Background Briefing

After the terrible storms and floods, the tragedy of Myanmar unfolded before the world. The situation now is still grim. New Zealand journalist Joy Reid reports.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Kirsten Garrett: Hello, this is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I'm Kirsten Garrett.

First today, a powerful documentary by Radio New Zealand journalist Joy Reid. She recently returned from Myanmar, the country that used to be known as Burma.

And later, in the second half of today's program, some insights into the politics of water, in Australia and around the world, by Canadian Maude Barlow.

Maude Barlow: I believe that the global water crisis is the most important ecological and human threat of our time. And I'm not trying to compete with climate change, but rather, I think, water is the first face of climate change; and when you hear about climate change refugees and when you hear about food refugees, right now it's generally because of water, and that connection hasn't been made as much as it should have.

Kirsten Garrett: New Zealand journalist Joy Reid travelled through Myanmar to record the aftermath of the Cyclone Nargis disaster.

First you'll hear some background on what happened.

Doctor: The government was in fact their own people's worst enemy in the midst of this disaster.

Mahn Mahn (translation): This is an example of how the Burmese military neglects its people. This is a crime against humanity, they're trying to kill their own people.

Stuart Corlett: I would say that we'd be looking at several years of real poverty for that whole area and possibly for wider Burma.

Newsreader: Entire villages were virtually washed away in a massive storm surge. The military government ...

Reporter: The scale of the natural disaster facing Burma means the numbers are simply bewildering. The United Nations says up to two and a half million people were severely affected by the storm ...

Reporter: Myanmar's government has sharply raised its death toll from Cyclone Nargis to almost 78,000. State television says another 56,000 ...

Joy Reid: Life drastically changed at the beginning of May for two and a half million people living in the Irrawaddy Delta. One hundred and forty thousand were either killed or are still missing, and the Category 4 storm tore a path of destruction totalling $US4 billion, nearly as much as the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia.

Man: A big wave came all of a sudden, so knocked them all down. He was trying to swim with his, you know lift his daughter above the surface, he himself under the surface, and once in a while he came up for breathing, things like that. But after a while you know he thought he will die, but there was a log; he got a tree trunk so they were hanging on that tree trunk.

Joy Reid: Survivor Saw Lor La is a local chief from the worst affected area in the delta, Laputa.

Saw Lor La: Six of them survived. His relatives.

Joy Reid: Out of how many people?

Saw Lor La: Fifteen of them are lost. Day one of cyclone; until they reach here they didn't receive anything. The military chopper came every day, passing them by. They tried to make signs out of their rice bag, and with long bamboo, like flag-waving to those choppers, but nobody cared you know. No food received, no nothing.

Joy Reid: Was he surprised by the government's reaction?

Saw Lor La: He was very much surprised actually. For a moment he thought other human being you know, other human being with sympathy and love for their own citizens. And he didn't even understand why they did not give help and also blocked help.

Newsreader: Foreign Aid agencies in Myanmar say about 250,000 people still have not received any help.

Reporter: ... International aid agencies struggled to get help to cyclone-stricken Myanmar ...

Newsreader: So far the military regime there has not agreed to allow foreigners to enter the country ...

Joy Reid: Saw Lor La's disbelief was expressed internationally, and the military government's paranoid attitude towards aid is still having an impact.

When Cyclone Nargis hit, the Burmese military government sealed off its borders to foreign aid in a bid to stop information leaking out. Now one of those borders was this one on the edge of the Burmese town at Mirwadi [?]. It's far enough north that the town survived the cyclone, but it became an important hub for relief efforts.

The only thing that separates Thailand and Burma here is a dirty brown river, which is about 50 metres wide. There's no fences or barriers, and while there's heavy police presence on the border bridge connecting the two countries, some aid was able to be smuggled in across in small boats further down the river here.

Four and a half months on, and restrictions on aid have eased. However relief worker for the Christian group, ETHNOS, Kevin Chan, says permission to travel down to the delta region still takes many days, and does not allow the full access required to reach all at risk.

Kevin Chan: When you see the aid workers are allowed in there, they're allowed into the major cities, but from the needier or the bigger towns in the area, they're not allowed out into the small villages where the aid actually is required. So a lot of organisations like us from the beginning are now starting to use locals to go out and do the legwork for them.

