PARK CITY, Utah (AFP) — Documentary film "Flow," premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this week, condemns water profiteering, calling for a UN resolution to make access to clean drinking water a human right.
The film by French-born director Irena Salina blasts Paris-based Suez and Vivendi Environment for commercializing water systems around the world, as well as Nestle, the world's largest bottled water seller, for draining watersheds.
Even the World Bank gets knocked in the film for funding massive water diversion projects that have displaced 80 million people, instead of smaller, cheaper and more eco-friendly community projects to bring fresh drinking water to the poor.
"It's a very dangerous trend, at a time when clean drinking water is becoming scarce, even in the United States, the richest country in the world," said Salina in an interview with AFP.
"We can't let companies continue to pollute our water. We need strong regulations to stop that, and also to stop them from draining our watersheds for profit," she said.
Along with a collective of activists, she is calling for a binding international treaty to protect the human right to water, as well as tougher local laws to prevent contamination of watersheds and water profiteering.
Her film documents African plumbers secretly reconnecting shantytown water pipes to ensure a community's survival.
It also shows a California scientist who exposes toxins in US water supplies, a "water guru" working to provide clean drinking water in India, and the CEO of Suez who argues for privatization as the wave of the future.
"It should not be possible to be running out of water," Maude Barlow, a Canadian activist and author of a book on the water crisis, "Blue Covenant," told AFP.
"But by mining groundwater and watersheds at the current rate, and contaminating water, we're actually losing water from the closed hydrologic cycle, and soon we'll be facing a water crisis."
Each year, water-borne diseases kill more than HIV, malaria, and wars combined, she noted, citing a World Health Organization estimate. An exact figure was not available.
"Water is the lifeblood of the planet and if you pollute it, it's like putting poison in your own veins," said Barlow.
More than one billion people worldwide live without access to improved water sources, according to the WHO, and Barlow suggested 36 US states will run out of easily available fresh water in the next five to 10 years.
"This notion that there is unlimited water to go around is wrong," she said, warning that water shortages were a potential cause of conflict.
"We're running out of clean drinking water as the population grows and demand grows exponentially. Suddenly there will be conflicts over water between countries, between rich and poor, between rural and urban areas."
Barlow got involved in the cause when water was included as a trade-able commodity in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
She has since pressed governments to enact strict laws to restrict agri-business and commercial uses of water. Drinking water currently accounts for only 10 percent of its use, the film notes.
Barlow warns that the bottled water trend, worth some 100 billion dollars in sales annually, and the creation of water cartels that own water delivery systems will lead to greater water shortages for the poor.
"Suddenly, water has become very big business," she said.
In one lighter scene in the film, a US restaurant serves "l'eau du Robinet" (tap water) to unsuspecting diners, and other faux bottled water brands, actually from a garden hose behind the restaurant.
One patron comments: "Oh yes, it tastes much better than tap water."
"We want it understood that nobody has the right to appropriate water for profit while people are being denied access to clean drinking water," Barlow said.
"Getting a UN covenant passed won't solve the problem, but it will shed light on it."
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