Access to water in the periphery

This chapter introduces humanity at a crossroads, a human-nature crisis, that may, depending on which road is taken, define the future of civilization.

The chapter begins by pointing out the human dimension to the global water crisis that is happening, increasingly, on the periphery, and how our discourse of growth and a linear view of progress invisibilizes these struggles, these spaces, and these people. The mass population movements to peri-urban areas continue to bring people to where the conditions are the most severe (UN Habitat, 2010; 2016). This lived household water crisis is evidenced by the fact that growing numbers of regions face “water starvation,” characterized by an insufficient supply of water, and less than continuous flow of household water (Totsuka et al., 2004). This is followed by an introduction to the rise of the bottled water paradigm, which

provides market access to drinking water but which extracts wealth from nation. This brief introduction to the global bottled water context shows that this paradigm is growing rapidly, re-establishing citizen-state relationships, but which responds to the needs of capital to expand in a limited worse. In this sense the growth of the bottled water paradigm traverses social reproduction spheres, going from a state managed and God-given resource to one with a price per liter. The chapter then presents an introduction and justification for bringing the focus of the study to Mexico and the story of bottled water in Mexico. Mexico represents the perfect storm of neoliberalism with unregulated industry contaminating available water supplies, financial inclusion policies pushing the working poor population into dangerous peripheral conditions, and the bottled water industry tapping into it all.

The final section states the importance of coming to grips with this phenomena as two conflicting paradigms. On the one hand, the dwindling availability of water resources for actual human consumption; and on the other, the movement of capital into the sector with its own set of needs and requirements.

Poverty and inequality are embedded in social structures that define, in so many ways, what it means to be modern (Pilling, 2018). It is frequently suggested that modernity has brought improvements in the human condition, that we have more material comforts, and that we live

Image 3: this neighborhood water shop offers free water to children as they pass

longer than 100 years ago (Straubhaar, 2003; Krugman et al., 2016; Roser, 2019; Banerjee &

Duflo, 2020). However, as this study shows, averages only distort our understanding of the reality at hand, not to mention its scale. The sheer scale of the depravations of modernity, the invisiblized, the dispossessed, the mass migrations, the refugees, the malnourished, the over-indebted, the desperate, the exposed, and the thirsty, are intimately related to the sheer scale of the accumulation of capital – which is a specific and central characteristic of modernity (Berman, 1981; Douglas, 2007; Bracking, 2009; Shiva, 2002; Sassen, 2014; Harvey, 2018).

The distance between those who indeed have never had it better and the masses of low-paid producers at the tail end of the commodity chain is tremendous (Krugman et al., 2016;

Hickel, 2020). The invisibilization of these people and these places happens where the riskiest, dirtiest and most destructive of modern human’s productive capacities are carried out. Furthermore, the desperate poverty of these regions creates a tension between the need for jobs and environmental protections (Martinez-Alier, 2002; Hickel, 2018). We can think of these as purposefully hidden from view, hidden from the story of who we moderns are, but we can also think of it as the negation of these populations in the story of our time, a process Spivak (1988) sees as an act of “obliteration.”

Densely populated, these landscapes are central to the production needs of the modern core. The inequalities in pay and working conditions between the core and these peripheral areas are so divergent that ironically, labor in these areas is alienated even from consumption of the goods they produce. Workers in one of the study regions, El Salto, Jalisco, Mexico, earn in the range of $75-$150 USD per week (Survey 2018) working six days per week in transnational and Mexican manufacturing firms making chemicals, plastics, vehicle parts, tools and computer chips that they can never afford. In the other urban study area, 60% of workers in San Cristobal de Las Casas, primarily employed in the tourism industry, earn less than $50 USD per week, serving meals they could never afford to eat and tending hotel rooms they could never afford to stay in (Trujillo-Rincon, 2015). These periphery environments exist in all industrialized contexts but its expression is starkest in states where neoliberalism has weakened social protections and public services, and where weak and corrupt governance regimes have dominated (Biswas et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2018).

The geography and sociology literature refer to the contested idea of the periphery as a global manifestation of gross relationships between producers and owners, labor and capital, supply and demand, rich and poor (Wallerstein, 1987). Other theories tease out the explicit character of these relationships spotlighting issues of power (Varoufakis, 2016), finance (Tooze, 2019), military dominance (Findlay & O’Rourke, 2009; Kennedy, 1987), hegemony (Chomsky, 2003), and discourse and agency (Boelens, 1998; Long, 2001; Fraser, 2013). But only through empirical research can we come to understand that these relationships are not just global in nature but also actively (and heterogeneously) reproduced on the local level (Cancian, 1992; Vernooy, 2001; Long, 2000, p. 189; Arce & Long, 2005, p. 377; Çalışkan

& Callon, 2009; Van der Ploeg, 2011, p. 168). While the tale of urbanization has been widely told and proclaimed as a shift from traditional to modernity, from civic exclusion to inclusion, from the bucolic to high-tech, each of these versions of our story, becomes a mythical representation of the change at hand, epically misleading and contributing to the invisibilization of these people, a huge portion of humanity (Berman, 1981).