Joy Reid: Near on a thousand international aid workers have been granted visas into Myanmar, a surprising number, given the initial resistance, according to Myanmar expert, Nicholas Farrelly, a researcher at the Australian National University.

Nicholas Farrelly: While the aid workers who are currently working inside Burma don't have full freedom of movement or of action, they are there in numbers that are unprecedented in the last 40-something years of Burmese history.

Joy Reid: But it's not enough. Thousands of people still haven't seen any form of humanitarian assistance. They've effectively been ignored and left to fend for themselves.

Mahn Mahn is part of the emergency assistance team, a team of local people backed by Western charities who are working at a grassroots level with affected communities and those not yet reached by the international community.

Mahn Mahn (translation): The government and aid agencies have not reached the most affected areas, only those near the towns, as it's very difficult and dangerous to cross the swollen rivers. The people in the most affected areas have still not received any assistance.

Joy Reid: But he claims much of the aid does not get through because of deliberate action against the minority ethnic group, the Karen. The Burmese government and the Karen tribes relationship has been fraught with difficulty over the years with the Karen providing the longest and most consistent resistance to military rule. That's resulted in continuous conflict between the two sides. Nicholas Farrelly says the reaction to the cyclone amounts to another attack.

Nicholas Farrelly: In delta areas there are large numbers of Karen who were badly affected by the cyclone. Some of those areas are the most remote parts of the delta and it's very difficult for aid workers to get to some of these places. All of this plays into the hands of the Burmese government in its decades-long campaign against the Karen and against their revolutionary movements.

Joy Reid: This young relief worker has just returned from a trip to the delta. Insight's agreed not to reveal his name for his own safety, but instead we'll call him Saw Ha Soe. He says if help is near those who need it, many of the Karen are denied access to it.

Saw Ha Soe: The government said okay, these towns you can come and get your rations of rice on this day, and so they would rally to get a boat together and travel half a day on the boat to get their rice. But then they arrive, and the government official says, 'Oh no, you're rice is not here, maybe try at this other place.' So they go to this other place, and then again, they're told, 'No, not here, try another place.' And they don't end up with any rice.

Joy Reid: He sees the lack of aid as a form of genocide.

Saw Ha Soe: I think that you could say it is a type of ethnic cleansing. The SBDC authorities have been known to say that there are a lot of bullets for the Karen people in the eastern border, however they don't need bullets for the Karen in the delta region because the cyclone will take care of them.

Joy Reid: Relief efforts to these regions have effectively been left to a dedicated few Burmese, illegally smuggling to the needy. But conditions are challenging, with transport boats overturning in the swollen waterways on a journey to the remote delta towns.

Stuart Corlett of Christian Aid organisation, Partners Relief and Development New Zealand, says it's a dangerous job.

Stuart Corlett: When you go into that delta area, there are military checkpoints all over the place. If you are found to be delivering aid illegally, then you're likely to be arrested. Shipments are being taken and then put into government hands, we don't know what happens to those shipments after that point.

Joy Reid: So how risky is it for people to be working in the delta without putting relief efforts through the government channels?

Stuart Corlett: Incredibly risky. Life threatening.

Joy Reid: It's these ongoing humanitarian efforts which Saw Hasoy says are keeping people alive.

Saw Ha Soe: People are not dying at the moment because they are getting the secret food provided by the religious organisation. However they are malnourished and if it continues like this, the conditions will get worse and worse and worse, because there's not enough food and nourishment for the people.

Joy Reid: But Mahn-Mahn of the Emergency Assistance team, who is also a Karen, says reaching the worst affected areas of the delta is only half the problem. Getting the much-needed goods into Mynamar is the other.

Mahn-Mahn (translation): Most of the aid has to pass through the government. You can't legally donate directly to the survivors. We don't know if the aid gets there, as there's a lot of corruption, and sometimes they're making the Nagis victims pay a small tax before they can receive any aid.

Joy Reid: The military regime also appears to be benefiting from the money flowing in, as Nicholas Farrelly explains.

Nicholas Farrelly: With the funds that have flowed into the country after the cyclone, there has been an attempt on the part of the Burmese government to use an advantageous exchange rate that allows them to take a slice of all donated funds and put it into government coffers.

Joy Reid: Last month the UN estimated $2.3 million in international aid was lost due to the military regime's complex foreign currency rules. And some of the donated aid is also turning up in the marketplace.

