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my name is nisha Swinton I am the organizer for food and water watch in Maine pretty much as a consumer advocacy nonprofit we work to ensure that water is provided to folks in sacred accessible and clean way we believe water is a human right and should be sold as commodity so we work in the state of Maine empowering communities to fight corporate control of water resources we're so excited to have folks here today for the main ground water summit we're going to be having opening remarks by window no hotter who is our executive director for food and water watch Winona has worked extensively on food water and energy and environmental issues at a national state and local level she helped found food and water watch and built it to be a multinational organization located in 15 offices in the united states in latin america and europe so please join me in welcoming Winona so I wanted to begin by remembering Barry commoner how many of you know Barry commoner is probably those of you my age and older so um Barry commoner died this week at the age of 95 and he's really an environmental hero and it's important that we remember our heroes as we're building the next generation different common environmental advocates Barry was really a visionary scientist he helped launch the environmental movement and in fact Time magazine on their cover in 1970 he founded the citizens party I have a special fondness for the citizens party because i was a volunteer organizer and i met my husband through the citizens party working on a local race in charlottesville virginia his 1971 book the closing circle it really affected me profoundly I was very young then and it contained a concept that we all talked about today and take for granted and that sustainability he also introduced the four laws of ecology everything is connected to everything else everything must go someplace nature knows best and there is no such thing as a free lunch and I can only imagine what Barry commoner and the other giants of the environmental movement people like David Brower and Rachel Carson would think of a our political debate last night that skips some of the most important issues that were facing for the future and you know I'm really reminded by George Orwell's you had so many great little snippets and he said political talk is designed to make lies sound truthful murder respectable and to give the wind the appearance of solidity and I think that pretty much sums up the political season this year now I'm recently witnessed a lot of those lies that the petroleum industry is telling because I went undercover to the first oil gas and water summit and I went to industry shindig because we become very involved in working to ban fracking and as you probably all know fracking requires and billions and billions of gallons of water that are used and polluted and it's worth mentioning that at this industry conference believe me there were no pretensions that natural gas is a bridge fuel to renewables and the truth is that it was just extremely clear to me that the oil and gas industry intends to drill and frack for every last drop of oil no matter how much water it uses or what the impact is on our global climate Stella at this meeting executives were representing the largest oil companies and water technology corporations so things you know the oil companies shell but the technology companies or companies like Douw veolia many some companies that you've never heard of before and this meeting was all about strategizing on the brave new world of profiting from wastewater it was about the partnership between the water industry and the oil and gas industry and the economic benefits of polluted water and they toss to add some really large numbers an official for one of the water processing companies that operates in Pennsylvania dealing with wastewater it's aqua tech their executives said that 2.4 billion gallons of water are polluted every day but oil and gas industry in the United States and that another 5.7 billion gallons of water are created in the rest of the world each day going gasps that's a daily volume of 8.1 billion gallons one of our researchers did the math that's enough water to cover the entire United States and a fraction of an inch of water and an official from GE power went on to say that the volume of water is increasing at a rate of eight percent annually that's the water used by oil and gas and in fact this was one of the most frightening aspects of this summit it's clear to me that the top echelon of the water technology industry named really want water scarcity to the truly cynical scarcity makes water more precious and it makes the technologies for removing contaminants very very valuable so in the end polluting large amounts of water is good for business building pipes and using tankers to move water that's the future they see and if they're allowed to move forward even your vast water resources here in Maine someday will be threatened because as you know our groundwater in Maine is regulated under absolute Dominion and that's a regulatory framework that says whoever has the biggest straw can take the biggest drink and this means that corporations can purchase land you know that this has already happened they can obtain leasing and property rights and they can own the groundwater below the land and this type of regulatory policy makes me the perfect place for water mining and I mean water mining beyond what's going on for bottled water today so today it's more important than ever to strengthen groundwater law water is a public trust this is especially true since the water bottling operations already threatened mains water resources Nestle is one of the first companies to identify water as a profit Center and to commodify it you all know this already and in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster Nestle started buying up quantities of groundwater around the world even in Switzerland where they're located because they saw what the disaster did to groundwater supplies and they saw the future for the water industry and today Nestle is absolutely scouring the planet for new supplies of water Nestle already pumps millions of gallons of groundwater every year throughout the country and here in Maine you probably all know that the company is becoming much more aggressive I know that there are several people here from Freiburg who can speak to this better than I can but Nestle is attempting to gain access to fly Berg's water for another 25 years and in August of this year the freiburg water companies submitted an agreement it wants to make with Nestle to the Public