This is in response to "The Coming Global Water Crisis" by Nikki...

I DO have several issues with this mini-documentary. First thing that raised a flag was that this was from something called "FutureMoneyTrends" which meant this documentary was to cleverly disguised to sell you the concept of "water as commodity". Well it is NOT, though the Water Barons would love you to believe that and they have been pushing it for years and have almost succeeded (interestingly, a lot of the links I was going to put here have VANISHED; UN has removed the documents; a lot of other documents I had bookmarked over the years have disappeared, especially a wonderful paper about the Big Five "Water barons" from the site of Center for Public Integrity (Interestingly they themselves link to it here -- image on the right -- but the link is broken).

The documentary above also talks about bottled water but only mentions Africa. The problem is every where: Where ever the Water Barons (Nestle, Suez, etc.) have made inroads, you will see public water systems destroyed and people being forced to buy bottled water. The documentary fails to mention this and fails to mention the fact that at least three gallons of waters are contaminated processing one gallon of bottled water. And yes, farms are running dry because water is being pumped to bottle it an...i (and no surprise these two are becoming major players in the bottled water business).

U.N. to has played a very deceptive role in this. Though on the surface, it claims to push "water is a human right", it is very much in the pocket of the water barons, legitimizing their takeover of the water resources the world over. For an example, see it's report titled "The Right to Water" -- an excellent example of double-speak. On the one hand it cries against water privatization and on the other it negates it with:

Similarly, in the Plan of Implementation adopted at the
2002 Johannesburg Summit, governments pledged to
“employ the full range of policy instruments, including regulation,
monitoring … and cost recovery of water services,
without cost recovery objectives becoming a barrier to
access to safe water by poor people….”

Thus, while world leaders have acknowledged that
access to drinking water is a basic human right, they also
recognize that the cost recovery principle should be
applied for water use beyond those needs.

Clever, eh? Note also that U.N. has reduced the "Water as a Right" to only "Clean drinking water as a right" (but then, as pointed out above, a right we must pay for, disguised as "cost recovery". Here I should also mention another U.N report that itself exposes U.N. duplicity. It tells us of how U.N. itself "facilitates corporate control of water resources" by supporting the "'CEO Water Mandate', a corporate driven water initiative under the 'UN Global Compact'". Also compare these two headlines as an example of U.N. playing Dorian Grey:

• UN declares clean water a 'fundamental human right'
• UN rejects water as basic human right

Another tool they have come up with is to indirectly privatize rivers. This is done through pushing Big Dams to little countries that can never afford them, hence they are stuck forever paying interest of those loans to IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, etc.

To learn how far these people go, an excellent example is illustrated in this article: A Tale of Two Cities. I promise it will be time well spent:

...By 1993, Bogotá's sewer and water company, the Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá (or EAAB), was practically bankrupt. Staffed with political cronies who often changed with each new government, it didn't have the professional management needed to run a large utility. The utility was also crippled by union featherbedding and contracts it couldn't afford. Hundreds of other water utilities across Colombia and Latin America suffered from similar problems. So in the early 1990s, the World Bank began recommending privatization as the only solution to bad public management. The most alluring argument was that privatization would provide easy access to private capital.

In 1994, Colombia drafted the Public Services Law, by which private operators or community organizations could run public utilities. The government also began lowering subsidies to the poor to make Colombia's utilities more viable.

What happened next rattled the foundations of World Bank policy and challenged the privatization mantra that only big water multinationals had the expertise and capital to deliver clean drinking water efficiently and at affordable prices. In the conviction that water belongs to the people, the city of Bogotá bucked the privatization trend, refused World Bank money and transformed its public utility into the most successful in Colombia....

And may I also recommend a few more:

• Privatizing Water: What the European Commission Doesn't Want You to...
• One of History's Great Atrocities: The Corporate Theft of the Publi...
• Promoting Privatization: An analysis of World Bank lending policies...
• Water For Profit

I could go on forever on this but will stop here...

In the end I would like to conclude that yes, there is a water crisis but it is purely a manufactured one. :)

P.S. Some of the 'Missing inks' that have gone 'poof!":

• 1000 gallons of water for 1 gallon of ethanol-how green is that
• The Water Barons
• Right to Water UN 2003 Report
  
• WHO | The right to water
• Public Citizen | Water is a Human Right - Water is a Human Right

Just a coincidence??

Another related myth: Overpopulation.... ;-)