This doctor needs his identity to remain a secret.

Doctor: The relief supplies that had been brought in by then for the people in fact were showing up in the marketplace in Rangoon for sale. Meaning that someone had confiscated them, sold them, and we're now seeing goods in the market we've never seen before, and they are of the nature of the items that we were told were brought into the country for relief purposes.

Joy Reid: However World Vision's Pamela Cisco who was based in Bangkok, says their aid is getting through.

Pamela Sitko: World Vision personally has not experienced that. This is something that you've had to be quite careful about though. It's something that you want to monitor and control in every emergency, and that's why we use our own processors, we use our own tracking systems because we want to be accountable and transparent, both to the donor community and to the people who are intended recipients of the aid.

Joy Reid: Those working in Myanmar paint a dismal picture of what life is still like in the areas hit by the cyclone.

Livestock numbers have been decimated, rice paddies ruined by saltwater, nearly half a million homes destroyed. Not only did the winds and rain wreak havoc but an accompanying tidal surge swamped low-lying villages and swept away most of the delta's infrastructure, including 4,000 roads, schools, and 75% of the region's hospitals. Pamela Cisco.

Pamela Sitko: Damage to that extent sends a community reeling. In a lot of areas in the delta, entire towns of 20,000 people were completely wiped out. The other thing to take into consideration is that when health clinics were also washed away, so were the staff. So now you've got a 10% shortage in health focused staff in the country.

Joy Reid: This doctor says as aid is delayed, lives will be lost, as surviving communities remain unprotected against outbreaks of disease.

Dr Butz: Malnutrition and exposure have caused a great deal of discomfort, and although there's no way to account for them, undoubtedly additional deaths. Here are people who live in an area where malaria is common, it's the rainy season, water and mosquitoes are everywhere, many of them have no shelter of any kind, no mosquito nets, many of them have no access to medicine still. So yes, there will be continuing increased number of deaths for the indefinite future, so long as these people are unreached.

Joy Reid: Already some towns have reported outbreaks of dengue fever, and relief worker Kevin Chan says decaying bodies remain unburied.

Kevin Chan: Dead bodies were still floating around. We've heard many reports about the Burmese sending people to clear the dead bodies, but they ended up just picking off their jewellery, the watches, that kind of thing, and chucking the dead bodies in the sea. Which of course, they floated back to land continued to pollute the rivers.

Joy Reid: The major focus right now is to try to restore a sense of normality to the delta, which was the rice-producing hub of Myanmar, the country once known as the Rice Bowl of Asia.

Pamela Sitko: A lot of the fields have been corrupted with saltwater. After the cyclone hit there was a giant sea-surge, and so it's like a tidal wave that washes over the fields, and unless the seeds are salt-resistant, they just simply won't grow. So there is a real need to focus on livelihood recovery. The planting season is ending at the end of this month, and without seeds in the ground, that means that people miss out on another harvest, and that means that we have to continue the aid the donor community has to continue providing people with food, because there is no alternative, there is nothing else to eat.

Joy Reid: Pamela Sitko says the lack of rice is a debilitating issue. There's not nearly as much plantable land available as there was pre-cyclone, and the world's food program estimates 700,000 people will need food assistance until livelihoods are restored.

But Stuart Corlett of Partners Relief and Development New Zealand, says that could be years away.

Are we where things should be after a general disaster, or have things been severely hampered?

Stuart Corlett: Absolutely not. They're nowhere near where they should be. More than half of the people are without what they need to survive. I would say that we'd be looking at several years of real poverty for that whole area, and possibly for wider Burma.

Joy Reid: Makeshift refugee camps were set up after the cyclone, by various religious groups, humanitarian groups and the government. However, Saw Ha Soe says within a few weeks the military regime began forcing people to return home, and then abandoned them.

Saw Ha Soe translation: The government believed that this time that they have spent in the camps has been enough for their rehabilitation, and it's time for them to go back. So they used 11 buses, and with no plan on what to do, they just drove the people back to where they previously were, and dropped them off. The government gave the people 32 cups of rice for a family, but the problem is that a worker will eat two and a half cups of rice each day, and so therefore 32 cups of rice will last about two weeks for a family, and then they have nothing.

Joy Reid: Many are returning to scuffles over land ownership. Relief worker, Mahn Mahn says during the vicious storm, their documents were washed away and that's proving problematic.

