Future of Water and Agriculture

Right to Water - Future of Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Hi, I'm Darcy O'Callahan from Food and Water Watch. I was in Istanbul for the recent meeting. And there was a lot of turbulence around inclusion of the right to water in the ministerial statement. And I know that approximately twenty-five countries signed a separate statement supporting the right to water, and that sixteen actually signed a statement supporting the move of such negotiations into the U.N. system. And I'd like to hear your version of how that process went, around the ministerial negotiations.

Yeah, it has been -- I think it's been quite interesting, not only in Istanbul. We, of course, worked over the last year to bring the, well, the Turkish government very much in the chair position in the lead of a country, let in the governmental process. We have been trying to bring the countries together on a consensus basis. We see very much that the Istanbul guide, which is much more a broader guide that has been negotiated by the senior officials, provides a lot of good ideas about what can be done. It's like a guide of inspiration. The statement, what you could say is, what could be agreed by all the countries, a consensus. What you refer to is a group of countries that are already, which you could say, ready to move beyond that consensus, and take it one step further. What we have seen, what started very much in Mexico and developed afterwards, is there's more and more countries that recognize the right to water, and then there's quite a few variations of that, and we as a council see that as definitely one of the paths to further, to follow. At this point in time, in the Ministerial, one of the challenges has been that some of the countries came forward, including the U.S., with a position that, according to their Constitution and their legislations, they cannot agree on any of the language. And of course, we are challenged, as a council then, by a process that is built on, based on consensus building with all the countries, to see that not all the countries can agree upon moving forward at this point in time. I think that we all have a task at hand in the years to come, to talk to our governments, and see what actually is really the challenge, what is really the problem with moving forward with the right to water, and particularly can also see here in the U.S. there is further work to be done to see what are real obstacles, then, of agreeing on what you could see as a very broad concept, what was put forward originally in some of the draft statements. So I can see that progress, in the sense that we were able to discuss this with the governments in several preparatory meetings. That was not the case in Mexico three years ago. So in that sense, we have made a step forward, but we're definitely not there yet. There's more work to be done. Absolutely.

One last question.