Maude Barlow’s speech to the Water Rights conference in Mexico City

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, founder of the Blue Planet Project, and co-author of the international best-selling book Blue Gold, The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water.

We are living in a period of history when the common heritage of humanity and the earth is under systemic siege. Under the current model of globalization, everything is for sale. Areas once considered our common heritage are being commodified, commercialized and privatized at an alarming rate. The assault on, and defence of, the commons is one of the great ideological and social struggles of our times.

Nothing dramatizes the crisis of the commons more clearly than freshwater. Water is a sacred component of the commons; it belongs to our common humanity, the earth and all living species. It is, therefore, a fundamental human right and a public good that must be protected by governments and communities, not a human need to be supplied by the market on the basis of wealth.

Today, we are on the threshold of a global water crisis. Right now, approximately one third of the world’s population is suffering from water scarcity. Every eight seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies of water-borne disease. If current trends continue, two thirds of the people on the planet will not have adequate access to clean water by the year 2025. As we massively pollute the world’s surface waters, we are mining groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it. The twin realities of growing freshwater shortages, combined with deeply inequitable access, pose the greatest ecological and human rights threats of our time.