Is water a public good? Privatizing water has led to all kinds of traumatic consequences in poor countries, with many complaints aimed at IMF conditionality-imposed schemes. India is considering a draft bill to privatize water there, where shortage seems particularly imminent: "India has more than 17 percent of the world's population, but has only 4% of world's renewable water resources with 2.6% of world's land area." There is plenty of worry about what the bill will mean in terms of pricing for profit-oriented industry and long-term infrastructural consequences. In a post last month I suggested that I thought waste disposal likely ought to be a public good because a private market would tend to want more garbage (more volume, more profit), while a public system might try to minimize garbage in order to reduce costs or meet other social goals such as conservation--the same principle seems to hold for water.
Basically we consume too much, both directly and indirectly, we waste a lot due to aging infrastructure, and we otherwise contaminate it with chemicals. A startling stat: municipal water in 71% of U.S. cities has too much hexavalent chromium in it. If you don't remember why you should worry about that, you just need to think Julia Roberts:
Here is the CIA World Factbook's page on water resources, showing " the long-term average water availability for a country in cubic kilometers," i.e., the total water available to the country in an average year.
No comments:
Post a Comment