Public’s Water and Rivers Up for Corporate Grab?

The concept of tradable water rights has a “frightening likelihood” of water resources being raided and monopolised by global corporations says a national trout fishing advocacy the NZ Federation of Freshwaters Anglers (NZFFA).

“It would essentially be privatisation of a public resource,” said NZFFA president David Haynes.

There was a “frightening parallel” with the sea fishing industry’s tradable quota management system (QMS) whereby big corporate players bought and held quota and set re-sale prices exorbitantly high to keep out all smaller players, as well as buying and aggregating quota to develop a monopoly, he said.

Reports indicated water could be a very valuable commercial resource if trading was allowed. There was a growing fear from some quarters that corporates like Amatil (Coca-Cola) and Nestle were eyeing water use rights in order to create and control a highly profitable global freshwater supply market.

David Haynes said with the increasing scarcity of available freshwater and with intensive farming continuing to grow, there was the risk that powerful business interests would lobby cash-strapped councils and governments to set water takes and pollution discharge at levels which would compromise the life supporting capacity of rivers and lakes.

“Using the parallel of the fisheries quota system, mega-fishing corporations in 1997 fought and beat the NZ government's attempt to reduce quota levels on snapper. Tradable water rights would run a real and high potential risk to be hijacked by large corporations.”

David Haynes made his comments in response to a very recent Maori Council media statement.

“Whilst the document promotes free access to water for New Zealanders for domestic and recreational needs and suggests that commercial use of water takes should only be available once environmental and domestic needs had been established and satisfied it proposes a charge on all commercial water takes and so effectively will establish the concept of tradable water rights,” he said.

David Haynes said introduction of tradable water rights in other countries, such as Australia, USA and Chile had highlighted some disturbing and unpredicted behaviours which ran contrary to the environmental gains claimed by corporate advocates. For example, in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin Pilot Trading Project a 2000 study showed that 99 percent of traded water permits were from "sleepers" i.e. those entities that held a right to take water but did not use it. The effect of this trading was that suddenly all those unused water take permits were being used and the water catchment became rapidly and dangerously over-allocated and de-watered.

In December 2014 a report uncovered how the World Bank promotes privatised water schemes to governments around the world whilst being a part-owner of private water supply companies such as Veolia.

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