ah. the population of pakistan totals one hundred eighty million and it's still growing in lahore love there are ten million people clean drinking water is in short supply. for nestle introduced pure lies bottled water was a rare sight in pakistan. now nestle dominates a vast market that it created itself i grew up in a city where you could go just like anyone else would also water and you would get a glass of water for free without any fear of its quality or it sounds and what's

happened over the last ten to fifteen years i mean in my own consciousness is that i have seen and witnessed a replacement of drinking water a commodification of drinking water. i want to see that it's nestle that's done it it's been a confluence of factors nestle appeared on the scene it started providing your life drinking water and all of sudden coca-cola shows up and that's the shows up and then a whole bunch of private local manufactured water school shows up as well all producing clean water clean water because of the terribly old and creaky infrastructure of the sanitation authority and then before you know it everywhere you go if you ask for a glass of water i have to be fifty rupees. as well as on the body i mean this water is not drink a bowl we have to drink it as this is the only water available once we drink this water. we get different stomach

diseases. although water is too dirty you have to boil it hilter it. and then drink it. if you have a meal you have to rush to the toilet because the water can't be digested when you are there along the water warms inside the body they are moving inside we don't show this water to the children otherwise they won't drink it and everything will be a mess. this leap year life is the safe alternative delivered directly to. the service for the well to do. we film at the home distribution station in the upmarket area was gone but. i introduced myself to the station manager and asked for permission to film. what is the problem so. you get what. you like what you put up with

what you said it's ok you don't really know. so. the university of management sciences in lahore and this elite institution hardly anyone drinks tap water and your life is a success story. i think a lot of the success of your life is nestle's marketing. that was good it was targeted to words but income people because assuming that you can always get water fleet who would be a premium for it most probably the poor people will not. in any case they can't afford the prices so it is you know the. upper middle class and nestle brodsky and this. was because of innocent distribution mustn't you know

that adds a very interesting lot of emphasis on quality and a model that you can trust. for a lot of butte. it was fashionable to be walking around with built life in hand. you know it was making a statement about themselves also so it was not just functional benefits it was position on that. that if you are you know a modern person if you are. you know person whose health conscious. in some sense the jetset as a pikestaff. i think honestly and more to the water companies have been able to effectively appeal to a part of the pakistani psyche that. likes things like is appealing to a lifestyle i read somewhere recently that a lot of the cola manufacturers decided to go into making bottled water because

they knew that the market for cooler was limited because it's so clearly unhealthy for you but the market fall drinking water is unlimited it's a constant supply so it's just a question of being able to effectively commodified drinking water and i mean i've seen it happen before my eyes in the last twenty years and it's not necessarily was not this early it was in the realm of your conspiracy theory i'm sure at some level this is part of a business plan put forward by a company that look here's a market where there's nobody drinking bottled water if we go in and do this this this all of the sudden we have ten million consumers how is that. brilliant.

about forty kilometers from the business knees shaken poor a factory. when the company introduced pure life to pakistan some ten years ago it was. right next to the factory. village. most of the village population cannot recall. the arrival of nestle brought extra employment but the factories also blamed for the biggest problem in the village. is a lack of clean drinking water. are other go in our opinion has taken our water from us nestlé puts its own chub well in the factory effect now the water has become very dirty. all of the way of the water level used to be one hundred feet now the level is down to three hundred

to four hundred feet. we worry a lot. of. the wells used by the population no longer reach deep enough. around the factory several wells and from trying. to. do. a lot of the relating to groundwater is unclear it's unclear who owns the groundwater who has a right to it whether the state has a right to regulate groundwater where the people who own land over the groundwater have a right to the resource or whether a company can come and be for the rights of groundwater these issues haven't been thrashed through legally economically or on any sort of policy for of yet and it remains to be done. because nestlings booming business with pure life the

company has been pumping water out of the ground. but what effect is this having on the ground. and on the quality of the more to a drunk by the people of the village. i asked nestle pakistan about to start a countdown. to cook no reply. to. what. medical people tell us the water is not safe. shouldn't drink it this girl is always sick bonnie's monday if you keep on giving water to the kids they keep on going to the toilet. if they can't digest the water. they tell us to boil the water first and to kill the germs johnny. if you're not what you are poor people can't afford to boil all the time money.

