A Namibian rights NGO has slammed a local government scheme to provide prepaid water, saying it is making the basic commodity "unaffordable for the poor". Helena Negumbo is among several thousand informal dwellers who have to buy water, when they can afford it, from a municipal tap. "I must first buy a card and put it into [a meter-box near] the tap. When the [money on the] card is finished, the water stops running, but I don't always have money for [more water]," she told IRIN.

A massive solar-based rural electrification of at least 88 villages is expected to be rolled out countrywide mid this year. Finance Minister Baledzi Gaolathe announced the P34 million National Rural Photovoltaic Electrification Programme during the 2005-2006 budget. He noted that the aim of the project is to improve access to energy services in rural areas and promote the use of renewable energy.

The net rate of forest loss in Africa is the second highest in the world, while the continent leads the globe in the frequency of forest fires, FAO told the African Forestry and Wildlife Commission at its meeting in Maputo, Mozambique. Globally, Africa suffered a net loss of forests exceeding 4 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2005, according to FAO. This was mainly due to conversion of forest lands to agriculture. Forest cover went from 655.6 million hectares (ha) to 635.4 million ha during this period.

The Tanzanian government will take stringent measures to curb environmental degradation, including the eviction of pastoralists and farmers from protected lands and the prohibition of thin plastic bags, according to the Vice-President. Human activities such as reckless tree felling, use of plastic bags, uncontrolled cattle grazing, invasion of reserved forest areas and mountains were cited as some of the causes of extensive environmental degradation.

The government of Kenya massively violated the rights of thousands of people it evicted from its forests recently, its own watchdog has said. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has criticised the evictions, saying neither the law nor internationally accepted regulations were followed. The victims were not given alternative settlement or access to basic necessities like food, shelter and healthcare. The commission is now compiling a report after a fact-finding mission to establish the extent of human rights violations in the evictions, including the one in Kipkurere Forest in Uasin Gishu two weeks ago.

The Forestry, Logging and Allied Workers' Union of Liberia (FLAWUL) has expressed its deep distaste with members of the National Transitional Legislative Assembly (NTLA) over what they called "a mortgaging of the future of the country." FLAWUL, in a release issued recently said: "The NTLA's passage of the bill of a Mineral Development Agreement (MDA) between the Liberian government and Mittal Steel was intended to benefit few officials at the detriment of the Liberian people."

Within the next 100 years, the growing human influence on Earth's climate could lead to a long and irreversible rise in sea levels by eroding the planet's vast polar ice sheets, according to new observations and analysis by several teams of scientists. One team, using computer models of climate and ice, found that by about 2100, average temperatures could be four degrees higher than today and that over the coming centuries, the oceans could rise 13 to 20 feet - conditions last seen 129,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages.

Issues of land ownership, management and rights have significant poverty implications for rural communities in Africa generally, but are of key concern to pastoralists and huntergatherers. Although ultimate state control over land remains widespread in Africa, as either ownership (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mozambique) or trusteeship (Tanzania, Namibia), the new generation of land laws allows and promotes various forms of land transfers and tends to strengthen the land rights of foreign investors.

Restoring viable livelihoods is the single major challenge facing rural communities in post-war Angola. The communities in the municipalities of Conda, Ambuim, and Sumbe (CAS) in Kuanza Sul province are meeting this challenge. Given that land is the primary asset for rural households, access to land becomes, therefore, a fundamental imperative. The current land tenure systems offer both opportunities and constraints to the improvement of women’s and men’s rights to land. This research, which has been commissioned to review the dynamics of land tenure in the CAS area, its opportunities and risks, reveals a denial of land access rights to communal farmers, whose livelihoods are centred on land.

Uganda has lost 26% of its forest cover in the last two decades, according to a report released last month by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In the Global Forest Resources Assessment Report, FAO said the forest cover had reduced from 4,924 million hectares in 1990 to 3,627 million in 2005. Uganda's forest cover is estimated at 24% of the land cover and is likely to decline with increasing population that relies on agriculture for survival.

One in five people in the world now lacks access to clean water and 40 per cent do not have basic sanitation. Water, the most precious global resource, is the subject of World Water Day on March 22, which was preceded by the World Water Forum, held between 16-22 March, where officials from 140 countries met to discuss how to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. Patrick Bond discusses the “water wars” – the battle by activists against the global trend that seeks to turn the delivery of water into a commercial enterprise.

On March 16 in Mexico City, thousands of grassroots water warriors marched against an equivalent number of establishment delegates from governments, corporations and international agencies at the World Water Forum.

