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The
Michigan Socialist | News | Michigan
Members of the Sweetwater Alliance demonstrate in
Lansing during the
inauguration of Governor Jennifer
Granholm.
Michigan's water
sold for profit as thousands are denied access:
The price for H2O
By MATT
ERARD
The Michigan Socialist
PERRIER GROUP OF America, a subsidiary of
Nestlé, the world's largest food producer, began production
last May of their regional brand of bottled water, Ice
Mountain, at their bottling plant in Mecosta County,
Michigan.
Perrier, which controls 30 percent of the
world's bottled water market, cut one of the most lucrative
deals with the state government last year, a deal that most
corporations could have only dreamed about in the past, at a
time when water is a scarcer resource to Michigan's residents
than ever before.
Under permits from the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality, Perrier is permitted to have one
bottling plant in Mecosta County, including two production
wells, a facility, and a pipeline. From this plant, Perrier is
permitted to withdraw 200 gallons per minute, equaling 200
million gallons per year.
Along with denying citizens in Mecosta and
Morton townships their right to put the project to a
referendum, the state of Michigan has entitled Perrier to
withdraw 500,000 gallons of the state's water per day, while
paying nothing to the state's citizens and privately keeping
all of the profits.
Unlike water taken by farmers and individuals,
which returns to its original basin, Ice Mountain water taken,
bottled, and shipped throughout the Midwest is not restored to
the ecosystem.
Thompson Lake alone has dropped 5 inches since
Perrier began its operations in Michigan, paralleling severe
drops in Crystal Spring near Orlando, Fla., where Perrier has
pumped for the past seven years.
Perrier estimates that the groundwater inflow
to its spring site will decrease by 26 percent, along with a
50 percent decrease in the discharge rate to the culvert
downstream.
Water is my no means exempt from
privatization's inevitable cancerous spread, particularly in
this age of corporate globalization.
Under the Chapter 11 rules of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) corporations cannot be
treated differentially, and have the ability to sue
governments directly for hindering their right to profit if
some corporations are given access to a publicly owned
resource and others are not.
This sets an especially dangerous precedent
for the world's largest supply of fresh water, which, under
such rules, could potentially come widely under the control of
a few conglomerates.
Despite Perrier's new legal entitlement to
amass Michigan's most vital publicly-owned resource for free,
many of Michigan's low-income residents have found that their
unassailable right to water for themselves and their families
is now null and void.
Since last year, the City of Detroit Water
Department, directed by former Thames Water and United Water
Companies executive, Victor Mercado, has shut off water to
over 40,000 of its residents, most of whom received no prior
notice.
All shut-offs were because of failure to
pay.
Many of these residents are victims of former
president Clinton's 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which put a five
year limit on welfare assistance.
Unemployed residents of Detroit and others
working only minimum wage jobs, exempting them from Family
Independence Agency assistance, are now being slapped with
unaffordable water and energy bills and large unpaid back
balances.
These long-running balances have been
especially catastrophic for tenants in the city whose
landlords have not paid their water bills for
years.
For families with steam-heated homes, the
water shut-offs have also meant a loss of heat due to
radiators needing water to operate.
Although little progress has been made in
terms of negotiations or reform, water rights activists from
the Sweetwater Alliance have made their voices
heard with continuous demonstrations at the Detroit Water
Department headquarters and the Ice Mountain bottling
plant.
Their message is as clear as the
life-sustaining resource for which they fight: water is
neither a commodity nor a luxury for the fortunate, but a
fundamental human right for
all. | 
