Summit floats on sea of wealth while Africa goes thirsty

Reports by Cahal Milmo

The Independent

31 May 2003

On the terrace of the Café du Mur Blanc in Evian-les-Bains yesterday, drinkers admiring the geraniums were knocking back their lunchtime tipple of choice - small bottles of Evian mineral water costing €2 or £1.50 each.

A few hundred metres away at the opulent Royal Parc Evian Hotel, hundreds of cases of Evian in special bottles were waiting to be served as the official water of the leaders of the eight leading industrialised nations and their entourages over 48 hours of geopolitical horse trading.

The message was simple: without Evian the water, Evian the town would not be what it is, a wealthy lakeside resort synonymous with purity and health where the casino even has free Evian on tap.

As Antoine, a waiter at the Mur Blanc, said: "We don't have too many problems in this town, apart from this summit and all the security. Everyone likes Evian. It has served us well." But while water has made Evian rich, the choice of the Alpine resort to host the G8 summit is for many an irony too far. This, after all, is a conference aimed at solving the world's ills, particularly the thirst suffered daily by a billion of its people.

Jacques Chirac, the French President, has made access to clean water in the developing world the summit's key aim, by securing an agreement to double the amount spent by the G8 members to £4bn.

The G8 goal is to halve the number of people without safe drinking water by 2015 and the £4bn figure will be held up as real progress on a problem that claims two million lives a year in deaths from water- related disease.

But aid agencies say the figure underlines the gross disparity between the worlds's rich and poor when compared with the £31bn spent on bottled water in developed countries last year. The brand that sold the most was Evian.

The amount spent on 500ml bottles of Evian by 10 customers at the Mur Blanc at lunchtime yesterday would have funded the water and sanitation costs of one child in the developing world for life.

Stephen Turner, deputy director of Water Aid, a British charity that specialises in sanitation and fresh water provision, said: "If, after the next two days of discussion and sipping Evian, the G8 governments do not emerge with a blueprint to finally tackle this issue then it would be an obscenity. Aid spending on water and sanitation has been falling, not increasing, and yet this is humanity's most basic and fundamental need. If, of all places, that situation is not reversed in Evian, then that is the word for it - obscene."

The inequality in the economics of water in the "first" and developing worlds is stark. When the French aristocrat the Marquis de Lessert stopped at a fountain outside Evian in 1789 to slake his thirst and found it improved his kidney ailment, he could not have known he was starting a commerce that is now growing at 15 per cent a year in America, and is worth more than the combined annual incomes of Mali, Zambia and Namibia.

Evian now sells about 900 million litres a year worldwide. It is owned by Danone, the French food and drink conglomerate that last year had a turnover of £6.6bn, to which sales of mineral water contributed £2.9bn, £900m more than the amount spent last year by the G8 countries on water provision in developing countries.

The world's biggest mineral water company, Nestlé, whose brands include Perrier, Vittel and San Pellegrino, had a turnover from water sales of £3.6bn.

In the villages and towns of Africa, which account for most of the one billion people in the world without access to safe drinking water, the picture could not be more different.

A child dies from a water- related disease in Africa every 15 seconds and collecting water in rural areas takes about two hours every day, according to Water Aid.

In Africa average consumption of water is 10 litres a person a day for all uses, compared with the minimum WHO recommendation of 50 litres a day. In Britain, average consumption is 135 litres. The £1 spent on any premium brand in a British supermarket would provide enough fresh drinking water for an African man or woman for six months.

While mineral water sales are growing by 5 per cent a year in Britain and will reach £1bn this year, spending on water and sanitation in the developing world fell from more than £3bn in the mid-1990s or 7 per cent of aid spending to £2bn or 5 per cent of aid.

Even what is spent is misdirected. Water spending in rural areas is one third of that in urban areas, although six times more people live in the countryside. But according to water experts, the greatest injustice in water provision is nothing to do with aid provision.

Instead, it is the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), drawn up at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva under which developing countries are required to open up utilities such as water provision, to private contractors. Campaigners claim this benefits six multinational companies, including Britain's Thames Water and United Utilities, which account for 90 per cent of all private investment in water utilities in the developing world.

A coalition of 100 non- government organisations at the G8 summit have issued the "Evian water challenge" to its European members to drop an EU demand that 72 countries open up their water sectors. The coalition claims that privatised systems concentrate on urban areas and reinforce water poverty in rural areas.

Clare Joy, of the World Development movement in London, said: "Many developing countries have rejected the idea of 7 water for profit, yet the European members of the G8 are pushing them into a trade agreement lobbied for by business."

Whether the eight most powerful men in the world agree will not be clear until a flurry of post-summit accords emerges on Monday. Meanwhile, there is evidence that the political importance of water is not lost on Evian. The mayor has tried to salve tensions between France and America by sending to the White House a six-pack of teardrop-shaped bottles of Evian.