By Maude Barlow, speaking on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio’s The Current.

Brazil has about 12 per cent of the world’s fresh water, yet its largest city, Sao Paulo,  is starting to run dry.  More than 11 million residents of Sao Paulo have been forced to severely ration what little water they receive and some go days without water.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians. She’s served as Senior Advisor on Water to the UN General Assembly. And she’s the author of Blue Future, Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever. Here are some highlights from the CBC interview with Barlow:

“It’s not enough to talk about the end result, we have to ask what the problem is. It’s very clearly related to the destruction of the Amazon. The reason this matters is that air moving over rainforest carries twice as much rain as air coming over a desert or a cut down forest. So the forest gives off vapours that are called flying rivers, huge areas of humidity, then travel thousands of kilometres, that’s what deposits rain when it’s need in Sao Paulo and other places. That is the key here. When you cut down the Amazon. When you remove water from water retentive landscape or vegetation from water retentive landscape you interrupt the cycle.

They are taking down the Amazon to massively produce soybean, sugarcane both for ethanol for export and cattle. All of those not only remove the rainforest that creates the flying rivers, they also use a great deal of water to produce. Food production consumes water, it doesn’t put it back. So then if you are producing a commodity that is exported you are exporting that water away. It’s as if you were putting a massive pipe in the Guarani aquifer or in the water system that we’re talking about and sucking that water up and taking it away. It is water export, but it’s called virtual water. And it’s all the water that is embedded in the products we produce.

My deep belief is that we are not looking at the big picture when we create economic and development policy. Almost every government in the world bases all their policies on the growth imperative. Unlimited growth, more stuff, more trade, less regulation, more power to the corporations. It’s no coincidence that it’s good for certain wealthy groups that can buy their way out of this crisis. This system is destroying water. We do not have the right kind of thinking in most capitals.

Nor is there a program at the United Nations. Every year governments of the world get together and try to deal with this issue. There is no corresponding process or plan or thought around water. If they talk about water it’s as a result of climate change, but it’s not a result of climate change, the abuse of water and the displacement of water from where it should be, is one of the causes of climate change. And we absolutely need a separate process. Governments have to wake up.

They have to stop cutting down the Amazon. They have to stop exporting massive amounts of water out of their watersheds. They have to conserve. We all have to go back to watershed protection and conservation and restoration. We have to build every single policy, every economic policy, all our trade policy now has to be based around the protection and restoration of watersheds. If we don’t do this, we are going to be a world running out of water. The crisis in Brazil is going to happen and is happening in many other places.”

To hear the full interview, please click here. Barlow’s segment begins at 14:46.

More from Maude Barlow’s blog:

The global water crisis is the greatest threat of our time, ecologically and in terms of human rights. Our planet is running out of water. All we learned in school about never being able to run out is false. Humans are polluting, mismanaging and diverting water from where nature put it to where we want it at an alarming rate.

• Using bore well technology that‎ did not exist before the 1950s, we are mining ground water far faster than nature can replenish it.
• We are also damming all the great rivers to death for flood irrigation to provide food for the global market.
• And sending vast amounts of land-based water ‎into thirsty mega cities where it is dumped into oceans. As a result, deserts are growing in over 100 countries.
• Our removal of water from water retentive landscapes is a major and unrecognized contributor to climate chaos and global warming.
• As a result of this mistreatment of our finite water sources, parts of the world are drying up.

Is water a commodity to be put on the open market like oil and gas, or a human right and public trust? How we answer this question will determine the future of millions and the survival of the planet.

The commodification of water takes many forms: privatization of water services; massive bottling of ground water; water “trading,” where ‎water licenses are converted to private property and bought and sold on the open market; and land and water grabs, where the actual water in a community is sold to private foreign investors whose interest is protected by free trade and investment agreements.

Recently, ‎foreign corporations are claiming ownership of the actual raw water they use for their operations.

In my new book Blue Future, I call for a new water ethic that puts the protection of water and watersheds at the heart of all policy, from energy to food production to trade agreements. In all we do we must ask the question, what is the impact on water?  If the impact is negative, we have to go back to the drawing board. And this ethic must honour four principles if we are to have a water secure future.

The first is that water is a human right. This has now been recognized by the United Nations but we have a long way to go before it is a fact. The UN now asserts that no one has the right to appropriate water for personal gain while others go without. All governments now have to come up with a plan based on three obligations:

• To respect, which means a right once given cannot be removed (for instance, water services being cut to those who cannot pay after water services have been privatized)‎;
• To protect, which means ‎that governments must protect people from third party destruction of their water, such as mining pollution;
• And to fulfill, which ‎obligates governments to come up with a plan to provide water and sanitation to the most vulnerable.

Priority must be given to the needs of people and communities over corporations and profit.

The second principle is that water is a common heritage and a public trust.

The bountiful waters of Brazil belong to all the people and future generations and governments must protect and manage them for the wise use of all. These watersheds cannot be owned. They belong to the people and must be carefully managed for the enjoyment of all. As a public trust, water serves the public good, not the interests of a privileged few.

Under public trust, all activity, private and public, must serve a mandate of restoration and preservation of watersheds and water justice for all members of the community.

And water services must be kept as an essential public service if the human right to water is to be real. There is no place for private profit in the delivery of water.

The third principle is that water has rights too beyond its usefulness to us.

Water is not a resource for our pleasure and profit. It is the essential element of a living ecosystem that gives life to us all. It is time to change our attitude to water.

Water was put where it belongs. Rivers need to flow. We play God when we engineer, ‎displace and dam our rivers to death and pump ancient groundwater mercilessly.

We must also recognize the right of other living beings to survive and thrive. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother ‎Earth calls for a body of law that stops seeing nature as property and is more compatible with the laws of the natural world.

In a speech three years ago to a conference on the Guarani, I called for a Guarani Watershed Covenant that would establish it as a public trust and protected bioregion and set watershed wide laws and regulations to stop the corporate plunder and pollution now threatening this precious heritage.

As well, the destruction of the Amazon must stop. Reforestation, watershed protection and restoration and rainwater harvesting are all necessary to fight the drought currently plaguing the country.

As well, political leaders must take a long hard look at their policies of unlimited export growth. The waters of Brazil are not unlimited!

Finally, water can teach us how to live together if we will only listen.

In a world of dramatically increasing demand and dramatically shrinking supplies, it is possible water will lead to conflict, violence and war. Water is already being used as a weapon of war in Syria.

But it is equally possible that water can bring us together in the search for solutions to our shared water crises.

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs ‎to those that believe in the beauty of their dreams. Well I believe in the beauty of this dream: That our shared need to protect water for life and for future generations will teach us to to live more tolerantly and lovingly with one another and step more lightly on our beautiful mother earth. This is the challenge of our time and we are blessed to be given this solemn task.

Speaking notes for International Forum of Environmental Management, Porto Alegre, Brazil, June 4, 2014