Mahn Mahn (translation): Some people have lost their land as they no longer have their land registration papers. When they return to their homes, they find that other companies have taken over their properties and they have no way to prove that they are the original owners.

Joy Reid: There are no reports of the government confiscating land, people claiming land they do not own, and others having to pay for the land they already owned. Children's documents were also washed away in the storm, and that's preventing some from returning to school.

For many of those who lost their parents, the future is bleak. Relief worker Kevin Chan says there are reports children left on their own are taken to army headquarters to service soldiers. Others end up as child prostitutes.

Kevin Chan: A lot of unaccompanied children end up being taken in by the police or by the army. Burma has the most number of child soldiers of any country in the world.

Joy Reid: Those in Yangon say both adult and child prostitution has increased since the cyclone, with an influx of people from the delta region.

While the impact of the cyclone has been devastating, the reality is life in Myanmar for many was difficult before the cyclone. The population has now lived under a restrictive and repressive military regime for more than 45 years. This is how aid worker Kevin Chan sees the situation.

Kevin Chan: The cyclone is just a symptom of a much deeper issue of the military junta. Burma is not a country with an army, it's an army with a country. And so the whole country exists for the army.

Joy Reid: May's Cyclone Nargis played its part in the deterioration; however most of the country's downward spiral has been man-made.

Kevin Chan: This is a country that used to be the richest country of South East Asia. This is a country that had so much natural resources that it could feed the population, take care of all the population several times over. But right now, all that wealth is being taken up by a few generals who have warehouses of gold in Rangoon. They're evil, and that place is just nuts.

Joy Reid: It now does its best to shut out the world. It's near impossible for a foreign journalist to get into Myanmar, let alone down to the delta region, but I can now officially say that I am on Myanman soil. I've come in as a tourist, not mentioning at all that I'm a journalist, and I had to leave my passport with the Burmese police at the border. Now this is to ensure that I do leave this evening. I'm under strict instructions that we're to be gone by 5pm tonight. No tourists are allowed to stay in the this area any longer than one day.

Well the first thing that strikes me about Myanmar is its poverty. As soon as I crossed over the border bridge, it became immediately evident. There's a very depressive feel about this place. The locals' clothes are very basic, some even without shoes, and all the roads off this main road here are full of potholes, and there's hardly any cars here on the roads. People instead are either walking in this 36-degree heat, or being pushed in trolley-like bicycles. There's numerous beggars in the streets as well, and there's a terrible stench in the local market. Dead rats lying on the ground; it's a completely different feel to Thailand which is literally just across the river.

The United Nations estimates more than a third of Burmese children are malnourished. It's one of the world's 10 poorest nations, with statistics showing the military regime spends up to 50% of its gross domestic product on the army, and less than 2% is spent on health and education. The military regime in Myanmar also stands accused of severe human rights violations against its people.

Man: In recent years the Burmese military has particularly in areas along the border between Thailand and Burma, been attempting to implement a campaign that will deny all support to the armed groups that are struggling on behalf of some of the minority peoples who live along that border, and there have been many well-documented cases where the Burmese military has abused and exploited local peoples, sometimes with horrifying consequences.

Joy Reid: There's also ongoing tension between the Burmese army and the rebel group, the Karen National Union, with recent counter-attacks by the independence movement killing many, including civilians, such as the bombing of a video café last week.

Hundreds of thousands are fleeing to the jungle or if they're lucky, across the border into the refugee camps which line the border with Thailand.

Well at the moment we're travelling north to the largest Burmese refugee camp here on the border of Burma and Thailand. It's called Mayla (?) and houses about 40,000 refugees. Now we've had to keep very quiet about our travel plans to come here, as technically it's actually illegal for foreigners to enter this camp.

Well we've made it inside this Mayla refugee camp, which is the largest of seven camps on the Thai side of the Myanmar-Thai border. Forty thousand refugees live here, in a space which was originally only designed for about 6,000 people. A few years ago it got up to 60,000. There are problems here with overcrowding, there's also a big problem with hygiene. The septic tanks are full, water supplies often from a small river, which is brown and dirty, and fast depleting its supply.

Pastor Robert Htwe lives in the Thai border town of Masot. He works with the refugees, most of whom are Karen.

