The precarious situation in Eastern European water supply – and particularly wastewater treatment – cannot be mitigated without permanent funding from Brussels. In many East European countries, the EU is still the major investor in the water and wastewater sector. Although development of water supply and wastewater treatment is thus financed mainly by public funds, private companies increasingly dominate the water management infrastructure. This was the message presented by lecturers from Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia at the symposium "Privatisation of the European water sector – need for reforms or capital interests?". The event on 9 March was organised by the Chamber of Labour (AK) Vienna and the Austrian Association of Cities and Towns.
Herbert Tumpel, President of the AK Vienna, opened the symposium by pointing to the fact that the Austrian population had "clearly voted against water privatisation" in pertaining surveys. In his opening address, Erich Pramböck, Secretary General of the Austrian Association of Cities and Towns, referred to this fact and warned that the freedom of organisation of the Austrian municipalities would be undermined by the obligation to tender advocated by parts of the EU Commission.
Pramböck regretted that the Commission was not even willing to speak about the undermining of communal autonomy with representatives of municipalities any longer. Furthermore, Pramböck criticised the adaptive behaviour of national governments to the Brussels mainstream. A massive attack impended from Brussels on the national investments of billions made by the Austrian municipalities in the past 15 years to achieve the present top level in domestic water management.
Karl Georg Doutlik, representative of the EU Commission in Austria, conceded already at the beginning of his presentation that a "hot water discussion" was actually to be expected due to an irrational fear of an Austrian water sell-out. However, one had to understand that the Commission was thinking about how to open the well-selling water sector to competition more than before.
For more than e 80 billion per year had already been turned over in the water and wastewater sector in the "old EU" with only 15 members. In view of this volume, it was justified that the Commission was striving to guarantee in the water sector, too, a "transparent and indiscriminative awarding of service contracts".
Neither was Doutlik able to see a contradiction between competition and high environmental standards. The EU representative advised the mainly critically minded audience not to proceed on the well-managed situation in Austria, but to consider those countries with an obvious need for action.
Summarising the lectures referring to East European water managements, the deficits have the following common denominator: water supply is still marked by a high leakage rate. Sewers – if they exist – often end without any treatment plant in the nearest receiving waters. The prospects that major corporations will "rescue" the situation, are assessed – according to the lecturers – increasingly less euphorically in Eastern Europe.
In the Czech Republic, for example, even the unions supported the privatisation of the water sector after the implosion of the communist regime, "also because private corporations arrived with cheap money from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development," said Pavel Ruzicka, who outlined the Czech state of discussion.
Today, however, people were disenchanted by privatisation, because: "The major advantage of privatisation are beautiful customer centers where one can complain." The other side of the coin was not only staff cuts by 50 %, but also a significant reduction in research and development.
Closing the symposium, Simona Wolesa, who represents the Austrian Association of Cities and Town in Brussels, presented a brilliant lecture. She said that her naivety regarding the Commission had diminished, and that her disillusionment had increased, because the Commission "increasingly neglected subsidiarity in favour of the right to competition."
While Jacques Delors had formulated the EU domestic market as an antithesis to globalisation, the completion of the domestic market according to the neo-liberal, Anglo-Saxon model was now the objective in the framework of the Lisbon Process. Wolesa called upon the audience to use the present "break" in Brussels to achieve a "trend reversal" in EU water management policy despite the strong influence of the "liberal Anglo-Saxon" experts present there. The slogans deregulation, market expansion, competition, and liberalisation had to be opposed by a responsible and municipal water management demanding "solidarity, social cohesion and unity"!
Please order the proceedings with the lectures via the Chamber of Labour Vienna: E-mail: Wolfgang.LAUBER@akwien.at Mag. Nikolaus Geiler is spokesman of the "Freiburger Arbeitskreis Wasser im Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz" and publisher of the "BBU-Wasser-Rundbrief" (free samples available via e-mail: nik@akwasser.de)
(Source: aqua press Int. 2/2005, Mag. Nikolaus Geiler)