Utility Commission here and this would enable the freiburg water company to lease land and a well and sell no less than 75 million gallons of water to nestle each year and if this contract is approved the water company is going to be obligated to identify a second water source as well and in the event of a water shortage the only protection in this is that the agreement the contract could be suspended for 60 days but even so this does nothing to mitigate the ongoing water withdrawals and two of the three main public utility commissioners that are going to act on this agreement or former employees of the company now it's not just in Maine that Nestle is threatening groundwater supplies Oregon is another state at the forefront of this battle with Nestle for the past three years we didn't fighting to prevent the construction of a water bottling facility in the Columbia River Gorge city of Cascade Locks there are a large water transfers planned and they're going to threaten the whole ecosystem of the Columbia River and further devastate our salmon so we've helped to form a very broad-based coalition called keep Nestle out of the gorge and it represents advocacy groups environmental groups labor social justice and this has been a three-year battle we also hired an economist to do an economic study because you know like everywhere the corporations want to do something that's not sustainable that's not really good for the environment they trot out the jobs issue and so they have said that they're going to be loads and loads of new jobs well as it turns out the promise of 53 new jobs in Oregon isn't even true people from outside Oregon are already employed by Nestle and they're actually going to get most of these jobs and asides from the jobs this economic study also indicated that there will be other really devastating impacts from the two hundred truck trips associated with this plant every day and it's been a set of very dangerous precedent in Oregon for allowing a state agency to get away public water resources for profit so right now after three years the hands the outcome of this decision is really in the hands of the governor and the campaign is continuing now if you do a Google search on Nestle you'll always find some new our outrage just this week Nestle vital aidid's freedom of speech in goal up Canada the city pulled the plug on a screening of the movie tapped which you'll remember i think it was showed all over Maine very critical of bottled water so they're director of corporate affairs where the threatening letter to the city and the city has pulled the film the Council of Canadians is wenting a space and going to be showing the film in a private space for anyone who wants to see it Nestle's also having a really negative effect around the world they're continuing to promote the privatization of municipal water companies and the head of the company Peter brabec he really advocates full commodification of water in the 2005 documentary we feed the world he said that the idea of water and the basic human right was extreme after much criticism he has admitted that the poor might need to drink water too and he's proposed setting aside 1.5% of fresh water for human rights and the rest should go into a water market so it's not surprising that Nestle is really powerful in Switzerland and very close to the Swiss government but this has reverberations all over the world because the Swiss play a major role in financing aid in the international finance institutions and they advise other governments they put their own money into aid and they they tell other governments how they should supply water services to the poor so Nestle is a charter member of this newly formed Swiss water partnership that is advising governments on water policy in the developing world and we're already hearing from our allies in Africa that groups that are against privatization or having their aid cut the company is also deeply involved in the funding arm of the World Bank in fact Peter brabec now chairs a new advisory board called the 2030 water research sources group that helps set policy and priorities for water and sanitation around the world and he's an apostle for what we were calling financial izing nature it's the whole idea that flea market regulations should replace traditional regulation and we saw this really discussed and promoted at the we owe plus 20 summit that took place in Joe in June in fact the UN Environment Program that really puts on this summit road a large paper on the green economy in 2011 that was basically boating water trading and what we're calling financialization of nature because financial interests have determined that trading money risk and related financial products outperforms the profitability of really making anything of manufacturing products or trading goods and services so we shouldn't be surprised that companies like Nestle are getting on the bandwagon and joining with the finance with banking and financial services industry to promote increasing the role of financial markets and institutions in natural resource management so we all know that water hasn't traditionally been seen as a product or a commodity this is a very recent thing and commodification leads to the next step which is privatization and that transfers the control and the management from the public to private ownership this process turns the inherent value of water into a market value and enables it to be priced and then bought and sold in on a market that's been created and that financial services industry can then treat water as an asset and apply financial instruments to it so I'm talking about things like derivatives futures contracts or even water pollution credits so I'm going to talk a little bit about water pollution credits because in the US this is really the one of the first steps that we're seeing in going beyond commodification privatization marketisation onto financialization this is a new strategy trading we've seen cap and trade for for carbon and discussed and promoted for climate change but it's now being promoted to actually replace parts of the Clean Water Act and to establish an interstate market in nitrogen and phosphorus run run hall and this is first being done in the Chesapeake Bay watershed now the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the u.s. it's down the East Coast down Pennsylvania Delaware Virginia Maryland or some of the states around the Chesapeake Bay and this is the first large-scale experience or trading as being promoted as a replacement for regulation and this scheme allows financial littleman to identify and purchase nitrogen and phosphorous credits from industrial