A major international child rights organisation has urged governments in developing countries to call a halt to water privatisation, saying it puts children in the poorest communities at risk.
John Hilary, trade policy adviser for the Save the Children Fund, told a session at the World Summit on Sustainable Development on Wednesday that the Convention on the Rights of the Child remained a ”strong statement of the world’s intent” to build a better future for the world’s children.
However this commitment was being watered down by globalisation and an increasing tendency towards privatisation. In country after country, water supplies were being handed over to private companies from Europe, followed by tariff hikes of 100% to 140%.
”For children it’s a particularly worrying trend,” Hilary said.
”When you raise water tariffs in a particular country, the poorest families can no longer afford access to clean water and that means that their children have to make do with dirty water from untreated sources.
”That water’s not safe, so we see more and more children falling at risk of the waterborne diseases which already kill two million children.”
He said governments in the developing world were under great pressure to privatise not only water, but also services such as health and education.
”The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made it absolutely clear that unless you sign up to their blueprint, you will not be able to gain access to the essential debt relief or concessional loans which they give.
”They’ve really got some developing country governments in a stranglehold,” he said.
These services were being changed from basic rights, to commodities for sale to those who could afford them.
Hilary said Save the Children was asking the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and all governments at the summit to rethink the idea of privatising health, water and education.
”It doesn’t work,” he said.
Instead of privatisation, there should be bigger investment in these sectors, drawn from the $350-billion a year that United States and European farmers were subsidised by so they could ”dump” food on the south.
Hilary also called on leaders at the summit to work towards a framework for corporate accountability, to ensure that companies operating in developing countries were contributing to sustainable development and not harming it.
His presentation followed the release this week of a Save the Children report on globalisation and children’s rights, which says poor children in particular are among the most vulnerable when local economies are opened to global market forces.
”The dominant economic paradigm which is currently driving globalisation needs to be challenged by a perspective which makes children and the protection of children’s rights visible in all aspects of economic policy-making,” the report says. – Sapa