Food and Water:

A Common Stake

Issue Brief October 2011 Protecting the Commons Safeguards our Food System and Water Resources
Water is bottled from the groundwater that feeds a communitys spring or a municipalitys tap and sold to consumers around the country. Fish is farmed in Hawaii, using feed from Canada, then shipped overnight to Japan. Eggs produced in a handful of massive factory farms in the Midwest find their way into supermarkets around the country and processed foods around the world. These activities take place everyday in our globalized world where industrial food and water products are traded on a massive scale, and its possible thanks to the privatization of our natural resources. Resources that once belonged to us allland, water, forests and now, even, the oceanshave effectively been privatized. Our public resources, collectively known as the commons, are routinely given to corporations sometimes for free. When an essential resource from nature becomes privatized, access to it becomes market-driven, and decisions about how that resource is used are made by private interests that may lie thousands of miles beyond a communitys borders. Furthermore, when water or food is treated as a market commodity, it can become concentrated in the hands of a few powerful private interests. They can assert pressure on policymakers to achieve favorable rules for their shareholdersoften to the detriment of consumers, producers and communities. The importance of keeping the global commons under public control is an issue at the heart of democracy.

What is the Commons?

American journalist Jonathan Rowe captured the essence of the concept: The commons is the vast realm that lies outside of both the economic market and the institutional state, and that all of us typically use without toll or price. The atmosphere and oceans, languages and culture, the stores of human knowledge and wisdom, the informal support systems of community, the peace and quiet we crave, the genetic building blocks of lifethese are all aspects of the commons.

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The commons as an idea was most popularized in a 1968 essay by biologist Garret Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin argued that if no one owned the commons, it would be plundered, since no entity was responsible for its stewardship. It gave ideological fire to those who sought to privatize the commons, but it had one major flaw: Hardins tragedy was of an unmanaged commons. Many researchers have denounced Hardin for ignoring examples of common property management systems that have been proven to manage resources sustainably. Economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her research questioning conventional wisdom that commons property is best managed in the private sphere. To ensure access to high-quality, wholesome and safe food, maintain our clean water standards, and provide healthy water to communities around the world, the commons must be managed collaboratively by those who use it, not corporations. A corporations mandate is to turn a profit for shareholders, not sustainably manage resources.

desalination and high technology wastewater treatment. Desalination removes salt from salty water to make drinking water, but it is a highly polluting and expensive process. As with water markets, there is less incentive at every level to emphasize source protection and conservation, and the true benefit comes to those that own the technology. Industrial agriculture is one of the greatest threats to our water commons. It is the largest user of water as well as a major polluter. Pesticide, fertilizer and manure run-off from large-scale industrialized farms can taint waterways both near and far. Another user and abuser of water is the energy industry. For example, natural gas fracking uses millions of gallons of freshwater in the process of extracting gas, and imperils groundwater, rivers and streams through the chemicals used during the process as well as through its waste. As freshwater is increasingly scarce thanks to pollution, population growth, and climate change, managing it under a commons framework in the public interest is critical. This means that the resource is

The Use and Abuse of our Water Commons

Whether its water shipped virtually from Kenya in the form of roses for export or water that is bottled in one community and sold worldwide, one of our most essential resources is being increasingly commodified. The commodification of waterincluding market-based mechanisms to manage itthreatens a resource that is central to not only industry, but to life itself. Many economists, market-oriented environmentalists and think tanks believe water markets are the best way to promote water conservation and balance the tension between dwindling supplies and growing demand. But market-based schemes for water management are dangerous and often lead to speculation. They can promote water plundering to the detriment of ecosystems and communities and have the potential to price out those who cannot afford to pay. Similarly dangerous is corporate exploitation of pollution and scarcity problems to promote expensive new water-related technologies like large-scale

managed locally, transparently and democratically, not by corporations. Ensuring that water is viewed as a human right and not a commodity will go a long way toward creating an atmosphere where increasingly scarce freshwater is managed in the public interest around the world.

producing communities, which are in turn vital to healthy food systems.

Our Ocean Commons

Like our land-based commons, our ocean commons are under threat from our food system. Two bad practices that are being promoted in the U.S. that threaten the ocean commons are open ocean aquaculture (OOA) and catch and trade schemes. Also known as ocean fish farming, OOA is the highly polluting mass-production of fish using floating cages or net pens in open ocean waters. In the U.S., we export 70 percent of fish caught or farmed here. If current seafood trends continue, with OOA, well export the fish, but keep the pollution. Its essentially the free use of our ocean commons for the biggest fishing interests to pollute and profit. Another scheme that is privatizing our ocean commons is catch shares, or catch and trade. At its essence, catch and trade is a means to allow almost complete control of our fisheries by bigger business interests. It often forces smaller historic fishermen out of the industry, skews fisheries toward industrial production, and decreases job opportunities and wages for crew, leading to widespread devastation in coastal and fishing communities. The unsafe practice of drilling off of deep water also imperils the ocean commons and the communities that benefit from it, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 illustrated.

