Water in a World of Crisis
The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4656
Date Written:  2016-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21392

Book review of Karen Piper's The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Piper outlines the colonial origins of the big five and the seamless transition of their engineers and executives to the new post-colonial world of the multinational corporation and its aggressive acquisition and control of global water resources.

She delineates the role of the Inter­national Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which use loan conditions and debt in the target countries to aid these companies in their efforts to capture global water supplies and profit from control and delivery of this precious resource.

Like the executives of the water corporations, the original World Bank members were often former colonial officers from Europe’s overseas offices, rebranded as experts on global trade. Ironically, the history of colonialism is rarely mentioned at the World Bank. The Bank's primary ideology is economics, specifically "development economics," an academic field that changed its name from "colonial economics" after Europe lost its colonies.