WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE...
By Jack A. Smith
Most inhabitants of the world’s rich countries assume that clean drinking water, adequate sanitary facilities, and efficient disposal of human wastes are a social given for people everywhere.
But such elementary human rights in this technological day and age are hardly accessible for 40% of the world’s population, amounting to 2.5 billion human beings who lack such amenities (including 1.1 billion without access to pure water). The real human tragedy is that by the year 2025 the number of those deprived of basic sanitation is expected reach 50%, even as the ruling classes of wealthy societies anticipate the accumulation of unparalleled riches. By 2050, the UN estimates that 80% of the world population will be living in poor countries.
It’s hard to comprehend, but poor sanitary conditions are responsible for some 2 million deaths of children every year, the majority of them victims of diseases associated with diarrhea resulting from impure drinking water. According to the UK’s Water Aid and Tearfund, which just released a report on the subject called “The Human Waste,” an expenditure of $16 billion a year by the rich industrial nations on improving sanitation in the developing countries (i.e., one-third of the Bush administration’s increase in the military budget for next year) could save 1 million child lives a year. In time, as the sanitary infrastructure grows, it should be possible to totally eliminate water-borne killer diseases.
All told, according to a new report from UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, about 11 million children die painful deaths annually from preventable diseases -- tetanus, polio and measles among them, in addition to diarrhea -- deaths that could be prevented for comparative pennies a day per child. These youngsters are part of some 600 million children of the world (more than twice the population of the United States) who live in abject poverty amidst the plenty enjoyed in the developed countries, nearly all of which functioned as the colonial or neocolonial rulers of the world for long periods during the last 200 years.
These children are not suffering because the societies in which they live are indifferent to their plight or are too ignorant or lazy to find solutions. Their poor societies are suffering as well, the result of historic and continuing exploitation and oppression principally by the industrialized countries of Europe of North America, which have enriched themselves by subjugating these peoples for generations. The few times extremely poor countries have managed to throw off their colonial and neocolonial shackles and tried to establish well-ordered, progressive societies, as in Angola or Nicaragua, the bully countries -- in the first case South Africa and the United States, in the second the U.S. alone -- supported the forces of reaction that destroyed these dreams of progress and sufficiency. The only real money being made in Angola today is stuffing the pockets of foreign oil countries. In dirt-poor Nicaragua, only the small upper class possesses material wealth. In both Africa and Latin America, the proportion of the population living in poverty has increased in the last decade, while in the industrialized countries the vaults of the corporate class overflowed from the globalization of economic inequality.
The poverty-stricken billions of our world, most of whom are the historic products of oppression, manipulation, underdevelopment and the misfortunes of climate, require clean water, decent sanitary facilities, enough food to survive, some schooling for the kids, elementary healthcare, and sufficient minimal financial and technical aid to get them moving in a good direction. Given the opportunity, they will start to make real progress for themselves in the societies they chose to construct, unless the old powerful masters return to impose their economic, political, and cultural hegemony, once again subverting the quest for national independence, economic sufficiency and political self-determination.
If the extraordinarily productive global capitalist economic system cannot even provide clean water and basic sanitation for 40% of the world’s peoples, and improved living standards for the next 40%, then it’s time to find a substitute --not for the water or sanitation, which are required for survival, but for an economic model based on the acquisition of profit for the few at the expense of human needs for the many. (end)