Privatizing Access to Good Food?

Increasingly, policymakers are influenced by agricultural interests to turn to technologies like genetic engineering, irradiation, growth hormones, and even cloning, but the technologies themselves do not come without risk and they drive policies that privatize access to safe food. Like water technologies that commodify water, food technologies afford no incentive to protect the environment, build equitable food systems or maintain safety standards for consumers. Genetically engineered (GE) foods are a good example. First, there is no way to guarantee that GE seeds or animals can be restricted to a certain parcel of land or sea, since seeds naturally travel through pollination, and GE animals can escape into natural environments. A farmers livelihood could be destroyed by an unwanted invasion of GE seed onto his property, ruining his ability to sell GE-free or organic products and farmers have even been sued by the creators of GE crops for contamination found on their farms from someone elses crops. Likewise, genetically engineered salmon that escape from the nets of open ocean fish farms could be detrimental to wild salmon populations. Secondly, GE organisms literally privatize nature through the patenting of DNA, and concentrate them into the hands of a few players. The U.S. industry for genetically modified seeds and genetic traits is extremely consolidated: In 2007, two firms sold 58 percent of the corn seeds, and in 2005, two firms sold 60 percent of the soybean seeds. Whats worse, development regimes push expensive GE seeds on poor farmers around the world instead of supporting more sustainable, low-input and local means of feeding themselves. A vibrant commons, including options for farmers to sell their product for a fair price and a diversity of seeds and breeds to plant, is necessary for vital food

How Trade Deals Can Be Bad For The Commons and the Communities
Corporations use political influence to lobby for trade deals that put global commerce ahead of the commons. Trade deals essentially open up the commons for global business and erode environmental and consumer safeguards. Governments can even lose the ability to manage their own natural resources under international trade regimes like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade deals are often promoted as vehicles for job creation, but too often the jobs created are low-wage jobs producing low-priced goods for consumers

in wealthy nations. And global trade can harm the poorest communities by exporting their commons resources. For example, when soy is produced in South America and traded around the world thanks to preferential trade deals, small farms yield to large plantations of soybean monocultures. Without land to farm, many farmers become landless or migrate to urban areas to join the ranks of urban poor because they can no longer have access to natural resources like land to sustain their livelihoods and food security. Meanwhile, virtual water water that is used in the production of industrial and agricultural products is exported from local watersheds. The water that irrigates vegetables in East Africa and Northern Mexico is shipped to supermarkets in Europe and the United States instead of cultivating food for the local community. And the massive use of herbicides used to farm these commodities, often genetically modified, also negatively impact the water resources in the community. Again, they are exporting the product, and the water used to produce it, but keeping the pollution. Trade is also harming communities that rely on local fisheries. Removing tariffs on fish had the effect of making fish imports cheaper than domestic fish in industrialized nations. This increased overfishing by the biggest fleets where people depend on fish for their livelihoods and sustenance. So customers in Europe and China can enjoy fish caught off of the coasts of Africa, while Africans find it increasingly difficult to catch fish themselves. Also, U.S. shrimpers are unable to compete with imported farmed shrimp. Many have gone out of business because cheaper imports flood the market, driving down prices. Preferential trade deals exacerbate this problem. Trade deals globalize commerce in our food and water at the expense of the worlds poorest that dont

have access to the global market and are most directly dependent upon their surrounding commons. Safeguarding the commons is the only way to ensure that some communities survive into the future.

A New Commons Narrative

As writer and commons thinker Peter Barnes points out, we are awash with capital and literally running out of nature. When that happens, the poorest suffer, making safeguarding our commons a human rights issue. A new narrative on how we manage resources is being developed by commons activists around the world, articulating ways in which people can take back control of their communities resources, and ensure that they are managed collaboratively and democratically in the interests of ecosystems and people. Food & Water Watch is working to further this narrative by promoting local control of water systems, the management of essential food and water resources in the public interest, and vibrant rural food communities. We also support efforts to recognize and legally codify the human right to water. For more information on the commons and ideas for how to bring about a new commons-based approach to natural resources management, please refer to the following resources: Our Water Commons: Toward a New Freshwater Narrative, by Maude Barlow All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, by Jay Walljasper Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes On the Commons (http://onthecommons.org/)

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainably produced. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping the global commons our shared resources under public control.
Copyright October 2011 by Food & Water Watch. All rights reserved. This issue brief can be viewed or downloaded at www.foodandwaterwatch.org.