here in the deal what nestle has no good neighbor policy but the villages have sent a petition to the company they too would like to have access to the clean water deep down under their village. has turned their request if we've asked them for to boil. least they should provide us with a small pipe with an outlet of water through the wall be able to go to the. with such a solution we the villagers could fetch water this way with cans in the body about the little nothing of what they could show us a little just to respect destiny in the end is really stealing the local water sources from people and that's their life their livelihood and the livelihoods and lives of their children don't forget that border is relatively small businesses. so we had a fake or that was. selling it counts for us year zero point sera sera

sera ninety percent of the fresh water being used. i mean it look even a troubling do it even let. it do what they should do the sixth international human rights forum opened this morning in the cern although the event is usually a peaceful affair but this year is different because of the participation of nestle's chairman peter brubaker and they stick to members of the swiss workers' union say that nestle itself violates human rights and has no place in such a forum. people have to buy expensive bottled water but poor people cannot afford it this is not a body human rights. have to face the main thing is to simply say the border is a human right is perhaps not enough in reality it is not a matter of whether water is a human right because quite clearly it is it's more

a question of how we can implement this human rights. we shouldn't reflect so much from whether water is a human right but rather reflect on how to ensure a permanent access to water in daily life. that says there are also a few other basic problems which needs solving. the most important point without question is the more must be invested in. water infrastructure that's right and secondly there should be no subsidies for the owners of swimming pools and golf courses and for biofuels produced from plants cultivated specifically for this purpose. but there should be subsidies for water for the purposed and for nature. lagos is the biggest city in africa here there is no such thing as tree. everybody

has to buy it. the poor rely on the sachet water locally produced but also the g.o.p.'s fall into. the city where the public water supply has failed is an opportunity for those who want to sell. videos and multinationals and invest into what's up i mislead them to have. that is producing. a many of us with a muscle of five so you see. these. mountain nationals. understand the importance of what they know that in one jury. is still it's you know if i'm biased age side the government has a bit of the can hold off providing enough what awful the nationals on for the citizens industry is indeed profiting and exploiting the weakness of the.

time. it's the present is loaded the wrong end of the stick is the other not a citizen who is helpless to live above the law is expensive and we barely made the nigerians. they all told me my language as well but i will only react to situations i have read the reports and let me know what is the know i will leave them to the state

department to comment on your letter point the muslims say it is secure yet a car is on the docket no god. no more weasel words when you they need a direct question be prepared for a change when you throw a punch be ready for a. president of speech and little down to freedom to costs. all. this is going to. sit. in my colleagues and i will never shake mr secretary as hans i consider him

a war criminal a. lot of. right to see. first street view and i would think that you're. on a reporter's twitter. and instagram. could be in the. located in the google's main goals is the cocoa it's a slum neighborhood built on stilts. it will give a human rights to water is nothing but

a phrase that. the slum dwellers have to buy their drinking water from businessmen who have set up water stations in the slums. not like. this no it's not easy to fetch water. that's it's a long way to the water stations. that. they doing up sometimes the pumps don't work because there's no petrol the year idea more. than you have to go to another station that is even further away than in life you go to work and there are only four stations around. for a family of twelve the daily budget is six dollars half of that we used to buy water. in the marketplace empty pet

bottles are sold to a life of cocoa style. the slum continues to grow on its own rotting garbage. the reality in the. global south is so powerful now it is such a life and death issue i mean more children die every day from dirty water than from h. i.v. aids more traffic accidents and malaria put together it's the number one killer and so when you have that kind of life and death situation and then a company like nasty comes in and says oh we've got the answer here life is yet ceremony going to sell you water that we're going to take from your very own aquifers when there are no public taps and when you turn the water on half the time nothing comes out the other half when it does it's polluted and you wouldn't use it then they're there you know then i i have to go beyond saying that it's irresponsible to say that this is almost a criminal act. mutant city

is one of the best public water supplies in the list. it still. is on the rides in this town. from untouched nature direct to the downtown the puppet's poland spring has become the top selling spring. with its population of eight million new york is the biggest beverage market on the american east coast. every year in the usa alone the beverage industry uses up eight hundred cells and tons of plastic. around to find bottles in the u.s.

end up as garbage along roadsides in the city. the shelves in the shopping centers of today are piled high with the garbage of tomorrow. new yorkers drink bottled water when they have access to the cleanest best water in the world it comes from the catskills it is the cleanest safest water you could possibly drink it's just marketing it suddenly became cool and they connected it to health and they even told us we needed eight glasses a day which by the way is not true and they and they told us that we had to always have it on our little hydrating tool that we had to have it on us at all times so i talk to kids now and they'll say i'm trying to understand what you're saying but how i can't from my house to my school without water i mean this is brilliant marketing and you know they've made tons of money telling us basically a lie. from you your head off again tonight.

i need to know the latest on the legal wrangling about the pumping stations welcome to a special edition of radioactive grass roots environmental and social justice news today's topic is on large scale corporate action and community control nestle the world's largest food and beverage company. springs in maine extracting from the state with intentions to expand. objecting to the sale of their water find themselves in positions of limited recourse within current regulatory processes. in the town of friedberg the bulldozers are in action. the battle around the second pumping station went up to the highest court in the state of maine. lost.

the company will be loading up its tankers with even. legal. i was granted only the right to limit the number of times the trips testings set this limit at thirty six thousand. this is sad sad tragic commentary on. what's legal. and what's that you know is it legal to steal is it ethically morally it. was legal and what's ethical and moral are two different things. you don't betray people you know it's like the courts that are supposed to defend you be trading in you feel you feel betrayed.

they're orchestrating the process so that they will eventually went with it they'll win because people are beat down and there they are tired of the fight or they don't even have the money to pay for the lawyers. nestle has unlimited funds you know we don't have the legal funds we don't have the the p.r. machines behind us but if you look at their message in freiburg they're good neighbor policy and you look at their message throughout the country they're all very self-serving they have a project called project wet for water education in the community school systems well all cheek they did a pilot program in freiburg isn't that interesting and then they can say look we did a pilot program for project wet for water education look we're helping the community well you're helping the community conserve water while you're taking one hundred fifty million gallons out of the community.

in the wildlife preserve the story had another ending here nestle has been defeated . the company must remove its test wells from the protected area the towns of shapley and new fields

have to plant over water in their territories to be a fundamental right. water belongs to nature and may be used by residents. long scale pump. and commercialization of the is no longer permitted. both new fields have signed to the right to local self-determination. a right which is anchored in the constitution of the usa. all of us have the same passion and once we found out that we couldn't you know work under the regulatory approach we had to find something in order to keep them out and that's how we found that we're the right space and we want to around again to educate the people about the right space and we pretty much said if you want nestle into your community then go with a regulatory approach that will regulate them if they come in fill out the permit

cross or t.'s dot their i's you can not say no to this large company and god forbid if you ever want to regulate anything stricter with them once they're ran because you will never win in court as freiburg now you have to as an instrument with choose what you would describe based organs is something. new and see. this is where shopping is board of selectmen since meetings in fact the board opposed the local women's demand to carry their fight to constitutional level so we wanted to get the right space ordinance on the town warrant where everybody would vote it well the selectmen again said no we're not going to do it and you know this is a majority of citizens they're the who elected these people so they said no we're not going to do it so they refuse the citizens petition they refused to allow the citizens to the what intuition that they gave to their own select right so there's

a little loophole in the law which laurie about where we can call our own tell me my right to vote went out the shelby water rights of all the government to the town and shout what at this time although think they were about to go weren't so indicate by raising your reality with one. hundred and fourteen votes to sixty six the women won the day for water as a fundamental right and against nestle. to shapley neighboring new field voted likewise. the wildlife preserve will remain untouched. by nearly everybody the reason why we're here today is to celebrate our victory our awesome victory and our new field in chad thank you. thank you really was a whole grassroots activity and if it's i think it's just unbelievable because many of us were never activists and it's all thanks to you when i just want to say that i'm very humble having that experience and i think of all of you as as friends and

again thank you very much thank you i. are. are. or. are. it's a small victory achieved by two small towns in the hinterland of maine but who can resist in countries where there is little democracy and even less water in pakistan or in nigeria. clean drinking water is becoming increasingly precious some can afford the luxury of bottled water. but the island's.

does the water on the planet.

i would rather as questions of people in positions of power instead of speak on

their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question more. he. is. wealthy british style. is not right for.

markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max cons or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser reports on. the week's top stories here on our moscow as calm as president obama freezes u.s. russia relations decrying what he sees as a cold war mentality following the granting of asylum to edward snowden. serious moving to the lands of the codes their villages being raised to the ground by radical jihadists who are aiming to set up an.