What? The Michigan Chamber of Commerce actively supports giving away Michigan water to international giants? It's thinking like this that has helped plunge Michigan's economy into peril. From the Washington Post.
"How do we decide when water is a product?" she asked. "Under the WTO and NAFTA,
there is no obligation for a state to extract its natural resources.
The difference comes when it makes the decision to allow an entity to
commercialize it and they do commercialize it. Then it is a product and
you can't ban the export." (emphasis added)
Doug Roberts Jr., director of environmental and energy policy at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, agrees.
"We think it's critical that you are able to make products and ship them all over the world," Roberts said. "That's what you do in a free-market economy. We were very concerned groups would target one product and say that product can't be shipped. What's the difference between bottled water and beer or cherry juice? Those all have water in them."
This gentleman's reasoning has sprung a leak.
Water is an ingredient in beer and juice, not a product. There is a long-standing right to use water to make things, but there is no right to sell water. Water itself belongs to the public, and there was no law condoning its commercialization in the Great Lakes Basin in 2006, when Michigan blundered into passing such a law. Now the Compact has done so for the region.
Maybe someday the simple point will become clear to more people: once you convert water in law from a public to a commercial resource, you risk losing public control of it -- and in this case, of the Great Lakes.
You leave out the really importnat part of Bradford's passage, "But once it is bottled and becomes itself a product, she said, trade agreements would prevent a ban on exports."
This is a paraphrase, but the point is that water in situ is not a product. Packaged water is a product. We don't have to worry about "waking up to find the lakes don't belong to us anymore." (as Jim Olsen has been quoted as saying)
That's a bugaboo. And maybe the reason why people don't get your simple point is that the simple point keeps changing and that your argument is really nothing but special pleading.
When water is extracted, filtered, packaged, shipped, refrigerated, branded and advertized it is a value-added product and you can't stop the manufacturer from selling the product wherever s/he wants.
You control this through rational environmental legislation that limits extraction
The distinction you make between "making" something that's 90+% water by content and selling bottled water is false. The water is just an ingredient of bottled water--otherwise how do you explain the fact that people buy it at an enormous markup in spite of the ready availability of cheaper alternatives? There must be something else of importance there--temperature, packaging, convenient location, psychological rewards, whatever--or they wouldn't spend the extra money buying it.
Looking at each bottled water export as a small "Nova Group plan" is moronic. Bottled water is a product much along the lines of any other soft drink and ought to be regulated as a soft drink. It isn't a harbinger of the apocalypse.
You guys will just say anything to get yours back from Nestle. Why should anyone listen?
Posted by: Oran Kelley | November 15, 2008 at 05:31 PM