Robert Htwe (translation): They are coming to Thailand as many of their houses and villages have been burnt down. People have been killed, and the Burmese military have put up land mines. We are afraid of the land mines. If we stay in the village, we are forced to be porters and to carry food for military. So many people have fled to Thailand.

Joy Reid: The claims about food and other aid not being distributed to the Karen people who make up a third of the population in the cyclone-affected area, appear to be the latest action against this ethnic grouping. But many have been fleeing, claiming torture and persecution for years.

Hebrew, who is Karen, escaped to the Mae La refugee camp in March, walking for a month through mountainous terrain.

Translator: He was caught and tortured because they accused him of giving food to the KNU. So he saw the whole village you know, torched, burnt down, and then four of his friends they were the accused and shot dead. The last person they shot him but not fired, apparently the bullet jammed or something. So they knifed him and cut his throat.

Joy Reid: Myanmar's ambassador to Australia, the closest to New Zealand, was not prepared to make himself available for an interview. However expert Nicholas Farrelly says the military regime staunchly defends itself and its actions.

Nicholas Farrelly: If you were to ask the Burmese generals themselves what was positive about their rule of the country, they would, I'm sure, assert that they see themselves as nationalists, as leaders who have brought pride back to their lands. In reality, the propaganda that the Burmese generals feed themselves, is but the tiniest fraction of the full story.

Joy Reid: But despite this, the Burmese people are proving themselves to be resilient and courageous in the wake of Cyclone Nargis. Communities are banding together to help rebuild each others' lives.

Kevin Chan: The heroes of this situation are the Burmese people. They've lived in such poverty under such oppression for so long, that this is just another thing that's happened. They are incredibly tough people. I've seen that time and time again, where situations that would knock down someone from somewhere else, but over there, they've just toughed up and got on with it. Somehow in a situation that most other people would call hopeless, they find hope.

Joy Reid: But the calls from the international community for more help for the people of Myanmar are as strong as ever.

Man: You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what's going on. Anybody who can refuse international aid so that people die, there's got to be something wrong with those people. It's a question of international human rights. These people are being brutalised and we need to help them.

Translator: Burmese people are all really suffering a humanitarian crisis. We need the international community's help, but they need to work with the local community. If they don't, the humanitarian crisis in Burma will get worse.

Woman: It takes a long time for recovery to happen, for people to rebuild their homes. So we expect, we anticipate the road to recovery will be a long one indeed.

Kirsten Garrett: That was a documentary about Myanmar today by Radio New Zealand journalist, Joy Reid. And this is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I'm Kirsten Garrett.

And we'd just like you to know that ABC Radio National has a survey for Online users of the network at present. You'll find the link on the Radio National website, on the right hand side of the page, and we'd really like to hear from you.

MAUDE BARLOW

Kirsten Garrett: Now, the second half of today's Background Briefing. It's part of a talk given at Sydney University by Canadian activist and specialist in the politics of water, Maude Barlow. She was speaking at the Sydney Ideas Forum.

Maude Barlow has six honorary doctorates in Canada and she's won several awards, written many books and she's a member of dozens of organisations that work to conserve water around the world. Maude Barlow.

Maude Barlow: I believe that the global water crisis is the most important ecological and human threat of our time, and I'm not trying to compete with climate change, but rather I think water is the first face of climate change, and when you hear about climate change refugees or when you hear about food refugees right now it's generally because of water, and that connection hasn't been made as much as it should have.

We all learned back in about Grade 6 that you can't waste water, it goes round and round in the hydrologic cycle, it's a fixed amount, it won't go anywhere, so it's OK to use all you want. And in fact that's not true. In fact what we're learning is that as we pollute surface water, or we just have more use for surface water than we have surface water, we are turning to groundwater and mining it far faster than it can be replenished by nature. Just so many examples: one is that India has 23 million bore wells going 24/7, and a group of UK scientists a few years ago said there's coming anarchy in India as the exponential drying up of the groundwater takes place at the same time as massive pollution of surface water.

And so we're also taking water from river systems, totally over-extending most of the major river systems of the world for mass flood irrigation, or urbanising, paving over what's called water retentive landscape, and literally we know that we're creating deserts from areas where we've removed the vegetation that's necessary for the hydrologic cycle to function, literally it won't rain if it doesn't have something to fall on.

