Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-11-Speech-3-460"
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"en.20090311.40.3-460"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I, too, would like to remind you as Mr Musacchio did, that in February, this Parliament, together with Mikhail Gorbachev’s World Political Forum, hosted a conference with a meaningful title: ‘Peace with Water’, a conference that produced a memorandum for a world water protocol that deserves serious consideration and was, moreover, supported by all the major political groups in this Parliament, but which seems to have been ignored by the Committee on Development, which drew up this document.
I do not think this was by accident: the text we are debating today in fact appears weak and vague on all the crucial points that will be on the agenda in Istanbul. Take the example of water as a fundamental human right. If it is a right – and it is absurd to deny it – then it cannot also be a commodity. A right cannot be bought or sold in a free society. A right is only bought in a society of slaves. We are well aware, however, that the giant private interests want to take possession of this right. So what will Europe say at Istanbul? Who, as it says for example in recital J, needs to increase the financial priority of water? That is a prime example of ambiguous wording. Furthermore, is the state, or public ownership, the sole player in water policy? Or, as it says in paragraph 12 of the resolution, is it the ‘major player’? What does this phrase really mean? For the rest, it contradicts paragraph 2 of the same document, where it is rightly stated that water is a ‘public good’ to be kept ‘under public control’.
In short, we are in the midst of a general crisis in our society’s model of development yet we are still clinging to an idea of the market that appropriates nature itself for private gain. Lastly, there is another very weak point: the document contains no organisational proposal for world water management. The aforesaid memorandum did, however, outline a proposal for a world agency, which is repeated in one of the amendments that I will support with my vote."@en1
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