What happens to small towns whose water becomes big business for bottled brands?

Groundwater being pumped from a highland aquifer, only to be whisked away in tankers and sold in little plastic bottles by a multinational corporation – it’s a difficult concept for a small farming town to swallow.

The more the market is willing to pay, the harder it is to regulate water use.

Just ask the residents of Stanley, Victoria, whose four-year court battle to stop a farmer bottling local groundwater for Japanese beverage giant Asahi ended in failure last month. They were left with a A$90,000 bill for legal costs.

Locals have clashed with the bottled water industry in many parts of the world, including the United States and Canada, and perhaps most famously in the French spa town of Vittel, where residents have accused Nestlé of selling so much of their water to the rest of the world that they barely have enough left for themselves.

Read the report from The Conversation - “What happens to small towns whose water becomes big business for bottled brands?”

Is Pakistan running out of water?

The sight of water flowing from taps may soon be a luxury, with people having to queue up at tankers for just a bucket load of water for their daily needs. Meanwhile, affluent neighbourhoods in gated communities may install desalination plants paid for (by volume) by wealthy homeowners.

Pakistan’s explosive population growth means less water for everybody .

If we are to try and bring some order to this chaotic picture of near future, the starting point for Arif Anwar, who heads the non-profit research organization International Water Management Institute (IWMI), will be to ensure that cities are water secure.

This is because the day-to-day injustice from inadequate water supply hits people with precarious livelihoods the most. In fact, for several years now, the chaotic picture of the future is already a reality in scores of informal settlements in the port city of Karachi.

Read Zofeen T Ebrahim’s story from thethirdpole.net - “Is Pakistan running out of water?”