We're also doing something called virtual water trade, and you are going to hear a lot more about virtual water trade, I hope, in the next little while here in Australia, because Australia's one of the three biggest water exporters in the world, through this process. You've heard about embedded or embodied water, that's the amount of water it takes to put a bottle of wine on your table, or a steak, or your handbag or whatever. But what people are talking about less is how much of that water actually gets exported out of your watershed and out of your country, in fact every day in the form of virtual water trade. And Australia, with Canada and the US, these are the three biggest exporters of water through this process; you're a major nett exporter of water, and one could argue that you don't have that water to be exporting.

So we're also moving water around the world from where it's needed in ecosystems to where other countries can buy it, or perhaps big corporations can buy it, because they don't want to use their own water. The most startling example of this is a lake called Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley in Kenya, I was there last year, and went out on this exquisite, I could not tell you how beautiful it is, the colour of blue is just different than anything I've seen. It holds the last wild hippopotamus herd in East Africa, and we were going out on this boat looking at this marvellous place, and I saw an Island that had wildebeest and giraffes and everything on it, and we saw pelicans and so on, and I said to the boatman, 'This looks just like Out of Africa', and he said, 'Well that would be because that was where Out of Africa was filmed, right there.' You could almost see Robert Redford landing his plane and Meryl Streep waiting for him. Well, it turns out that this lovely, lovely lake is dying; it'll be gone in about five years, because it's been surrounded by European rose agribusiness companies. Because Europe is taking care of its water, so they don't want to use their own water to produce roses, which are water-intensive. So all the roses that you would buy pretty well in Great Britain and Europe, come from either Lake Nyvasha, or one of the lakes in the surrounding area, and the lake is dying. It's just one small example of where a poor country, or a water-poor country still sends its water away. In Australia's case it's not because you're a water poor country, it's because your government, like my government just has received its orders and its marching orders are you know, 'Trade at all costs, export competition, economic globalisation, part of the Cairns Exporting Group can't question it and so you just have to keep going on, even if you've come up to the water wall.

So as a result of all these developments and activities, what we're finding, and what I want to state so strongly, is that our pollution displacement and mismanagement of water is actually one of the causes of climate change. We usually hear it the other way, that water is a consequence, water problems are a consequence of greenhouse-gas-induced climate change which is true too. The warmer the air, the faster the evaporation, the less ice pack you have, the less snow melt, the glaciers of the world are all melting quickly, so it is absolutely true that water is a victim of climate change. But it is also true the other way, that as we move remove water from water-retentive landscapes we create more desert, which creates more heat, which is part of the whole issue. Our scientists are now talking about what they call hot stains, and these are parts of the world that are running out of water. This is not cyclical drought, it's not just climate change, it is running out of water. Those include 22 countries in Africa, most of the countries of the Middle East, they include Northern China because China, while it has a lot of water, about the same amount as Canada, it's using its water to produce all the shower-curtain liners and toys in the world, and so they diverted their water from food production and out of watersheds to industrial production. It includes large parts of Southern India, and several other Asian countries. It includes the south-west of the United States, the south-east of the United States is now in crisis and it includes Mexico City, and the whole Mexican valley, Mexico City is actually sinking in on itself; it's called subsidence, when you take all the water underneath your city, it just literally starts to sink. And I fear that it includes Australia, at the rate that Australia is running out of water. So we're talking not about a cyclical drought that will somehow right itself, but a permanent change in the amount of water that exists in these communities.

So we have a growing crisis, but I have to say it's not just the global south. In Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, three years ago they cut off the water to 42,000 families because they couldn't pay their water bills, and water bills are starting to go up around the world as water becomes what I call 'blue gold', and also these families of course were African-American and so there's a huge issue around race and class and so on. The issues of equity and the ecology are deeply, deeply entwined here, including in the notion that many well-intentioned people have, which is if we could just find the money to hook up the people in the global south without money to groundwater supplies, everything would be OK, without understanding that we're destroying groundwater supplies, and that water may not be there for them.

