It's No Longer Enough to Regulate Corporate Greed: The Global Water Crisis Demands a Paradigm Shift

When it comes to water, the corporate green economy is about using the environmental crisis to further entrench corporate rights and access to scarce water resources.

Gandhi said it best when he said, "the Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not enough to satisfy every man's greed."

This is truer of the world's freshwater supply now than ever before. There is no shortage of water for the needs of people and the planet, yet we are rapidly running out of clean water because there aren't sufficient amounts to serve the insatiable greed of a small number of powerful corporations whose interests dominate the global economic agenda.

If there was any illusion that Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, could restrain the runaway capitalism that has generated the environmental crisis plaguing our ever-shrinking planet, it has already been extinguished. Rio+20 is shaping up to be yet another platform for corporations seeking unfettered growth at a time when the planet is telling us we need to scale down and change course.

Dominated by corporate interests, the dialogues leading to Rio+20 have been about packaging the quest for economic growth and market expansion into a new brand of corporate environmentalism, and the still fairly vague proposals for a so-called "green economy" are being met with fierce opposition from social movements around the world.