The World Bank, Water Wars, and Corporations

Womens Lives, Mulicultral Perspectives, Chapter 57- Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey
The World Bank, WTO and Corporate Control Over Water (2002)
Written By Vandana Shiva

The United States America survives on capitalism, we live off of production and time is constantly on our minds. Being a part of this society, I can look back at look at how I have grown up, and see that for the most part at least from my background this is how it is. We go to school to learn, we go then, to continue in school, so we can get a job, and from there we work hard at our jobs to earn money. I have always been told since I was a child that we had to work hard to we could get a good job. Whenever I said things like, I don’t want money or don’t need money I was shot down.

Since this class, my idea of everyone working hard and getting money has changed. This is due to the fact that we certainly don’t start on an even field and underlying that is race and class, things I believed as a child didn’t exist. We are so focused on the goal of getting a job and earning money in order to ‘survive’ that we are almost blinded to what is going on around us. That or we simply don’t care what is happening to those around us because we are disconnected from that world. I understood people not being able to feel completely with disasters and horrors happening around the world because you can’t see, but in our own country we are blind to these things.

Looking at time and money as a way our society runs off of, I am not surprised when I read Vandana Shiva’s article, “The World Bank, WTO and Corporate Control Over Water (2002).” In summary she explains that water is becoming what some politicians call the new water or the new gold, and therefore due to its scarcity and importance, a profit to made off of it. It is true that water must be controlled and dispersed in a way that everyone can get some and live comfortably, but as a corporation who wants a profit, it is not the way. When this has happened in places live Bolivia, people who are the poorest didn’t have access to the water systems that were put into place by the World Bank, through corporations. When the community came together to try and gather water from rain, rivers etc., they were charged and were not even allowed the murky river water.

As citizens of the United States, we like to take pride in the fact that we aren’t run by our government, but what most of us don’t realize is that we are run by corporations that control the market. Beneath that, are the ideas of racism and class discrimination. So as citizens who are represented around the world by our government and maybe even more strongly, our corporations, what can we do so that we are heard?