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For sale to water someone's golf course? Photo by Eric Jackson

Battle lines drawn over water privatization

by Eric Jackson

A confrontation has been brewing for a long time, since the privatization of the electric utilities under the Pérez Balladares administration, which among other things sold part of the state-owned IRHE electric utility to private electric generation companies, and approved a process whereby new power generators could get permits to dam the nation's rivers and streams. In the Moscoso administration there was a mad dash for power generating concessions, physical development of which has actually began in a relatively few cases.

By early in the Torrijos administration, virtually every river and stream in Panama had been conceded to some real or paper power company. At last count there were more than 500 concessions granted to dam watercourses in Panama, none of them granted with any prior environmental study, public debate or open bidding.

In many cases what was really going on was a spurious power project that was really about creating a lake around which to build an upscale gated community to be marketed to foreigners, or to appropriate public water supplies to irrigate a golf course community in a place with insufficient water resources on the site.

But a dam on every river and stream means the devastation of Panama's coastal fisheries by way of altering estuary ecologies. It means the end of many a surfing beach, by cutting of the flow of sand that maintains the sand bars at the mouths of rivers that make waves break in the right way. It means the expulsion from the land of countless rural families who depend on streams for the water that their households and farm animals use, and the expulsion of others whose farms are flooded out behind the new dams. It means the destruction of public recreation assets and many an archaeological or historical site or rare ecological niche.

The hydroelectric projects that have advanced have mostly been on lands inhabited by Panama's least influential people, the indigenous nations. All across the country, indigenous communities have divided on whether the new economic activity is worth what would be lost, environmentalist groups have opposed dams as a matter of principle and a wide range of people with downstream interests or lands that stand to be flooded have joined in protest movements.

All this, from a Torrijos administration that made as one of its few 2004 campaign promises a pledge not to privatize the IDAAN water and sewer utility. In a very technical sense, he hasn't lied. His plan is not to privatize the water utility, but the water itself.

And so the president and his cabinet sent proposed Law 278 to the National Assembly. That would allow the government to grant permanent concessions not only to dam rivers and streams, but also to the rights to water from lakes and to groundwater. Law 278's title says it's "to establish an integrated management of water resources."

As in, there need no longer be any pretense of hydroelectric generation in order to appropriate a town's water supply to irrigate some well connected developer's golf course.

At the behest of Consumo Etico, a small group of people dedicated to the defense of public water rights, some 15 organizations came together to form a coalition to fight Law 278. All of the folks who have already been resisting hydroelectric dams, most of the environmental movement, most of the left, the most influential labor unions, a number of civic groups and a lot of middle class people who already feel squeezed and don't want to pay extra for their water have flocked to the bandwagon.

So has it influenced the government?

Well, in the National Assembly's Environment Committee, they did change the proposal to grant private water concessions for 50 years, instead of in perpetuity.

Look for a huge political battle over which the Torrijos administration will exhaust much of its public support on this issue in the months to come.

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Business & Economy Briefs