Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow

Author:Maude Barlow [Barlow, Maude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551991573
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2007-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Ecuador

On March 1, 2007, the mayor of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, announced he had halted plans to privatize the city’s water, plans that had been seriously underway for four years. The Coalition for the Defense of Public Water used a Price Waterhouse report to show that the city would have had to invest US$20 million in the first five years while the private companies would only have invested US$7 million to make the project work. After just six years, the company would start to make a profit, worth US$226 million over thirty years. The coalition was also able to tell the story of how the Bechtel subsidiary, Guayaquil Interagua, behaved in early 2001 when it took over the water services of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, with two million inhabitants. The company immediately fired all the workers, started dumping 95 percent of its wastewater into the local rivers, leading to a major hepatitis A outbreak in 2005, and cut off water to thousands who could not afford it. Food and Water Watch reports that the local citizens network, Citizens’ Observatory for Public Services, is demanding that the government fine the company for its violations.

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