An Interview with Maude Barlow

Maude Barlow, author of the recently published Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, has been a social justice advocate for over twenty years, leading the fight for the right to water. She has been a vocal opponent of water privatization and bulk exports of freshwater resources, as well as a proponent of sustainable conservation practices. Through her work, Ms. Barlow has helped lead water discussions and battles from the boardroom to the river basin. She was invited to speak with the Journal of International Affairs to share her opinions and personal experiences from the frontlines of the international grassroots water movement. Journal: Was there a turning point in your career when water really became an important cause for you, and how did that happen? Barlow: I was first interested in water from the perspective of security and sovereignty of Canada's water. It started in the mid-1980s when the governments of Canada and the U.S. were first negotiating the trade agreement that would be warped into NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]. In that first free trade agreement, water was included as a tradeable good, as well as an investment in NAFTA. We tried to get water out [of NAFTA]. We were told we were paranoid. Under Chapter 11, there are some concerns that we had, and still have, around the rights of big corporations in Canada using water. In 1998, I wrote about the politics of water; it was called Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply. I updated it and then it became a book called Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World's Water. And Gold ended up being a kind of bible of the water movement. It came out in 2002 and ended up being published in forty-five or forty-seven countries. I started traveling and being on frontline fights with people. I've been tear gassed by the police in South Africa, and chased by bureaucrats in Tokyo and been on the frontlines of the struggle in Bolivia. So, what started as an issue around water [in Canada], soon made me very aware that this was what I now consider to be the most important human rights and ecological issue of our time. And it just drew me in on the kind of journey that I've not looked back from. Could you tell us more about your travels? How have you seen water scarcity impact the daily lives of people? Have you seen women impacted differently? Well, I think, the first thing I want to say is that water isn't like anything else. go into communities, particularly in the Global South--though there are also poor communities in the Global North--and the thing that you notice first about these communities is that they have struggled and protested against the colonial theft of their minerals, and their system has been privatized and turned over to big corporations. In some cases, their education and healthcare have been lost to structural adjustment [programs] by the World Bank and turned over to big, for-profit companies. While there may have been struggles around [those issues], none of them have, in my opinion, the intensity of the struggles around water, because water is life and death. Water is the standpoint at which people come together and say; You know, you came and you took away all of these rights. And you took away our genetic diversity and so on, but you will not take our water. We will stand, and we will I think it's provoked this kind of reaction because it's held so deeply as a standpoint issue on which to fight. And so people galvanize across political lines, across ages and genders, to come together and protect their local water and then assert a democratic system around water management. It's been an incredibly powerful movement to be part of. There are two groups that are hit harder than others. One is indigenous peoples because in many; many communities around the world, it is the water on indigenous land that is being taken, such as in Mexico City. …

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