Water (Alejandro Alcoba)

It kind of goes without saying that water is a basic human right. But the unfortunate reality is that much of the global south exists without potable water. The responsibility falls to the Global North to provide them with the means to clean their water supplies, but it’s a task at which we often fail. In fact, we often make the situation worse. Take the lake of Naivasha, for example. This Kenyan lake is responsible for growing many of the roses sold in Europe, if not all of them. The truth is that these flowers are very water intensive, and each year they suck up more and more of that lake’s water. It is now expected that that lake has a life expectancy of only 5 to 10 more years. Another situation to consider is that in Africa, in which many of the villages don’t have clean water, and so the women of the village are sent to go fetch water miles and miles away. Each year, they must travel further and further, and it is this water that they must carry back to their families, to feed them, and also to clean. Each year though, because the water grows scarcer and scarcer, they often come back with less and less water and what happens is the women are put through unfortunate situations in which they are beaten and worse sometimes. Consider also India. Many villages in India don’t have any access to clean water. It is very common for entire families to bathe in dirty rivers and lakes filled with dirty excrement and chemical spill off from factories that are often nearby. None of this seems responsible and it seems as though the global north are not doing their necessary job If the Global North doesn’t step up soon, the clean and potable water that is required to survive, and that we see in such abundance, and is often considered a basic human right, will become less and less of a right in the South.