Water Privatization Overlooked as Factor in Egypt's Revolt

[marmar]

http://onthecommons.org/magazine/water-privatization-overlooked-factor-egypts-revolt


from OnTheCommons.org:


Water Privatization Overlooked as Factor in Egypt's Revolt
Mubarak's water policies contributed to the Arab Spring revolution last year

August 10, 2012 | by Karen Piper


The American media focused mainly on internal corruption and oppression (as causes of the Arab Spring revolution last year). They did not report on the role of the international superpowers in influencing the Mubarak regime to privatize the country’s public land and water; they did not report, for instance, that since the 1990s the World Bank has argued that privatization enhances “efficiency” and has mandated the policy as a condition for making loans; and that in 2004 this mandate led the Egyptian government to privatize its water utilities, transforming them into corporations which were required to operate at a profit, and which thus began to practice “full cost recovery”— passing along the cost of new infrastructure through rate increases.

Within months of privatization, the price of water doubled in some areas of Cairo, and citizens started to protest. At one demonstration in northern Cairo, in 2005, “angry residents chased bill collectors down the streets.” Those who could not afford the new rates had little choice but to go to the city’s outskirts to collect water from the dirty Nile River canals.

In 2007, protestors in the Nile Delta blocked the main coastal road after the regional water company diverted water from farming and fishing towns to affluent resort communities. “The authorities sent riot police to put down these ‘disturbances,’” wrote Philip Marfleet, a professor at the University of East London, even as “water flowed uninterrupted to the gated communities, and to country clubs and upmarket resorts of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.” In the next few years such demonstrations only grew in intensity. As activist Abdel Mawla Ismail has noted, “Thirst protests or intifadas, as some people have called them, started to represent a new path for a social movement.” From this path the revolution that consumed the nation in 2011 seems inevitable. People can live in poverty for a long time; they cannot live without water.

[Auggie]

1. Our local water bills are about to skyrocket ...

due to needed repairs and upgrades to infrastructure. But I'll pay my share -- and gladly -- if it helps to keep our water publicly-owned.

[Time for change]

2. One more outrage by the psychopaths who comprise our international power structure

This is one of the things that the World Bank was supposed to be designed to prevent, not to encourage.

[Igel]

3. Contributing factor, perhaps. Not the trigger.

Any trigger that takes 6 years is probably not really the trigger.

A better trigger would be bread and grain prices, which spiked in the months prior to the Tahrir Sq crowds and continued high into the "revolution."

Contributing would be recession--fewer jobs, less tourism. And, after the first initial reports of troubles--whether involving Copts or "democracy advocates," tourism would drop off even more and jobs would decrease very soon after that.

[DCKit]

4. None the less, a contributing factor.

Six years of a death by a thousand cuts, and who knows what came before?

If it were up to TPTB, you'd start paying a toll the second your car hit the pavement, every drop of water would be metered and your real estate taxes would be paid directly to corporations to cover all the things that city, state and county governments handle now - especially education.

They've telegraphed their intentions and the World Bank and IMF are just two of the organizations leading the charge and floating these projects as trial balloons.

[nanabugg]

5. This is coming to a town near you. nt

[HiPointDem]

6. kr. I read that labor issues were also a trigger:

The Egyptian labor movement had been strong for years, with more than 3,000 labor actions since 2004.

One important demonstration was an attempted workers' strike on 6 April 2008 at the state-run textile factories of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, just outside Cairo. The idea for this type of demonstration spread throughout the country, promoted by computer-literate working class youths and their supporters among middle-class college students. A Facebook page, set up to promote the strike, attracted tens of thousands of followers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Motivations