Angelica Isa

It’s the fun thing to do during the February carnaval: Fill a bucket, or a bottle, anything that will hold water and soak some merry reveler out in the street.

Meanwhile, in the shanty towns that ring the city, a plastic barrel, holds all of the water a poor family will use between weekly visits of the water truck.

There are no pipes in the shanty towns. Private vendors sell water to the slum dwellers at perhaps ten times the price paid by those who can get it from the tap in more affluent parts of the city. There might be a solution to this inequity, but one must not suggest it. It is said to be unfair to the poor.

Lima, a 475-year-old city with a population of 8.5 million, is located in the middle of the Atacama Desert; there isn’t a lot of water. It averages between 0.35 – 1.5 inches of rain a year. (Phoenix, Arizona, gets about 6.5 inches per year.) According to the state-owned water company, Sedapal, Lima, residents with running water consume about 63 U.S. gallons per day.

Company officials claim that reducing this by a mere 2.6 gallons a day could supply another 130,000 families (out of the 1.3 million without tap water access) with water, but there is little incentive to conserve. Tap water, unlike water from trucks, is very cheap.

Truck water is not just more expensive than tap water — it is more dangerous. It is untreated and likely to carry parasites that can cause diarrhea, dysentery or even cholera. Moreover, the open standing bins of water are friendly breeding places for mosquitoes in the summer. How disgracefully perfect for the segment of the population with no real health care provision.

So what is there to be done? What about making the water price for those with running pipelines reflect its true availability — or lack thereof?

What about privatizing the water company so that water’s real scarcity will be reflected in its market-driven price instead of having a government subsidize it?

Wouldn’t a thoroughly private company be more driven to provide city-wide piping faster in order to increase its profits?

 Wouldn’t that be more efficient than the company being held to city politics, funding projects only when elections are coming up?

Private companies will lay down pipes where they see potential profit, not where they are likely to get important votes.

Of course, bring up the idea of privatizing the water company and the whole city (if not the whole country) will rise up in arms about it — a strong possibility evidenced by the anti-Free Trade Agreement graffiti found on the walls throughout the major cities. Anything smacking of neoliberal policies will have a tough time getting through the hardest hit, poorest sectors of Latin America who took the major blows of economic structural readjustment in the 1980s. Those with running water will complain about rising prices and everyone, of course, will agonize about the poor.

Won’t they get abused by a private company?

The sad irony is that water to the poor is already privatized. And, indeed, they pay exorbitant prices — to the private truck owners. It is simply more expensive to supply water by truck than it is by pipe.

The awful truth, not just in Peru, but around the world, is that those of us getting it through the tap are indirectly being subsidized by those who get it from the truck. Tap water is too cheap and truck water too expensive. But politicians have little incentive to antagonize the relatively wealthy by raising water prices, which a private water company would almost certainly do and the poor have too little political power to compel the politicians.

The current system is profoundly unfair. But it’s one thing to talk about championing the needs of the poor and another to be willing to pay for them directly. Privatizing water provision would make us wealthy people start having to pay through the nose for water, just like the poorest among us already are doing. And we privileged ones are not going to like it. Not one bit.

For one thing, it will be more expensive to splash people at carnaval.

Angelica Isa is a student at Grinnell College.