Hallelujah! WHO/UNICEF declare the first Millennium Development Goal reached, and a surprising three years before its deadline. I move over to the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog: MDG drinking water target being met is cause for celebration. UNICEF Canada, China Daily, CS Monitor all read the same: victory. 

When I find the post by Sanjay Wijesekera, the Chief of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene for UNICEF/New York, the feeling of triumph fades. He states, “783 million people still do not have access to drinking water, this most basic human right.” A prominent CEO from WaterAid America, David Winder, echoes the same alarming statistic: “Nearly 800 million of the world’s poorest people still live without this basic human need.” Aside from the ‘slight’ difference in numbers, did Winder refer to access to safe drinking water as a basic human ‘need’? Surely he knows the difference between ‘right’ and ‘need’ and most probably he uses the latter by mistake but it made me recall one of the most shocking realizations I had since I started traveling the world reporting on water-related conflicts.

Exactly three years ago I attended the 5th World Water Forum, the largest conference on the planet’s freshwater crisis. It quickly became evident the high-profile forum was hardly accepted as a legitimate body after learning of the organizer’s strong ties to privately-owned water corporations. 

Not far from the heavily guarded official venue the People’s Water Forum buzzed with activists representing nations hard hit with the water crisis, who travel here to learn and share new ways to fight injustices and bring community-led solutions back home. That’s where I met Maude Barlow, perhaps the most renowned ‘water warrior’ of our times. As Senior Advisor on Water to Father Miguel D’escoto, the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly, Maude came to Istanbul to deliver his message to the Forum’s attendees.

On July 28, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly finally recognized access to clean water and sanitation as a basic human right. It took activists, experts and pressure groups more than a decade to convince leaders to fight this battle against corporate interest.

In the foreword of the WHO/UNICEF report, ‘Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012′, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon acknowledges the considerable work ahead: “There are still 780 million people without access to an improved drinking water source. And even though 1.8 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world remains off track for the sanitation target.”

Dang. There it is again, ‘improved’ vs ‘safe’. Yet another minor tweak in language that if acted upon in the real world could mean life or death to millions. 

Releasing the UN report days before the 6th World Water Forum will no doubt be a leading topic at the conference. I’ll be there next week in Marseille to get the reaction from both the ‘official’ and the Alternative World Water Forum attendees. Hopefully we’ll understand more about our water secure future. It will greatly depend on the way we look at water. Private commodity or public common. Tradable good or basic human right.

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Last updated: March 10, 2012.

“While I congratulate all who work on this issue – the UN, NGOs, some countries – I don’t think the picture is as rosy as this report would suggest. I worry that a report like this makes us feel the problem is on the way to being solved when in fact, it is the exact opposite.” – Maude Barlow

With plenty of landscaped gardens and water features in the immediate neighborhood its hard to take this sign seriously. Serving tap water only ‘on request’ however is still more than most European restaurants offer. Probably something the Venetian restaurant owners could learn from their US counterparts…

Plastic garbage floats on the Chao Phraya River in central Bangkok, Thailand on December 30, 2011.

Check out where most of the water bottles are dumped in the Maldives besides the sea…

The first thing I notice when I enter the room at the Hilton Colombo Residence is a couple of water bottles on the table. They are meticulously arranged behind the fruit basket with their labels facing the room entrance. Both the fruits and the custom branded water are complimentary.

Sigiriya is perhaps one of the most popular tourist destinations in Sri Lanka. Once serving as the royal capital, this giant rock formation towers over the vast forests in the surrounding plain. Near the entrance of the archeological site I find a small canteen filled with tea drinking guards and tourist guides. I ask the woman behind the counter for a large bottle of water. “Only small,” she replies and brings forward a cold bottle from her tiny fridge. Although the price is printed on most of the local bottled water she set her own price by adding 30 more Rupees to the original 50.

In western countries bottled water prices vary greatly depending on where the water is bought. Surprisingly in Sri Lanka stores and even restaurants sell the bottled water at the price printed on the label. One exception was Sigiriya Village, a resort near the popular tourist destination. Although the management provides a complimentary large bottle of water per room each day, drinking bottled water during breakfast and dinner is not part of the all-inclusive deal. Although proper filtered ice water is available on request the waiters first serve guests the small, custom branded bottles. The price is 146.10 Sri Lankan Rupees that is conveniently rounded up to 180 Rupees with the added 33.90 Rupees for surcharge and tax.

Most of the tourists in this season visit the beaches in the southern coast. Unawatuna is considered one of the best in the country. After suffering from the unbearable heat in a tiny room without air conditioning at a dodgy hotel called Happy Banana I decided to upgrade to a much more comfortable spot at the nearby Banana Garden hotel. Across the street is a small convenient store where I buy water every day. At first I am surprised when the young man at the shop gives me two different prices for the same bottle. If I would like to buy the chilled water from the fridge he charges 10 additional Rupees on top of the standard 50 Rupees. “In Sri Lanka the electricity is extremely expensive,” he says, explaining why he makes his customers bear the cost of the $100 USD monthly electricity bill.