The general story of the developing world getting wealthier through economic growth appears to overlook how this growth simultaneously creates difficult living conditions. The shift in population in recent decades, throughout the globe, has been to these peri-urban environments. These environments are defined by the lack of access to the benefits that urbanization presupposes.

The global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside – mechanization of agriculture in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti, and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the “pull” of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. As a result, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. —Davis (2006, p. 17) These rapidly emerging and expanding semi-urban contexts are isolating, alienating, and dangerous. The UN estimates that 1 billion humans now live in these peri-urban environments, lacking access to key rights, protections and public services (UN Habitat, 2016). Globally it is also estimated that 1 billion people completely lack access even to the pipes, with or without water. Then, in what some call a “pipe dream,” despite having pipes, another 2 billion people currently lack daily water flow (Totsuk et al., 2004; Vairavamoorthy, 2018). In India, for example, service averages 3 hours per day – and this is for the 49% of the 1339 million people who have access (Dahasahasra, 2018). This is a concrete example of a phenomenon that is recognized as increasing throughout the developing world “under water starving conditions” (Totsuka et al., 2004; Vairavamoorthy, 2018). Additionally, even when there is water, “at least” 2 billion are thought to consume water contaminated by fecal matter (WHO & UNICEF, 2019). These categories are not exclusive but regardless, the numbers are impressive: 10% of the world completely lacks access; 25% drinks dirty water; 25%

lacks continuous service, 25% lack sanitation services (UNEP, 2016). Furthermore, these regions are heavily polluted and it is estimated that globally one in four live in conditions that put their personal health at risk (UN Habitat, 2016). This physical reality is a clash of development paradigms, as urbanization is taking place in peripheral spaces, but these are the exact same spaces that former development models favored pushing these problematic (polluting) productive activities to – on the fringes of the urban core. This is compounded by the fact that environmental movements of the 1970s pushed the dirtiest of these industries out of the developed world and into these so-called peripheral-nations. “The result today is a world in which every nook and cranny bears the impress of capital’s toxification,” writes Moore (2015, p. 271). Porter (1999) says it is the most vulnerable who suffer, because they are powerless. “The poor living in and around major industrial concentrations, who are the main victims of industrial pollution in these countries, have not gained sufficient political power to offset the clout of the socioeconomic and political forces arrayed against their interests,” (1999, p. 142). Exposure to dangerous living conditions without basic services and protections is an expression of vulnerability and a definition of poverty, and this thesis explores exactly that. This exposure has consequences: worldwide about “4 billion cases

of diarrhea are caused by the ingestion of contaminated water” (UNEP, 2016; Onda et al., 2012, p. 17).

These industries pollute not just the air, but the water as well. The UNEP (2016) currently estimates that the world’s water resources are under direct threat from the globalized consumption and production system. “The quality of surface waters used for household water supply in many parts of the developing world continues to deteriorate,” (2016, p.

89). Pollution, both from increased agricultural intensity and industrial output, and at points of extraction and production all the way through to consumption and disposal/

return to the environment is increasing. The UN’s most recent Snapshot of the World’s Water Quality (2016) directly attributes this contamination to the practices of humans (such as agrochemical food production), the lack of wastewater treatment for domestic and industrial discharges, and increasingly from the decomposing leachate material waste of our garbage (UNEP, 2016).²

While we tout the version of modernity and generalized progress, it’s important to keep these numbers in mind – especially when we consider the evidence that shows improving conditions since 1900, when in 1900, there were fewer than two billion people on the planet.

Despite progress bringing access to larger numbers of people, simultaneously more people lack water today than ever before. The consequences of modernity are not just felt by the poor, increasingly exposed to contamination, but by the environment in general. Species of plants and animals and aquatic life are in a state of “catastrophic decline” (WWF, 2018, p. 5) and the situation is general, confirmed by the telling of the 6th Extinction (Kolbert, 2014) and the debates therein of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene (Moore, 2016). As we weigh the progress and potentials that modernity has brought, not to mention the risks (Giddens, 1994) it is important that we do not lose sight of these costs.

In his analogy of Faust and the Faustian bargain as a window through which to understand the logic of capitalism and modern development, Berman (1981) writes that while we admire the great accomplishments of civilization we must never turn our gaze away from those who pay the price. It is not just the lack of urban water services that create this condition where so many lack water, but the increasing production of goods and the mismanagement of waste.

To ignore this would be to continue to invisibilize (Herzog, 2018) and thus historically and presently, obliterate (Spivak, 1988), a huge swath of humanity. “The vicious circle of physical invisibilization and silencing seems to seriously exacerbate the suffering of those marginalized groups who have entered the public sphere and the decision-making process, making it a question of fundamental justice to shatter those very processes of silencing and invisibilization” (Herzog, 2018, p. 13-14).

