The common good cannot be commodified or subject to speculation.
At the beginning of December 2020, a news item with little relevance in the international mass media reported that "Water has begun to be traded in the financial market for future commodity derivatives".
The opinions in favor assured that contracts under this financial instrument would allow a better management of irrigation, regulating water scarcity, improving the correlation between supply and demand. It was mentioned that this stock market "tool" only applies to water in the state of California in the USA and that "what is being quoted is the future price of water, not the water itself."
The above statement can only come from large financial corporations such as the first to push these contracts, the CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) or from those who ignore the dynamics of systemic corruption in the world economy, with its subsequent impact on the cost of raw materials that these financial gadgets have.
We all know the essential importance of water for life, human development and the entire ecosystem. It is generalized worldwide that laws establish that water is a public good. In fact, and under the capitalist economy, accentuated by the impulse of the neoliberal version, water has become just another commodity with which financial profit is made.
The example of Chile in water management is for the moment a case of extreme violence at world level. Neoliberalism was applied for the first time in the world in that country, during the genocidal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The sinister dictator was among other things a puppet of the so-called Chicago School of Economics, a doctrinaire powerhouse of the neoliberal model. In the constitution decreed by Pinochet in 1980, Article 24 states that "The rights of individuals over water, recognized or constituted in accordance with the law, shall grant their holders ownership over them". This legal framework is an emblematic international case of the extreme advance in the privatization of water.
The current decision to use water as a good for financial speculation is one more negative step that follows the line of the crudest financial capitalism that began to be practiced worldwide in the 70s of the last century, first with Pinochet in Chile and then with Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and the USA.
Water has started to follow the financial path initiated by food three decades ago. In 1991, in the context of an expanding neoliberalism, the Goldman Sachs corporation decided that bread and other everyday foods could be a good business for "the world of finance". They transformed food into a financial abstraction, selected more than fifteen ingredients that could become tradable commodities in the financial market and prepared "financial products" with pigs, coffee, cocoa, soybeans, corn, some varieties of wheat, among other natural goods. They weighed the investment value of each item, mixed and coded the parts and reduced what had been a complicated mathematical formula into a single number: the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index.
The higher the price of the commodity the more attractive the investment. The higher the investment, the greater the risk that the price of the raw material will increase in the face of scarcity, and those who cannot pay the new price will pay for it with malnutrition and hunger, as they will not be able to access this commodity. Neoliberal rationality establishes that "everything can be commodified and negotiated".
It is necessary to understand and denounce the so-called "big financial corporations". Their only interest is profit, profit, whether we are talking about food, weapons, medicines or now water.
The factual result, proven over time, is always the same: the sustained increase in prices.
Absurdly, the top of the pyramid of food production is occupied by bankers and stock brokers who fix the price and paradoxically at the base of the pyramid are the peasants, the farmers with their work.
More than half of the money in the stock markets of the rich world is in the hands of HFT (High Frequency Trading), the most extreme form of algorithmic or automated speculation. Supercomputers that carry out millions of operations, lasting seconds or milliseconds, buy and sell without stopping, taking advantage of minimal differences in price, which in these quantities are transformed into mountains of money.
The disastrous consequences that the entry into speculative markets has had on the cost of food is the same path that has begun with water, the difference being that the financial speculation of the future derivatives market has only just begun on this essential natural good. As with food, the beginning of this type of financial transactions was almost silent. Then will come the fomented and induced crises with the consequent artificial rise in prices.
The human right to safe drinking water and sanitation was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly on July 28, 2010. Currently, 40% of the world's population lives in regions where drinking water is scarce. Eighty percent of wastewater returns to ecosystems without being treated.
Based on current data from the United Nations water agency (UN Water), the number of people without basic water services reaches 844 million. Some 2.1 billion people do not have access to safely managed drinking water, while 4.5 billion do not have access to safely managed sanitation services.
If the dehumanizing direction promoted by Big Capital is not reversed, speculation on territories with water sources will soon intensify, the subjugation of native peoples in different continents will be further enhanced, as will the increase in the displacement of populations and the promotion of armed conflicts.
Access to this resource, which originated on our planet long before hominids appeared and even before "the world of finance" was invented (current science estimates that water was formed on the planet in different ways some 2,000 million years ago), is a basic human right, linked to survival in an essential way; without water there is no health, no food, no life.
Humanists maintain that it is essential to move in the opposite direction to the international financial system.
For the new humanism, the factors of production are labor and capital, and speculation and usury are no longer factors of production.
We need to de-commodify nature and its components such as water. We need a harmonious relationship with the socio-natural environment.
Current science can (as long as it invests and develops much more than at present) provide in the short term alternative means to obtain more drinking water.
Current science and resources would make it possible in the very short term to have drinking water for the entire human race. If this is not happening, it is because the monstrous speculation of big capital is preventing it.
Some of them are currently being deployed, such as floating greenhouses, condensed water from fog, desalination and purification of sea water, and numerous instruments for a proportionate use of this vital element, for the benefit of the entire human species.
New techniques at the service of the people and the abandonment of violent practices that only have profit as an objective, arise as part of a formula to overcome this stage of human prehistory marked by the commodification of life, by the depredation of natural resources and environmental disaster, by the progressive discarding of human beings.
Humanists act in the political arena in an attempt to prevent the State from being an instrument of global financial capital.
Access to water is a human right and this vital liquid is an inappropriate common good, essential for the realization of the right to life.
The current moment calls for the protection of ecosystems and the restoration of those damaged and devastated. For this, it is necessary to change the roots of the productive, energetic and consumption matrix imposed by the current materialistic-capitalist culture.
International Coordination Team.
International Federation of Humanist Parties.