After having a couple of bad experience with bottled water on the road I start to look for brands I am either familiar with or wish to avoid. Although the label states that the content is “approved by Ministry of Health” I cannot screw back on the top of the Sisila bottled water fast enough to avoid its nasty odor spreading inside the car. It might be simply bad water quality, a packaging mistake by the company or a consequence of inappropriate storage but I want to make sure I don’t buy this one ever again.

Although I find most label designs awkward and funny, at the same time western companies could learn something from their Sri Lankan counterparts. In general the bottles on sale are always sealed and the packaging always provides valuable information such as the source, the content and the product’s expiration date. The information is printed visibly according to what’s valuable to the costumers and not what’s needed to sell the product.

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During the couple of weeks I spent in Sri Lanka I mainly saw bottled water on the shelf in two sizes. In this article I refer the 1.5 liter bottles as ‘large’ and the 1 liter bottles as ‘small’.

About The Virtual Water Project:

[excerpt from the project's homepage]
Water is probably one of the most precious resources and vital for everyone’s everyday life. Despite this obvious fact, people use large amounts of water: drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, and almost every other physical product.

About the theory:

[excerpt from waterfootprint.org]
Virtual water content: The virtual-water content of a product (a commodity, good or service) is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced (production-site definition). It refers to the sum of the water use in the various steps of the production chain. The virtual-water content of a product can also be defined as the volume of water that would have been required to produce the product at the place where the product is consumed (consumption-site definition). We recommend to use the production-site definition and to mention it explicitly when the consumption-site definition is used. The adjective ‘virtual’ refers to the fact that most of the water used to produce a product is not contained in the product. The real-water content of products is generally negligible if compared to the virtual-water content. [Read more here]

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See other water related art projects at Science Gallery’s new exhibition

I am sitting at a bus stop with Sandra listening to deafening music pour out of a massive wall of loudspeakers erected on the street of a small favela. Sandra is a Brazilian friend whom I first met years ago in New York City before she moved back to her native country. During one of her previous visits to Rio’s largest shantytown she met R (name withheld to protect his identity), who guides foreign visitors through Rocinha. Without personally knowing the ‘rulers’ of the favela, who are the foot soldiers of one of Rio’s notorious drug gangs, it would be extremely dangerous if not impossible to venture inside this otherwise seemingly peaceful settlement.

The party on the street goes wild soon after its starts. Although it is already 2AM no one seems to complain about the noise. Most of the boys who organized the party are in their late teens and besides the board shorts and havaianas, semi automatic rifles hang off their shoulders. We are visiting a friend in Vidigal, a small favela closest to Rio’s famous Ipanema beach. The area is controlled by the same gang and some of R’s friends are on duty tonight guarding a spot where drugs are being sold.

We are more than welcomed to hang out but photographing the illegal trade and its players is most of the time off limits. Due to my frequent visits to Afghanistan I grew a beard much longer than I would feel comfortable with. Although it is essential if you would like to blend in amongst Afghanistan’s Pasthun population it does very little in my favor in Brazil, that is until I found out that R is introducing me to his friends as a prominent representative of the Afghan insurgency. From then on the mood changed. After describing tactics insurgents use to attack NATO convoys patrolling villages, the crowd of young men unanimously scream, “this is exactly how we fight the police here if they dare to enter our territory.” After they learn the guns they fight with cost a hundred times less in Afghanistan, talk of lucrative business deals ensue and I am soon led to a small favela where the local gang leader, a 24-year-old ‘veteran’, explains how he lost almost all of his childhood friends after 15 years of working in this business. He shows me around the tiny hill under his control and invites me to target practice with a gun he bought from a friend who serves in the Brazilian Army.

I remind myself of the main purpose behind visiting the favela, to understand how people cope with the dire living conditions and the lack of access to safe water and proper sanitation.

The rapid and chaotic urbanization process in Brazil often led to uncontrolled metropolitan growth and many consequent problems in huge cities like Rio de Janeiro. The first illegally built settlement on squatted land appeared on the outskirts of Rio approximately one hundred years ago. Currently, about one-fifth of the city’s residents live in such slums despite several official attempts to eradicate these often lawless shantytowns. Most buildings in the favelas are built without proper planning and authorization and sewage and water pipes are mostly laid and maintained in an improvised manner, forcing those who live here to solve many of their own infrastructure problems. The natural flow of water from the mountains is collected and stored in small makeshift reservoirs from which a tangled network of plastic pipes supply water with questionable quality to the settlement below.

With growing media attention around the upcoming 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, the government has begun implementing substantial plans to give the county a new face in time for the games. Although former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that investing in running water and other basic services was the best way to beat organized crime, it took three more years before elite police units backed by armored military vehicles and helicopters took action against the parallel governors, the drug lords of Rocinha.

Today police forces stormed Rocinha and pacified the infamous slum. Looking at the first images transmitted by the wires I see police tanks patrolling a place where only a few years ago gun-toting youngsters were selling drugs at an improvised checkpoint simply called “little-Gaza”. It’s anyone’s guess when the government plans to act on their word and start improving water and sanitation services promised to the millions living in Rio’s favelas.

See more of my images on Daily Beast and read Mac Margolis’ Newsweek article profiling Rio’s Public Safety Secretary José Mariano Beltrame and providing a glimpse into Brazil’s “shantytown counterinsurgency.”