International Expo "Water and Sustainable Development"
Agora
Social protest by all citizens: key to change
Ricardo Petrella, sociologist and founder of the “Lisbon Group”, is a man ahead of his time as back in 1996 he wrote “The Water Manifesto” and now, 12 years later, he has come to Expo Zaragoza to present a “Water Manifesto” for the XXI century.
“Things are getting worse: water is being capitalised and is becoming the blue gold of the multi-national companies” is one of the accusations by this student who has seen how the political paradigms of the century have changed in favour of others that are only of interest to the richest people. One example is hunger: where just a few years ago there was talk of eradicating poverty, now it is all about reducing poverty. Another example, according to Petrella, is “safety”: it is the main idea in great powers, such as the United States, a “safety” that only boosts the survival of a model of growth that is utterly unsustainable.
“People are no longer humans but are now resources”, according to this expert – we have lost our human values and now we are only analysed in terms of our abilities as workers. A person is useful as long as s/he is generating wealth.
In a more positive manner, he declared that climate change is an opportunity for making the political classes aware because, unfortunately, the UN has lost its power in the face of these “dominant classes”.
He also commented on the case of Global Compact. This was an initiative that came out of the United Nations and invited the large companies to formulate solutions in the matter of water. The current president is the president of Coca Cola. Each bottle of this soft drink consumes some 10 litres of freshwater and they produce 137,000 million bottles per year. This is what he defined as “coca cola-isation”. “And the same thing with Nestlé, Danone, Unilever…”, Petrella continued.
Faced with this panorama, the writer has defended the place of protest and social mobilisation as being the right way to bring about changes.
However, the sociologist left the Agora at the Water Tribune saying that the future was still to be written and he provided a quote from Victor Hugo: “When you open a school, you close a prison”.
