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Statement on the 6th World Water Forum

Water and Food Sovereignty
Statement of the Asia Pacific Network for Food Sovereignty (APNFS)
on the occasion of the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille, France
March 17, 2012


At the conclusion of the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille, we – smallholder farmers, fishers, women, civil society organizations and rural development advocates from the Asia Pacific Network for Food Sovereignty (APNFS) – hereby declare the World Water Forum, a dismal failure in upholding the people’s right to water and food. It remains an elitist and undemocratic jamboree of corporations and capitalists whose real agenda is to make profit from the water industry. While its Ministerial Declaration sees the “involvement of food security stakeholders, especially producer organizations, in water policies,” the voices of the marginalized and vulnerable such as smallholder farmers, workers, women and indigenous people remain minimal in the occasion.

The Marseille World Water Forum recognizes that water is key for agriculture, rural development and food security. However, what we witnessed at the Forum is the complete opposite.

While the Ministerial Declaration expresses its intention to ensure water and food security especially of local communities, smallholder farmers, women and indigenous peoples, its main policy agenda is directed to push for water governance reforms that may further undermine people’s access to water and food. It subscribes to a multi-stakeholder approach to water governance such as the integrated water resource management (IWRM) that is being vigorously pushed by the World Bank and its regional counterparts like the Asian Development Bank. Through their IWRM projects in client countries, international financial institutions (IFIs) are pushing for the commodification of water and the adoption of policies and institutional frameworks that allow increased control of private corporations over water resources and territories.

Water commodification has been pushed through the WB-sponsored Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) models. The IMT or Participatory Irrigation Development, for all its adherence to participatory approaches, is found to have led to the deterioration of irrigation systems and canals due to inability of poor cash-strapped farmers to pay for high irrigation tariffs much less to spend free labor for irrigation maintenance. More recently the World Bank has introduced volumetric pricing as part of its continuing irrigation policy reforms that definitely will increase the price of irrigation water tenfold, depriving poor farmers of the precious element needed for food production and of their source of income. Further, with the introduction of cost efficiency in water use and management, the IFIs have clearly favored big industrial agriculture and plantations, mining operations, golf courses and beverage corporations such as Coca-cola that can pay more for water than the smallholder farmers and indigenous peoples.

The strategy of Private Sector Participation (PSP) or Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), whatever one calls it, in irrigation also opens the sector, which to date has remained under the purview of the State, to entry of the corporate private sector. Instead of increasing the state’s role in providing cheap and accessible irrigation for farmers, PPP circumvents the right to water of smallholder farmers. Experience tells us that companies that are involved in water and energy sector will always make sure the quickest return of their investments and the maximum possible profit, making freshwater for agriculture, with a high price tag, no longer a human right for smallholder farmers.

We believe that the commodification of freshwater through such schemes will not solve the problems and challenges of ensuring food security. Worse, it will further contribute to the growing inequality and poverty faced by smallholder farmers.

We are likewise gravely concerned that water is being promoted in Marseille as the engine of the green economy. Together with the pro-market solutions offered by the 6th World Water Forum to ensure water and food security, the green economy being pushed in the Rio + 20 Summit will result to greater privatization of water resources through policies and programs that will promote cost efficiency in water utilization and management, large dam projects in the guise of green energy and agrofuel production that will further undermine the smallholder farmers and women’s access to land and water.

We also recognize that the twin problems of water scarcity and food insecurity should not only be addressed at the international level. Governments of both the developed and developing countries should do their respective parts to ensure that all rights, as enshrined in various international covenants, are enforced and protected.

Hence, we call on governments of developed countries, especially those which sit in the governing bodies of IFIs and with business interest on water and agriculture, to stop imposing harmful neoliberal solutions to the water and food crisis, including land grabbing.

We also call on governments of developing countries to increase their support to agriculture and irrigation by allocating more public funds for agricultural inputs and infrastructures such as irrigation, and by empowering smallholder producers, including women and indigenous peoples and enlarging their voices in agriculture and food policy-making. We urge them to refocus agriculture out of its present export-oriented, monoculture and industrial farming model towards food sovereignty to ensure genuine food security. We demand the democratization of land ownership in favor of smallholder farmers and the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral domain.

Further, we demand that governments uphold the fundamental and inalienable human right to water and sanitation.

Instead of backing up this event, the United Nations should organize its own Forum where every stakeholder is represented and has a voice. We urge the member states to implement their obligations to respect, fulfill, and protect the human right to food, water and other economic and social rights. Without water, there will be no food. Without water and food, there will be no life.


Source:
Arze Glipo
Regional Coordinator
Asia-Pacific Network on Food Sovereignty (APNFS)
87 Malakas St., Pinyahan, Quezon City, 1100 Philippines
Telefax:-+632-9250987
www.apnfs.net

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