An opinion: private v public.

Exploring land grabbing highlights some broader concerns around the most peaceful way to manage complex shared water systems, or even water more generally. That is the debate between public and private control of water supplies. Private companies are involved to some extent in all water management, fixing and maintaining supplies are normally the task of private companies. However, referring again to land grabbing, here land and rights are sold to the highest bidder, the land is sold but the water is also quietly given away to support such land. Sharing water involves all stakeholders, yet private companies are often not held accountable for their actions, and few regulations to act as checks and balances exist in countries desperate for foreign investment, where regulation exists, created by international institutions, that ensures a free market operates only on one side of the board.

Private companies are driven by private interest – profit is essential. Water is a public good, or should be, yet across the world is more and more so a commodity to be traded between those who can afford it, just like the food water gives life too. There is a strong argument for some private scope in Africa where governments themselves are unable to borrow sufficiently to develop water sources in necessary ways. However, there is a need for strong regulation of such companies and a commitment to ensuring fair and equitable use. Free water (as initiated in South Africa as a strategy to move away from apartheid divisions in access) is not always viable and arguably does not encourage sustainable use. A sloped fee charges differently for increased use, something that one might see as deterring large investment, or instead encouraging sustainable use of water sources by such investors. The privatisation of water in Bolivia led to revolt that ended the idea, and such action can happen again. To take away water is to take away food, and both are integral to life. To remove this through land grabbing will not end peacefully, as governments like Namibia are starting to see. Private investment that has a bound commitment to said country and is not left to its own self serving devices may have a place in the world as we know it. However, to let companies and countries come in, lease land and provide little else but perhaps destruction of said land, is an unfortunate reality that should be able to be mitigated against. This could occur realistically through working as a unified ‘block’ – such as an agreement between SADC countries to only lease or sell land if there are firm commitments to meet a % of food production for the region, secure employment domestically and to ensure environmental sustainability. This overlooks issues with the actual act of displacement which most would find as fundamentally wrong with such acquisition of land and water. Ideally communities should be strengthened, if this is deemed possible through private lease then it may be fitting, however if people are displaced to their own detriment then large private interests should never be taken first.