The activists, opposed to what they term the 'commodification' of water, were stopped a kilometer away from their establishment opponents. But as the Washington Post reported, 'Youths in ski masks attacked journalists and fought with police, smashing a patrol car and hurling rocks during largely peaceful Water Forum protests involving about 10,000 marchers.'

The Post continued, 'Many of the battles over water in Mexico don't involve people who would otherwise be considered radicals. Those on the front lines are residents of low-income neighbourhoods in Mexico City who get in fistfights over water-truck deliveries, or housewives who can no longer stand the stink of untreated sewage flowing beside their homes. And then there are the Indian families whose crops are ruined by the diversion of water to feed a nearby city, while their children go without safe drinking water.'

Here in South Africa, there are millions who can tell stories of water 'delivery drought'. Rural areas are under-serviced due to lack of operating subsidies which mean that a large percentage of taps installed in the post-apartheid era are now dry. And for those lucky to be on municipal water grids, mass disconnections due to unaffordability affect more than 1.5 million South Africans each year, even the government admits.

According to Desmond D'Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, 'Across the metro, low-income people and even whole blocks of flats are having trouble paying their rates, and quite a few have had their water cut off recently. I've negotiated for some reconnections, but the amounts outstanding are vast. People simply can't afford the rates. Council is even reneging on a pre-election promise to write off arrears.'

Water warriors here also decry the new 'pre-paid meter' technology that leads to self-disconnection. Conlog, a firm directed by the late ANC leader Joe Modise once he retired as minister of defense in 1999, is manufacturing these devices, which Johannesburg activists backed by the Freedom of Expression Institute will argue in court next month are unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Conlog is installing them across the African continent. Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee activists have taken the lead in ripping out pre-paid meters - both water and electricity - and periodically marching to municipal offices to trash the hated technology.

And as part of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, with its focus on public-private infrastructure partnerships, state-owned Rand Water - which supplies bulk water to Johannesburg - is helping a Dutch company and the World Bank privatise water in Accra, Ghana. That country's National Coalition Against the Privatisation of Water is already in close contact with the Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum, helping coordinate protests.

The highest profile citizens' campaign against commodified water was in Bolivia six years ago, when the people of the third-largest city, Cochabamba, fought the US firm Bechtel, backed by the World Bank. As of two months ago, the new Bolivian water minister in Evo Morales' indigenous-led government is Abel Mamani, a neighbourhood activist veteran of another water war, in El Alto, who cut his teeth battling the French water company Suez.

Mamani made five points in a speech last week:
* Water is a fundamental human right and a pre-requisite to the realization of other human rights;
* Water belongs to the earth and all living beings including human beings and it is the duty of everyone to protect access to water for all forms of life and for the earth itself;
* Water is a public good and therefore its management needs to be in a sphere that is public, social, community-based, participative and not based on profit;
* Water should not be privatised and should be withdrawn from all free trade and investment agreements; and
* There should be profound change in the organization of the World Water Forum to allow majority and decisive participation in the negotiations by the poorest and those who most need water.

Bolivia is just one of the sites where the balance of forces has shifted left; other major battles - not always victorious - have been fought in Manila, Jakarta and Detroit. Biwater was kicked out of Dar es Salaam last year, to the regret of its advisor, the Adam Smith Institute, funded by British taxpayers.

Civil society movements and governments have forced Suez to retreat from major cities ranging from Atlanta to Buenos Aires to Montevideo in recent months. The firm's bid to retain the Johannesburg Water contract for another 25 years will be considered by council in June, but after mass protests in Soweto, Orange Farm and other townships, is by no means secure.

The goals of progressive civil society activists, generally, are 'decommodification' of water, improved access by poor people, better conditions for water workers, and more appropriate eco-management of water. The latter should include penalties for hedonistic consumption.

Additional campaigns are waged against megadams, inappropriate irrigation, fish destocking, water pollution, bulk water diversions, bottled water, abuse of water by golf courses and extractive firms like Coca Cola and Nestle, and looming water scarcity. On one crucial battleground, control of water by the World Trade Organisation, activists appear to have just won, by exempting water from the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services.

As the Mexico confrontation shows, protesters are linking up with vigour. Back in 1992, after the Rio Earth Summit and a Dublin water conference that both advanced the principle that water is 'an economic good', privatisation began in earnest. Within a few years, a broad-based international front of community, consumer, environmental and labour organisations emerged to fight back.