Oh, and I just want to say that of course then, because we are running out of water, the planet running out of water, there are crises, in conflicts now growing around water. Several kinds of conflicts, one of them is between large urban centres which have the right to water, right, because they're big, and small communities, rural communities, indigenous communities, peasant or tribal communities, and all over the world big cities are confiscating water systems that belong in the country, and not only is this totally unjust to the people who live there, but it disconnects the water from the land. They literally remove the water from where it's needed for a healthy, hydrologic cycle. Mexico City has taken the water that belongs to the people called the Masalas, it's a First Nations group in Mexico, and they built a pipe into their community and built a great big fortress with armed guards and dogs, and they will shoot you if they catch you trying to get into that water system there, just as one example. I saw one here; Andrew and I went up to the Moorabul River near Melbourne last week, and this is a river system - I don't know if any of you have heard of the Lal-Lal Falls, but it is a very beautiful river system between Ballarat and Geelong. But a month ago, the State government just made a decision and with the stroke of a pen, This is done, to take the water, to confiscate the water from the Murubul and to send it to those two urban cities. And they just declared, they didn't say this, but it's the same as saying it, the Moorabul is expendable, and it will die. And already the trees are beginning to go dry and there's no more platypus in the river and the farmers along there have no water, and it's just - you know, they invited us into their homes and they just were kind of like animals in headlights. 'We live in Australia, we have a democracy, how could this have happened? How could they just have taken our water? I mean this is what you hear in dictatorships, but how could this have happened here?' When I speak I don't want us to think far away, I want us to understand how close to home this is.

Kirsten Garrett: Canadian activist Maude Barlow, speaking recently in Sydney. And she spent many years working on the politics of water around the world.

Maude Barlow.

Maude Barlow: We're also going to see water as the national security issue for nation-states that are running out, particularly superpowers. China, because it's running out of water, is building a great big pipeline to take the water from the Tibetan Himalayas, and move it to where it needs it for its industrial production. Now this is water that belongs to and feeds the give great rivers of Asia. Now you see a coming conflict with countries like India, as China just helps itself to water that now belongs to everyone. In my part of the world, the United States is running out of water, and I came upon a consortium advising the Bush White House and the Pentagon on water as a national security issue, and one of the corporations advising them is Lockheed-Martin, the world's biggest weapons manufacturer, and there's no question that sooner than later, the US is going to claim Canada's water as its own.

You're going to start to see this search outside of borders. I guess the other conflict that is really heating up is the conflict between those who see water as a human right, who say that it's a commons, it belongs to all of us, and it should not be privatised, and that does not mean, by the way, we shouldn't put a price on it for the service, that's different, but who say that it should be delivered as a public service on a not-for-profit basis. And those who see water as a commodity to be put on the open market for sale, like running shoes. You get the bottled water companies. Last year we put over 200-billion litres of water in plastic bottles around the world, most of them, 95% of them do not get recycled, they get thrown into lakes, rivers garbage dumps, oceans, whatever, creating massive amounts of pollution. And the latest is the whole move to recycle water, either actual toilet to tap recycling, or desalination. And this is the hot new area, and this is what I'm hearing more and more from governments, particularly in the so-called First World, don't have to change our behaviours, don't have to lesson our water, yes, you can have your boutique bottled water and you can have your exports, you can have everything else, we'll just take it from the ocean. And it's such a very, very short-sighted answer; desalination is polluting, highly polluting, it puts a highly polluting chemical brine back into the ocean. You're now talking about choosing dead zones in the ocean, they will send it out far enough that it won't wash back somehow, and they'll choose parts of the ocean that will be expendable. I don't know how one makes that decision. I would sure worry about it for a country like Australia surrounded by oceans, you know, without the proper protections for these ecosystems. But this is the new shining city on the hill, is desalination. And I think you're going to hear a lot more about it as the answer here. It is expensive, it's energy-intensive, it creates more global warming of course because of emissions and so on. But you know, it's one of those things that happens when you put billions of dollars of investment into a technology, governments tend to get invested in it, and even if ten years down the road they say, 'Well, I wouldn't have made that decision if I could have gone back ten years', it's hard to undo, it's better not to do it in the first place.

