by Tom Blair
Columnist
In a recent meeting of giant heads from around the globe, the discussion was about what could cause our most imminent “world ending” event. Could it be war, food shortage, natural disaster, earthquake, meteor or floods?
On each of these experts list, lack of clean water was near the top. Studies reveal that by the year 2030, two thirds of the world will be lacking access to clean drinking water. Who controls it and where is it going?
Well, whenever you treat a product as a commodity, where the price of it is dependant on supply and demand, you end up with corporate control. And, it’s happening right now! With a good deal of draught in our country (35 states) it really becomes a clear and present danger to all of us.
Currently, bottled water is more expensive than gas and in 2007 America alone bought 29 billion bottles of water and it has increased dramatically since then.
Bottled water has become a financial empire.
Nestle is one of the biggest bottled water companies and has other names on some of the bottles, but they are Mr. Big in the industry. A Swiss company comes into small rural areas and basically does water mining. In most states, ground comes under something called “Absolute Domain.” Kind of like, whoever has the biggest pumps gets the most water.
Many of these companies just dig a well and pump away, sometimes exhausting the entire area underground water supply and don’t even pay taxes on what they get. Most water companies set up in a town, fill bottles with water and sell it all over the world at a huge profit.
A town in South Caroline was in the middle of a draught. Their water reservoir was drying up and the people were on water restrictions, while Pepsi company continued using 400,000 gallons of water a day, plastic bottling municipal water to sell in stores everywhere.
Atlanta Georgia had a similar problem involving Coca-Cola taking 118 million gallons of water out of their draught stricken lake. There are many more water companies and the problem is growing at an alarming rate and there are not enough laws to protect our water supply.
Cities, counties and federal dollars are being spent to clean up lakes and streams and the water belongs to the people, but OUR public water is being taken from the ground like oil companies do and they are making a fortune on one of our basic necessities of life; water.
Please, try to learn more about this problem and drink more tap water. That’s what you are buying and I believe the plastic bottle is FAR more dangerous than tap water.
Tom “Road” Blair
Website: www.tomroadblair.com