agricultural operations in the watershed now these operations are things like the poultry factories that have hundreds of thousands of birds concentrated into a few sheds of Purdue is the the largest poultry owner Anna on the Eastern Shore and surprising unsurprisingly the Farm Bureau is in favor of water trading or water pollution trading so all these agricultural operations have to do is a test that they will reduce their pollution levels now this is unverifiable the credits are then aggregated and bundled together and sold to power plants wastewater treatment plants and other point point source polluters who are either unable or simply unwilling to meet their Clean Water Act permit levels you know this is William it's a payer pollute training program and it represents a really dramatic departure from the successful industrial pollution controls that were established by the Clean Water Act pollution trading we believe violates the fundamental concept that the Clean Water Act is built upon which is pollution is illegal and ironically the evisceration of the Clean Water Act is taking part are taking place as the landmark piece of legislation is about to have its fortieth year anniversary later this month it's built on the premise that we should strive to eliminate water pollution from lakes rivers and bays water pollution trading schemes are a disaster a substitute for the proven means of regulating harmful chemical discharges and we believe that the Clean Water Act has been enormously successful it was passed under the Nixon administration when two-thirds of our waterways were polluted today a third of waterways are still in really bad shape there's obviously a lot of work that needs to be done but we need the political will to make this happen and the water pollution trading that's being polluted in the Chesapeake Bay is not the direction that we want to go and we know that it will if it's allowed to go forward that we're going to see it in water basins all around the country so yesterday food and water watch and Friends of the Earth filed a joint lawsuit to force the US EPA to stop this trading program in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and maintain the integrity of the Clean Water Act and will be represented in this lawsuit by the Columbia Law School's Environmental Law Clinic we filed the lawsuit because it's viewed as a national model and we believe that this is the place to stop it and we're going to be sending a letter to our environmental allies and the next week or two asking them to join us in opposing this water pollution trading scheme now our question is considering that we just had the largest financial meltdown in 75 years just why is it that we would put Wall Street in charge of resource natural resource management and I'm afraid that the answer is lobbying by the financial services industry and the other industries that would benefit from this new scheme and unfortunately unfortunately we've seen the financial sector play an increasingly large rol in our economy its share of the domestic corporate profits rose from below sixteen percent in the 70s and 80s to as high as forty one percent before the financial crisis and now it's leveled out to about thirty three percent so the financial services industry controls and benefits from a third of our of the out of the economy and as it's grown in size it's grown in strength and its policies in DC have come to reflect the the interest of banks hedge fund operators and derivative bundlers and you know the scary thing is that water pollution trading isn't even the words of scheme on foot we believe that we have to put an end to it before some of these other proposals move forward and once in a while we're lucky because the hidden veil is lifted the hidden veil of what corporations have in store for us in the future and we recently got a really clear view of what the financial services industry hopes for in regard to water this was in an essay written in 2011 by the chief economist of Citigroup and he said I'm going to read this these quotes to you because I think it's the only way to really explain why we have to organize to stop the financialization of nature he said I expect to see in the near future a massive expansion of investment in the water sector including the production of fresh clean water from other sources desalination purification there will be storage shipping and transportation of water I expect to see pipeline networks that exceed the capacity of those for oil and gas today i see fleets of water tankers single hole and storage facilities that will dwarf there as we currently have for oil natural gas and liquid gas i see new canal systems dug for water transportation similar an ambition and scale to those currently in progress in china and he went on to talk about water as an asset asset class he said quote i expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years once the spot markets for water integrated futures markets and other rivet of water based financial instruments puts call swaps both exchange-traded and over-the-counter will follow there will be different grades and types of fresh water just the way we have like sweet and heavy sour crude today water is an asset class will in my view become eventually the single most important physical commodity based asset class dwarfing oil copper agricultural commodities and precious metals now I read that quote not to depress folks but to really inspire us to do the organizing the hard work to stop this and here in Maine the beginning of stopping this is really passing groundwater legislation and making sure that there's a public trust for water and we really need to go back as an environmental movement to organizing to organizing at the grassroots level to fight him for what we really want not the best that can be negotiated by inside deals we have to create a movement that's so powerful that we can actually change the debate of elections and while it's daunting we have to do this at the local level in every congressional district in every state and we have to build to the national level and we need all the young people in this room and all of the older people to commit themselves to this battle because we can do this we know it took 50 years of organizing to get rid of child labor we know organizing works we just have to commit ourselves and be brave enough to stand up to these economic interests and to any of our allies who go along with these schemes because they don't see the bigger picture so at food water watch we look forward to working with you to fight for the future that we want not just the best that we're going to yeah thank you