The formal privatisation of water slowed during the late 1990s, in part because it became so difficult for the big British, French, German, Spanish and US firms to realise profits across the Third World, not least thanks to rising social resistance. Nevertheless, municipalities and water supply agencies are still being pressured by the World Bank to adopt commercial principles, including pricing water high enough to at least cover operating/maintenance costs, at a time of declining subsidies.

No one disputes that with at least 2.6 billion people lacking adequate sanitation and 1.1 billion lacking access to improved water sources, there is an urgent need for dramatic improvements in investment, management and affordability. Third World states shrunk during the past quarter-century of sustained structural adjustment, addled by debt payment outflows, capital flight and foreign aid cutbacks. So the resources required for water and sanitation cannot often be found.

Still, the primary strategy adopted by water advocates has been to defend the state as the key institution for delivering water. There are vast problems with relying on state agencies (whether national or municipal), yet in most societies it remains the institution which can best redistribute and organise resources.

Some water-delivery NGOs such as WaterAid, members of Freshwater Action Network or South Africa's Mvula Trust do find themselves occasionally accused of betraying mass popular movement sentiments over water prices, standards and institutional delivery systems. While expanded community control is generally an objective of progressive activists, a primary concern is that decentralization should not replace a serious state commitment to subsidizing poor people's water. Unlike what most NGOs can provide, an operative state's grid service is more likely to offer purified, high-pressure water in sufficient quantities to serve gender equity, public health and other broader eco-social goals.

Critics argue that some NGO interventions lubricate neoliberalism, because installing inadequate collective tap systems - usually without sufficient sanitation - contributes to further state shrinkage. The general trend towards private outsourcing, including some examples of NGO delivery, has been destructive, because standards are lower, prices are higher, disconnections are more common, maintenance is worse and accountability is harder to establish.

The struggles against commodified water often erupt on global platforms, such as the triannual World Water Forum - at The Hague in 2000, Kyoto in 2003 and Mexico City in 2006 - and related meetings of the water establishment such as WTO summits. There, activists have battled a series of enemies:
* the Global Water Partnership (created by the World Bank, UN Development Programme and Swedish aid);
* the Marseilles-based World Water Council (founded by Suez, Canadian aid and the Egyptian government and joined by 300 private companies, government ministries, and international organisations);
* the International Private Water Association (privatisation firms plus the World Bank, US Credit Export Agency and Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development);
* the World Bank itself (which in $20 billion worth of 1990s water projects imposed privatisation as a loan condition in a third of the transactions);
* Mikhael Gorbachev's Green Cross (in ongoing dispute with Council of Canadians over global-scale water rights and property rights in the UN);
* Aquafed (a federation set up by a former Suez managing director); and
* the World Panel on Financing Infrastructure.

The latter was chaired by former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus during 2002-03, with major multilateral development banks, Citibank, Lazard Freres, the US Ex-Im Bank, private water companies (Suez, Thames Water), state elites (from Egypt, France, Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Pakistan) and two NGOs (Transparency International and WaterAid). It proposed much greater amounts of public subsidies for privatisers, via a risk insurance mechanism to safeguard companies like Suez against currency crises which devastated the firm's Argentina operations after 2001.

Some of the strongest critics of neoliberal water policies are citizens'/consumers' organisations (especially the Council of Canadians in Ottawa and Public Citizen in Washington); trade unions (Public Services International and their affiliates); indigenous people's movements; environmental groups (led by the International Rivers Network and Friends of the Earth); and think-tanks (e.g., the PSI Research Unit at Greenwich University, Polaris in Ottawa, the TransNational Institute in Amsterdam, the Agriculture and Trade Policy Center in Minneapolis, the Municipal Services Project in South African and Canadian universities, Parivartan and the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi, Food and Water Watch in Washington, and the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco).

From the struggles have emerged inspiring leaders, intellectuals and politicians, including Accra campaigners Rudolf Amenga-Etego (who was awarded the 2004 Goldman environmental prize) and Alhassan Adam, Canadians Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (who won the 2005 Right Livelihood Award) and writer Varda Burstein, Paris-based Danielle Mitterrand, Cochabamba movement leader Oscar Olivera, Washington-based water watchdogs Maj Fiil-Flynn and Sara Grusky, Olivier Hoedeman and Satoko Kishimoto of 'Reclaiming Public Water' at the Transnational Institute, filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, European campaigner Ricardo Petrello, anti-dam strategists Paddy McCully and Lori Pottinger, and extraordinary Indian women like Sunita Narrain, Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva and Shiney Varghese. South Africans who are well-known internationally include Bryan Ashe and Lianne Greef of the SA Water Caucus, Dale McKinley of the national Campaign Against Water Privatisation, Wits sociology researcher Ebrahim Harvey, Anil Naidoo (based in Ottawa), trade unionist Roger Ronnie, and Sowetans Trevor Ngwane and Virginia Setshedi.

