tax incentive -- would of course be needed.) In the end, all this will help bring more and more people onto the water grid. And that's what it's all about, right?
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN/AFP/Getty Images
contrarian market b.s. w/o substance
> I am not a heartless westerner, I promise.
Thank god for that, I was getting worried!
Rights and markets are not incompatible entities: one has a right to own property in every developed country, but does this mean we must trot out the old line "well, there's a finite amount of this thing that creates economic value, ergo let the democracy of the market take care of it" every time we talk about land values?
>Rights to something like water usually imply that there is also no price -- and often no limits.
No it doesn't. Every right we have has *some* limits and those rights are guaranteed by some set of institutions, i.e. the right to speech is maintained through a healthy judicial system.
But rather than address the substance of the institutions that maintain rights, you want to make a silly argument that "rights = infinity amount of something," which is an argument that nobody is making!
Is this really what FP is publishing these days? A hack job post that fails Political Philosophy 101 and reproduces the same think-tank WC groupthink the US is famous for?
a big thumbs up!
Repugant Values of Foreign Policy
Why can we declare superfluous second-tier individualist "freedoms" such as free speech, press, religion, and even broad-band access to be fundamental human rights - but not the most basic survival and economic necessities such as access to... clean water, sanitiation, food, shelter, work, and health care to be a fundamental human right? I think this is an insane, brutal, and dehumanizing prejudice of western liberal democratic capitalist states...
IMHO any state that does not provide these basic human survival and economic necessities for its citizensis is more guilty of genuine and fundamental abuses of human rights (ie actually causing death from need) than any moralizing list of abusers of individualist rights and dictat of universalisms coming out of the US or EU every year...
"Here's the conundrum: All humans need water. But companies, industries, governments, power plants, and nearly everything that creates economic wealth also requires water. And for those entities, water has an economic value. (Water also has an economic value to humans, the way food does.) And like all things that create economic value, we don't have an unlimited supply of water. That means that no matter what, there will limits about how much any one person or business can use. "
This logic that places the value of "the market God" and wealth above the basic necessities for human life is repugnant and if I were religious, I would say sinful. To suggest that business and industry might have legitimate access to water while thousands die every day from lack of water and sanitiation is beyond amoral.
There is far more than enough water for every human's and nature's use on this planet. UN figures show that if the Western world spent a fraction of what it spends (usually completely uneccessarily) on buying bottle water when clean safe tap water is availiable at fractions of cent every year - then we could provide clear safe drinking water for every human being on the planet.
http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/
This failure of distribution is the ultimate failure of the logic and values of "the market". "The market" is supposed to be a means to an end of providing a better standard and quality of life for all. Instead it as become and end unto itself - as demonstrated by the, frankly, evil pro-market logic expressed in this article attacking a declaration of a human right to water and sanitation. Thousands are literally condmened to death every day as result. This is a true and genuine abuse of human rights IMHO.
We've put a price on land, shelter, food, security, water, what is next - the air we breath? And in so doing, according to the dictat of capitalism - we have thus put these truly fundamental human rights beyond the reach of a sixth of the population of our planet (the bottom billion whose "economic" value is considered to be neglibile - something that outweighs there "human value") all in the name of wealth creation at the expense of human empathy, sharing, and cooperation. Surely this is tantamount to economic genocide. Something is deeply wrong with the world we have constructed for ourselves.
I was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! Hulu Downloader | iPad Converter This article is very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing . m2ts files converter from m2ts converter
Passport, FP’s flagship blog, brings you news and hidden angles on the biggest stories of the day, as well as insights and under-the-radar gems from around the world.
Read More
Sept. / Oct. 2010
-
Cover Story:
-
Exclusive:
-
Feature:
(3)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE