Alurralde is executive director of Agua Sustentable, a Bolivian non-government organization that researches water policy. Faminow is with Canada’s international development research centre and grew up in the Eastern Irrigation District of Alberta.
In the past, the present, and maybe in the future too, Albertans and faraway Bolivians share a common concern: how to fairly and efficiently manage scarce water supplies.
Most Albertans and surely all Bolivians would be surprised to learn that about 90 years ago farmers along the Bow River were threatening to move en masse to Bolivia. Although they felt provoked by various concerns, most prominent were complaints about the dominance of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
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A big part of the problem was water. Farmers protested about how much they were paying to a private water system, one that was owned and operated by the CPR.
A condition of the original 1880 CPR agreement was that the railway received 25 million acres of land grants as compensation for constructing the intercontinental line. The CPR recruited colonists and in 1903 the company established an irrigation scheme along the Bow River, hoping to profit from the sale of land and water while building up traffic on its lines.
The investment was significant. The CPR spent over $40 million, a huge sum then, on the scheme to irrigate the last three million acres of the land grant. A diversion weir was built near Calgary, the Bassano Dam constructed, over 2,000 kilometres of canals dug and Lake Newell created.
Despite the optimism, promotion and engineering achievements, the CPR scheme floundered. By the 1920s, farmers had organized and were blaming the CPR, saying high expenses for land and water were unacceptable. Many abandoned their farms. A farmer named W.D. Trego led some of the protests and contacted a relocation agent about moving a group of farmers to Bolivia.
With the onset of the Great Depression and dust bowl in southern Alberta, the CPR gave up on the water business.
In 1935, the railway wrote off its losses and handed its entire eastern Alberta operations, including the substantial infrastructure of dam, canals and reservoir, to a farmer’s co-operative. The Eastern Irrigation District was born and through to today successfully operates as a farmer-owned water co-operative in an area larger than that of Prince Edward Island.
In the end, Trego’s farmers never made it to Bolivia. But that Andean country, so physically and culturally removed from Alberta, today shares some of the same water problems that bedeviled the Canadian province generations ago.
In 1997, the World Bank offered financial aid to an indebted Bolivia on the condition that its water system would be privatized. International companies such as Bechtel and Suez took over water delivery in the cities of Cochabamba and El Alto.
Urban water users complained of tariff hikes up to 200 percent, dollarization of water prices and a lack of promised connections, especially in the poorest areas of the cities. Farmers protested the loss of water sources. These complaints erupted into the famous water war of Cochabamba in 2000 and the mass marches in El Alto. The riot police who were sent into Cochabamba clashed with protesters, killing one person and injuring 30 others.
Whether the water is used for household purposes or for irrigation, people tend to protest when their water supply is privatized. Curiously, arguments about cost appear to matter less than issues surrounding the trust that co-operatives or publicly owned corporations seem to invoke. Why?
Research in Bolivia after the water war provides clues. The researchers compared the pay-as-you-go system favoured by the Bolivian government, which believed it to be the most efficient way, to the co-operative distribution system preferred by farmers and traditionally used in the Andes.
They found that the co-operative system was at least as efficient in water use but resulted in a much fairer distribution of water. This fairness was most pronounced in times of water scarcity.
When it came to water, what worried most people was basic justice. Small wonder that farmers in Bolivia recently, and in Alberta during the dust bowl, both preferred the co-operative approach.
In recent years, glaciers have shrunk dramatically. This means that, in both countries, water will become scarcer and will likely become more contested. A whole new set of questions will need answers.
Will urban water demand for human consumption, lawns and golf courses bid water away from agricultural uses? How do we define efficiency? How do we define fairness? How do we decide who gets the water and who does not?
Solutions that try to balance efficiency and fairness cannot be defined scientifically but should be negotiated. Water needs to be viewed in a collaborative sense.
This means that more public participation will be necessary to achieve good water policy, whether in Bolivia, Alberta or elsewhere. Future water institutions will need to take into account certain key principles.
For example, the constitutional agreement recently approved in Bolivia placed water in the context of fundamental human well-being, using phrases such as “water for people, food and the environment.” As water becomes scarcer, basic principles such as these will increasingly need to underlie water institutions.
Second, there is increased pressure in many countries to respect and recognize traditional and indigenous rights, uses and customs. The recognition of traditional water customs in law has helped achieve considerable consensus over water in Bolivia, and could possibly do so elsewhere.
Third, rapid demand growth in Alberta and Bolivia, combined with high agricultural prices, will make water more contested in the future. This will require negotiation, co-operation and collaboration.
Finally, when it comes to a sensitive issue like water, policy makers who rely on abstract theories will do so at their peril. Most ordinary people will prefer their water supply to depend on a sound knowledge of what has worked historically and on what has been shown to be fair.
Together, Alberta and Bolivia offer some interesting lessons.