So this brings me to Australia, and what I see here. You have a right to be really angry with your governments. What we're looking at here are years and years and years of mismanagement, of collusion with corporate and special interest organisations and industries and so on. Ignoring scientific, environmental warnings that were crystal clear at the time when some of this crisis could have been averted much more easily; of massive over-allocations. The Murray-Darling is over-allocated anywhere from 50% to 80% depending on which study you look at. But everybody agrees there are allocations for water that doesn't exist there, and of course with the drying of the Murray-Darling comes the certification of the Murray-Darling, and now the discussion about whether they're going to allow saltwater intrusion to protect the lakes at the end of the system, just takes my breath away. It is a crisis and it is not just a crisis of climate change. And their dependence on water-trading as if it's some kind of panacea is I think is a terribly shortsighted response. And I have to say to you that if your governments tell you that everybody's into privatisation, you should say, 'This is not true'. My country, Canada, we're almost 100% public sector delivery and control of our water. Europe has a little bit of a mix, it's about 75% public, but even the countries that have gone private like France, which has been historically private, is moving away, and the city of Paris, just announced about two months ago that it's going to switch back from a private to a public model when this contract is up. You cannot unbundle water from the land which is the actual language that is being used here, and not have a further exaggeration and a further deepening of the crisis because you are removing water from the very systems that are dying for that water, now. We have to bring that water back.

I really feel very strongly that the Australian people, the citizens of this country are far ahead of your governments, and ready and willing to take this on, but can't seem to get through that, and I've met dozens of local groups around the country that are working on the issue, but not together. And what needs to happen here is that you need to bring in the public trust doctrine to your water systems, including groundwater, and you need to follow a model like Vermont, and I'll tell you about Vermont.

Vermont is one of the New England States that has been bringing in legislation to protect its water systems, particularly groundwater, because as other parts of the United States run out of water, all these water-hunters are coming in, and pumping this water, just renting or buying properties, sticking bore wells down, and just sucking the water out. And we've been working with a lot of communities. I'm Canadian, but I do a lot of work in the US, working with communities to fight back and to reclaim their water systems. One of the big companies in Maine, for instance, is Poland Springs, which is a big Nestle company and Poland Springs goes into little communities and gives them money to their - you know, they pay a fee, which local community, government sometimes, accept, and then there they are, they build a big plant and it becomes its own reality. And a little place called Firebird, Maine, every eight minutes a great big double tanker of water is rolling out of there 24/7. They've cut up the roads and they've polluted the area, the lakes are dying, the springs are dying, the wells are drying up. This is the story.

So in Vermont they decided they'd better do something, so they just passed about two months ago, legislation that I would love to see here, and that is that they said, Nobody any more owns the water under the land. Nobody owns Vermont's water, it belongs to all Vemonters, it belongs to the ecosystem and it belongs to future generations, and to use a certain amount beyond a certain daily amount that farmers are allowed and so on, you have to get a permit, and the permit is only given if sustainable use of that water is demonstrated, so that there is excess for that use. You will pay for it. You will pay a permitting fee, quite high, and (this is the part I like the best) if there is any kind of drought, or any kind of shortage, there's a priority. The priority is No.1: Water for drinking and living for the people of Vermont; No.2: For local food production; and No.3: For all other activities, commercial activities, bottling activities, and food that leaves the State. Food that is for virtual water trade. And they're very, very clear. And it was a bipartisan Bill; it passed the State Legislature last month unanimously. This is kind of spreading throughout many places that are understanding that if they don't take measures now, whether you have lots of water or not, within a number of years that water may not be there.

And we have struggled, this global water movement, with the principles and we say The answer to the question of who owns water is that no-one owns water. Water belongs to the earth, it belongs to all species, it belongs to future generations. It's a common, and it's a public trust, and it's a human right. And so we're working very hard to get a covenant at the United Nations to declare once and for all that water is a human right and therefore no-one has the right to appropriate it for personal profit while other people are dying. And that may sound like a motherhood, but your country is going to oppose, my country's opposed, the United States is opposed, so we take a deep breath and we move to the next step of this process.

So I'd like to just end with the beautiful words of an American environmentalist whose name is Ernst Colombec, and he coined what are called the Four Laws of Ecology, and they apply to anything to do with the ecology, but they also I think specifically are very good words for us to think about when we think about water. Ernst Colombec said:

The Four Laws of Ecology are: Everything goes somewhere. All things are connected. There's no such thing as a free lunch; and Nature bats last.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

Kirsten Garrett: That was Canadian Maude Barlow, speaking at the Sydney Ideas Forum at the University of Sydney a few weeks ago. And there will be a link to the full talk, and the question and answer session on the Background Briefing website.

Earlier today you heard a documentary on Mynamar, by Radio New Zealand journalist Joy Reid.

Further Information

Council of Canadians

Watermark Australia

Blue Planet Project

Presenter

Kirsten Garrett

Producer

Kirsten Garrett