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water "to return it to nature", seeing in this new liberal order a mean of protecting the environment.
In Australia, the hottest continent on the planet, this commodification of water has already bankrupted farmers for the profit of industrial agriculture, and California imitates this model. Faced with this formidable offensive, launched in Great Britain since the Thatcher era, citizen resistance is organizing to defend the right to water for all, and to secure this limited vital resource, on which 10 billion people on Earth will depend on by 2050.
The financialization of precious resources underpins an international initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and supported by the European Union, Germany, the United Kingdom, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Japan. It’s named, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB).TEEB aims to calculate up to the last trillion dollars, rials or Chinese renminbi, the value of ecosystems. The PES movement "payment for environmental services" (rendered by ecosystems) refers to things like the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Supporters of the concept include the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). According to the 2010 TEEB report: "The focus of modern society on the welfare components market and our almost total dependence on market prices to assign value means that we do not measure and we only manage the economic values traded through the markets.
"The ability of the Wall Street stock market to profit from the food bubble, Washington's inability to regulate global (financial) derivatives and the strong tendency to turn nature into a commodity, using TEEB-type instruments and PES, converged in the summer of 2012 to a single focus: the drought that hit the United States. An avalanche of grim social and environmental predictions accompanied this drought: in 2035, three billion human beings will be affected by water stress, the lack of water will become chronic, forest fires will start everywhere, the monsoons will become unpredictable and the snowmelt that brought water from the mountains to villages and towns will decrease drastically, given the number of hot winters.
At the same time, water has become essential for an increasingly broad spectrum of industries, ranging from white coal to hydraulic fracturing, and brewing to semiconductor manufacturing.
According to hydrologists, the water table is collapsing in Asia. Political scientists see many quarrels on the horizon over the ownership and use of the Himalayan rivers, and anyone who drills a well in Nebraska knows that the Ogallala aquifer in the center -western United States is declining worryingly.
The consequences are appalling: destruction of ecosystems, extinction of countless species, risk of regional and international conflicts. the 21st century "water wars" are now a palpable possibility.
What will happen when Ethiopia erects dams on the Nile? Or when Yemen becomes the first country to run out of water? A short answer is obvious: nothing good.
Investors from all walks of life love apocalyptic atmospheres. Through the interstices of violence and chaos, there is money to be collected. Nowadays, the biggest profits do not come from the sale or purchase of real things (like houses, wheat or cars), but from the manipulation of ethereal concepts, such as risk, debts and collaterals. Wealth flows from financial instruments that transcend reality.
Investing in the "water" stock index is sought after today as never before. There are over a hundred clues to track and assess the value of stocks and shares of companies engaged in the water business such as utilities, sanitation and desalination. There are many who provide comfortable dividends.
Hence the pressure exerted by the World Bank and the IMF, always on the lookout to expand the stock markets for their billions of dollars in credit and to induce countries to privatize their resources. These include the lakes, rivers, and reservoirs of Argentina, Bolivia, Ghana, Mexico, Malaysia, Nigeria and the Philippines just to name a few.
What better guarantee of prosperity than a rush of multinationals determined to generate income from something they are the sole entities to manage? The next big commodity in the world will be neither gold, wheat, nor oil. It will be water.
While raising stocks and interests in listed companies is a good thing, water is sure to generate juicy profits. But wouldn't it be more efficient to translate water into hard cash?
Perhaps, are plotting the arbitrageurs and the speculators. A water market, comparable to that of gold or cereals, a futures market which would ensure the delivery or the reception of volumes of water for a next date determined could be considered. We would trade water like cash.
Flashmag January 2020 www.flashmag.net