The World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, as well as regional Social Fora, have provided spaces for water activist assemblies during the early 2000s. Email listserves such as 'water warriors', 'reclaiming public water' and 'right to water' permit information exchange and coordination. A People's World Water Forum was held in Delhi two years ago, preceded by the 2001 'Blue Planet' conference in Vancouver, as well as periodic European gatherings.

Because the water movements have generated superb examples of cooperation across borders, campaigns against commodified services will continue to serve as a model for global civil society. If in the short-term here in South Africa activists can reconnect water to Durban's poor and working people and disconnect Suez from Johannesburg and Rand Water from Accra, over the longer-term, the world desperately needs to link their visions, programmes and projects to similar processes, in the next set of 21st century water wars.

* Patrick Bond (pbond (at) mail.ngo.za) is based at the Centre for Civil Society,

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The Lesotho Highlands scheme supplies South Africa with millions of cubic metres of water per year, while people living in the lowlands of the tiny mountain kingdom struggle to find water for domestic consumption. Young women and children queuing with containers, waiting to draw water from boreholes or public taps, are a common sight in many parts of the country. "Life is difficult because we always have to travel for long distances to get water, and when we finally find a place that has water, there are many people waiting to get a turn," said Makemohele Koetle, from Lithabaneng district, southeast of the capital, Maseru.

Tanzanian villagers have begun using an energy-saving method to sterilise their drinking water - leaving the water under the sun. The piped water supply to Ndolela village in the central Iringa region is intermittent and even when it does it flow, it is not clean enough to drink. When the pipes run dry, villagers get water from a dirty spring. Mother of five Rose Longwa says the new process has changed her life. "We no longer suffer from stomach illness. That's because the water is clean and safe."

The targets for the seventh United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) sound impressive. This MDG focuses on ensuring environmental sustainability. Eight goals were adopted by the international community at the UN Millennium Summit, held in 2000, in a bid to raise living standards around the globe by 2015. However, Muna Lakhani, a member of the South-Africa based environmental action group, Earthlife Africa, has concerns about the targets for MDG seven - and indicators used to measure progress towards these targets.

The country is losing tonnes of an indigenous tree species to Europe where it is used in the manufacture of a cancer drug. As a result, conservationists in Tigoni, Kiambu, have launched a campaign to save Prunus Africana, locally known as Muiri. Tonnes of the tree's bark are exported to France and other European countries every year for the manufacture of drugs used in the treatment of prostate cancer.

Reports about the housing situation in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, often focus on the lack of proper places to stay - particularly in the massive slum of Kibera, where tens of thousands live in appalling conditions. However, there are also areas of the city where too many residential properties are being built - or at least, being built too quickly. Development here is outstripping the provision of water, electricity and sewerage systems. And the result, greater numbers of people relying on limited infrastructure, is seen as a recipe for disaster.

"Access to water is a basic right": while this is the message voiced by the organisers of the 4th World Water Forum, beginning Thursday (March 16) in Mexico City, civil society activists take a dim view of this international event, as they believe it will promote the privatisation of water resources.

A report published by WWF, Oxfam and WaterAid reveals that hydropower has the potential to contribute to reducing Africa's energy poverty, but calls for a greater emphasis in energy policies on providing benefits for the poorest people and reducing damage to ecosystems. The report 'Meeting Africa's Energy Needs - the Costs and Benefits of Hydropower' coincided with the start of the African Ministerial Conference on Hydropower and Sustainable Development in South Africa (March 6-9).

More frequent and more severe droughts are likely to blight the Horn of Africa as global warming increases and commercial activities continue to destroy the environment's ability to bounce back from dry spells, leading environmental experts have cautioned. Deforestation and commercial exploitation of wetlands have brought about climate change and decreased rainfall on a massive scale across eastern Africa, and if these harmful practices continue, millions of people could face starvation annually.

Focusing on water discharges by the Kiira and Nalubaale power stations as the principal cause of Lake Victoria's falling water levels, is diverting the debate from issues more critical to the long term health of the lake, according to senior Uganda Water and Energy officials. Regional environmental and global climatic issues pose a far greater threat to the lake as inflows from tributaries have fallen significantly in recent years, while the mean temperature has risen by 0.48 degrees centigrade over the past two years.