Sunnyland Distribution CEO Abbas Bayat intoned 18th and 19th century poet Samuel Coleridge when he told the crowd gathered in Cabot Auditorium that the world faced "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
Panelists at Saturday's Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) Symposium, "Commons or Commodity? The Future of Water," discussed the current perplexity of water distribution: society is destroying the very life force that sustains it.
More than 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and over two billion people have died in developing countries from preventable diseases linked to poor water sanitation.
Peter Gleick, Co-Founder and President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, and one of the five panelists, summed up the seeming paradox of the world's shortage of clean water. "Despite improvements in the grand scale of water management, we are faced with a global water crisis," he said.
The symposium focused on the question of how we should approach the problem of distributing safe water to all.
Marcia Brewster, Senior Economic Affairs Officer of the Sustainable Development Division in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations said there is a "debate over whether water is an economic good, a commodity, or a human right, a social good."
Brewster focused on the issue of privatization - the distribution of water by privately owned companies. Most western countries have public, or government-controlled, water supplies, she said.
In developing countries, however, "governments are unable to provide basic water needs of their citizens because they lack financial capital and have corruption, and privatization is the common solution," Brewster said.
Brewster doubted the prospects of successful privatization. She said growing corporate interest that leads to the benefit of a wealthy few at the hands of many.
Gleick pointed out that monopolies inevitably form in the water distribution business. "Governments must regulate them," he said, "There needs to be government oversight."
Anthony Turton, Head of the Africa Water Issues Research Unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said, "Governments and institutions are key."
Turton presented a diagram illustrating governance as interconnected relations between government, society, and science.
He said that before we enact policies, "we need to understand the socio-cultural and economic history. Mature democracies are different from fledgling democracies."
Bayat, whose Belgium-based Sunnyland Distribution distributes water, said it was the "responsibility of academics to create practical models" to address the water crisis.
He said humans seek instant gratification, using water faster than it can be replenished, sometimes on projects such as golf courses in deserts, which he deemed unnecessary.
"The question is about life itself," he said, "evil does exist [in the forms of] greed and individual desire for power."
"It's time to look elsewhere, to new ideas, to new answers," Gleick said. "[Water mismanagement is] more than an embarrassment. It causes huge suffering."
The panelists conveyed optimism regarding the future of water.
"The answer depends on the choices we make," Gleick said.