In this thesis the concept of inequality and water poverty are interrogated as not only constructs, because they are not, but as constructions (consequences) of a paradigm that

2 The report states that in Latin America about one quarter of all rivers are severely contaminated: a fifth to a quarter of all of Africa’s and a third to a half of those in Asia.

portrays itself as the ongoing linear, ahistorical march towards progress. The thesis locates the most basic form of poverty, that of vulnerabilities (Moser, 2009, p. 19), and brings this lack of access to clean water and the inability to protect oneself from exposure to dangerous contamination, into the heterogeneous literature of how to assess and understand poverty.

The issue of contamination and scarcity go hand in hand, and in the two main study areas that this thesis tackles, communities facing water scarcity have a seriously contaminated river flowing through their territory – water that is no longer fit for human consumption. In the background, and explored in this thesis, is the context in which global institutions are recognizing commodified water as a possible solution to this large-scale governance problem (WHO & UNICEF, 2017; Greene, 2018).

Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, the main discourse about access to water has been dominated by the narrative that the situation is improving. This is clear in the way international development goals are scored. The Millennium Development Goals appear to have been achieved. In the case of Mexico, the entire population appears to enjoy access to safe drinking water. In the case of the MDGs, the metric assessed whether households have access to pipes and plumbing regardless of whether there is water. In this sense the metrics employed by the development discourse can obscure this growing reality (Godinez-Madrigal et al., 2018; Godinez-Madrigal et al., 2020; Clasen, 2012).³ The inclusion of bottled water as a form of access for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) 6.1: Universal Access to Safe Drinking Water is a further example of this (WHO & UNICEF, 2017, p. 12).

These metrics, appearing neutral in the foreground, can be deconstructed to show how the epistemologies, from which they flow, either reproduce or challenge power (Boelens, 2015).

Exploring the issue of water as an economic good, this thesis deconstructs the way these discourses are inseparable from the neoliberal context they are embedded in.

In the same moment that the discourse is hijacked by an economic logic embedded in rationalism but not in empiricism (i.e. in the same moment that the world plays with the numbers and brings pipes instead of water to the poor without either) both the scale and scope of the problem grows. Increasing proportions of national and urban populations are living in these deteriorating peri-urban environments. In Mexico, where this research is carried out, 22% of the population now lives in new housing developments predominantly defined by these periphery peri-urban conditions (Reyes Ruiz del Cueto 2018, p. 75). The problem is twofold. First, continued urban expansion has brought demand for first time water service connections beyond the reach of already existing infrastructure (OECD, 2009). Secondly, the lack of reinvestment in civic infrastructure has resulted in the decreasing quality and reliability in urban environments (OECD, 2009; Hasley, 2013). While this thesis will address the making of this world through the discourse of the powerful actors that are creating and reproducing these spaces, not to mention capitalizing, accumulating, externalizing, and dispossessing within these spaces, the main focus of this thesis is to understand how this

3 Godinez-Madrigal et al. (2020) show that even the most neutral appearing metrics, such as models calculating the physical flow of water in a river are highly political and reproduce social orders of inequality and power.

undeniable form of poverty is experienced and the strategies that people undertake to cope with their own disparate realities. Households, composed of workers, families, children, elders, and youth in turn, make do. But what does that mean and how does that play out?

As an investigator carrying out ethnographic research in a number of projects in this region, and a student of actor-agency theory (Long, 2001) I became interested in the sublime, the absurdity of a bottled water world where it was completely normalized, habitualized, and even ritualized. As I travelled throughout the country I began to ask about local water practices and as a field investigator I began to include questions about household water, or the lack thereof, into lines of questioning looking at difficulties and costs in accessing safe water. I also began looking at how different individuals and groups created distinct configurations of reality underneath this bottled water paradigm (Greene, 2014; 2018). In community after community, polluted water was named as the biggest threat to household survival. Despite the argument made by Nobel Prize winning economists such as Banerjee and Duflo (2020) who say “the last few decades have been remarkably good for the world’s poor” in these communities on the front-line of the ecological crisis where we have crossed planetary boundaries, children are sick (Dominguez-Cortinas, 2019), living in deplorable conditions, and lacking even the most basic human need, access to life itself: enough clean water to drink.

In this context it is important to recognize the agency of actors in this space. Despite the fact that individuals and households frequently embody the neoliberal discourse that has objectified them and subjected them to this reality, seeking out individual solutions to this rather global problem, they also actively engage in transforming the limits of their reality and creating space for maneuver. “If therefore, we recognize that we are dealing with multiple realities’, potentially conflicting social and normative interests, and diverse and fragmented bodies of knowledge, then we must … look closely at the issue of whose interpretations of models … prevail over those of other actors and under what conditions” (Long and Villarreal, 1993, p. 26-7).