Water Is a Global Public Good

Agora of the Inhabitants of the Earth

Resolution of the World Assembly of 22 March 2021  Launching of the Campaign Water is a Global Public Good(*) 

 Water continues to be a commodity, ransacked, subjected to devastating commercial and financial domination. Water is diseased everywhere, polluted, exploited to the point of exhaustion. Rivers are dying, lakes are drying up. More than a third of the world’s groundwater is unfit for human use. More than a thousand children under the age of 6 die every day from diseases caused by the lack of water or its poor quality. 2.1 billion people do not know what clean water is. 4.2 billion people do not have a “safe” toilet

Today, there is no stopping the brutal and predatory takeover of the Earth’s water by money-hungry private interests.

On March 22, 2021, the official World Water Day, the Agora of the Inhabitants  of the Earth is launching a campaign to fight for water-a global public-good

The goal: to stop the devastation of water perpetrated by powerful global oligarchies that continue to treat water for life (once a common good) as an increasingly scarce and therefore profitable “commodity”. By listing water on the stock exchange on 7 December, these true predators have explicitly confirmed that they have no intention of changing their plundering of water and nature. In the context of growing scarcity, water insecurity has become a feature of life on our Earth. Let’s stop the plunderers.

The campaign has three main objectives:

– Freeing water from predatory finance, starting with banning publicly traded companies from speculating on water, necessary for life, water for life, and turning over the management of water services at the watershed level to a public community water government;

– Secure water by ensuring its preservation, its good ecological state and its natural regeneration capacities, as a non-transferable and non-privatisable global public good, recognising the rights of nature by granting legal personality to water bodies, such as rivers, lakes, wetlands, etc.

– To take water out of the culture of rivalry and violence by promoting practices of life, from the local to the planetary, based on joint responsibility, sharing, respect for the universal rights to life of all the inhabitants of the Earth, solidarity and brotherhood. Contrary to what is happening and what will certainly happen in the absence of a reversal of the trends, resilience must be collective, global.

For more details, see the short description of the campaign at: https://agora-humanité.org

Expressions of interest and support are welcome

Write to: agora.humanity@gmail.com                           

First information web meeting: 15 April at 6pm.

The link will be sent on request.   Brussels 23 March 2021

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(*)Text sended to Other News by Riccardo Petrella, Prof. Emeritus of Globalisation at the Catholic University of Louvain, coordinator of Àgora  founder of the International Committee for the World Water Contract, pro­mo­ter of the in­ter­na­tio­nal ini­tia­ti­ve Au­da­ci­ty in the name of Hu­ma­ni­ty.