Coalition asks European Commission - stop support water privatisation in developing countries
For a recent (March 2007) report on Public private infrastructure advisory facility please check out http://www.corporateeurope.org/murkywater.html
(18 December 2006) EPSU has co-signed a letter to the European Commission asking it to with draw support for instruments to support water privatisation. The letter has been signed by a large number of other organisations including PSI, World Development Movement and several unions. The European Comission is supporting the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility - PPIAF. A report details how this outfit has funded work to ‘build consensus’ around the so-called benefits of water privatisation. While ‘consensus building’ might sound relatively innocuous, this has included work to persuade populations, employees, journalists and government officials that water privatisation is the right way forward. It involves interfering in, and skewing, legitimate domestic debates on the provision of essential public services and it is hard to justify that this is an effective use of EU aid money. PPIAF is a central institution in the continuing push to privatise water supply and sanitation in developing countries by donors. Furthermore, PPIAF operates in a way which restricts poor countries’ choice to decide their own development path. PPIAF has funded water privatisation in at least 17 countries where water privatisation conditions have been attached to loans, debt relief or aid, by international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
By collaborating with conditionality in this way, PPIAF undermines a country’s right to decide how to run its public services. Also, as PPIAF, by definition, only funds privatisation processes (as opposed to public-orientated reforms), it will carry out ‘options studies’ to only assess the type of privatisation to be implemented, not the principle of privatisation per se. Since PPIAF was created, the evidence of the failure of water privatisation to deliver clean, affordable water to the poorest communities has grown. The European Commission has stated to representives that privatisation of water would not be a conditionality for its loans, yet it does do so.
For the letter:
For the report:
The report can be accessed in English at:
http://www.wdm.org.uk/resources/briefings/aid/downthedrainreport26112006.pdf
or French:
http://www.wdm.org.uk/resources/briefings/aid/downthedrainreportFR26112006.pdf
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