I wrote this ten years ago. So I'm late? BFD! Since I did not blog then I couldn't post it so I have been awaiting the tenth anniversary of the 3WWF.
You will be surprised to learn that some things have not changed.
No, I am not at the World Wrestling Federation, or the World Wildlife Fund. I can't travel all the way to Japan for the Third World Water Forum and not file a report. There are just too many good stories. By the way, in case you're wondering, "Third" modifies "World Water Forum", not just "World" (trust me, there's a difference, and this has been noted by a number of speakers). The first of these was in Marrakech (Crosby, Stills and Nash opened the show) and the second one was in The Hague (Shocking Blue opened that one). This one is being held in three cities, Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka, with Kyoto being the main venue. Makes it fun trying to hit the sessions you want when you have to take bullet trains to three cities. By the way, the opening act at the 3WWF was Kofi and The Dreamers.
There is the feeling among some that the same old stuff will emerge from the 3WWF and nothing concrete will get done. For example, for the second time, the Ministerial Declaration made no mention of access to water as a basic human right (A no-brainer, right? Remember, these are ministers.), although it came close. It also called for more private sector financing to solve the world's water problems. This latter statement angered activists and NGOs, but in fairness, the ministers did call on governments to protect the interests of the public, especially the poor, and to have better receptions.
The UN doesn't run the WWFs; the World Water Council does, an international water policy think tank. Activists and NGOs claim the WWC is a tool of groups like the World Bank, the IMF and multinational corporations. According to some, this could be the last WWF. We all thought the next one would be in Montreal in 2006, but the Canadians don't want it. Someone suggested DC, but the USA is silent and keeping a low profile. Other possibilities are Mexico City, Brazil (Rio?) and Cairo. The Japanese government spent $25,000,000 on this meeting; the Dutch spent $17,000,000 on 2WWF.
I actually have to write a legitimate report on this meeting for the National Ground Water Association and for one of its newsletters. The NGWA is paying part of my way here. It will be really difficult to be serious, but I will have to make the effort. I am here as a representative of the NGWA, UNM, and as President of an NGO, so I can wear whichever hat suits me at the moment. I've never had so much fun.
The Japanese are incredible hosts - efficient and gracious. There must be one to help every attendee. I find it interesting that the Japanese are so artistic, yet capable of such amazing engineering feats. You'd have to have great engineering to put 127,000,000 people with a high standard of living in a small, rugged country prone to natural disasters. I tip my hat to them.
Lots of bigwigs will be here. Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a speech. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe was supposed to make an appearance but canceled, because the most expensive hotel room his entourage could find was only $2,000 per night, far below his usual standard. Jacques Chirac was slated to address the opening session but sent his apologies because of pressing issues -- his mistress was threatening to leave him - so he sent a video and one of his minions instead. Unfortunately, the wrong video was sent (it was the blackmail video from his paramour) and it proved to be quite entertaining, if you catch my drift. The opening session was interesting - it was for VIPs, by invitation only, so most of "us" were not able to attend because we were unimportant. A number of people noted how this kind of set the tone for the conference about who counts and who doesn't. Granted, the Kyoto Conference Hall could not hold us all, but they could have held a drawing or picked some of us at random to attend if we chose to. But we did see the festivities on the HDTV monitors, but voted to switch to the top-rated show "Karaoke Klub" after a few minutes of the self-congratulatory drivel. Actually, the organizers wanted to prevent some of the activists from disrupting the ceremonies, which happened last time.
But the big news is that the North Koreans may make an appearance. One of their official planes was at the Osaka International Airport. It was a propeller plane - I never knew rubber bands could be so big. Seriously, the North Koreans are terribly misunderstood. They are not warmongers, nor are they anti-social. The reason they keep to themselves and are so cranky and belligerent is simple: their men are terribly self-conscious because they have really bad haircuts. Yes, take a look at Kim Jong Il the next time you can. Would you go out much if you had his haircut? But this is not their fault; a few years ago it was discovered that North Koreans lack the gene that enables a person to give good haircuts to men. You remember one of my Vienna Reports (go back and read Vienna Report 7 now) in which I described my encounter with Azerbaijan's Minister of the Interior, who had a really bad haircut. Turns out that Azerbaijan barbers were trained in North Korea. Realizing that Mother Nature had dealt them a bad hand, the North Koreans recently asked the Japanese if they could borrow a few thousand barbers. But the Japanese are understandably reluctant to do so because the last time the North Koreans "borrowed" some Japanese, they forgot to return them for about 30 years. And when they did, they had bad haircuts!
There are all kinds of sessions here. Water and Cities. Water and Rural Areas. Water and People. Water and Ecosystems. Water and Food. Water and (fill in the blank). Not to be morbid, but we're missing a session on "Water As A Weapon". The North Koreans could be the keynoters, as they have apparently built a big dam above Seoul in the Han River basin, and have, from time to time, "suggested" that they might blow it up and float Seoul out to sea. Maybe I will propose such a session for the Fourth World Water Forum.
I met a Welsh couple at the Osaka airport who were coming to Kyoto to meet their son and his wife. I asked them which hotel they were staying at in Kyoto. They said they were going to wait till they were there to get a place. "In your dreams", I said, and then related how 10,000+ water wonks were descending upon the Imperial City, sucking up all kinds of hotel rooms. When they realized that I was one of those 10,000, they recoiled in horror, muttering words with eight syllables and two vowels, and decided to stay in Osaka.
In The Daily Yomiuri, an English-language paper here, one of the stories had the headline "Cracker Goes Online at Largest Venezuelan Refinery". I first thought, "What's Jimmy Carter doing on the Internet at a Venezuelan oil refinery?", but then realized the story referred to a cracking facility that had been under repair at an oil refinery in Venezuela. The paper also had a story on the latest woes of Dennis Kozlowski, the disgraced former CEO of Tyco International. You remember him - busted for misusing corporate funds to buy personal items, one of which was a $15,000 dog umbrella holder (could I make that up?). When you buy any kind of umbrella holder for more than a few bucks, that is God's way of saying "You make too much money." Let's hope Dennis is soon making license plates at a facility near you.
My first night in Japan was spent at the Holiday Inn at the Osaka International Airport. This represented a first for me in that I had never seen a toilet with electronic controls at the side (the Japanese are serious about toilets). Most of the instructions were in Japanese, but there were a few English ones. One set said to operate the controls ONLY when sitting on the toilet. One switch said "High Pressure" - that's all. So I'm going to throw a switch that says "High Pressure" while sitting on a toilet?
You all recall that I have occasionally used these epistles to poke fun at the Royals (no, Mike, the British ones, not the Kansas City variety). Well, I found some new Royals to lambaste - the Dutch versions. Seems that Princess Margarita (yes, she is named after the drink, a number of which were responsible for her birth) is miffed at her royal relatives for snubbing her husband Edwin de Roy van Zuydewijn de Doofus and ruining his business (he headed the Dutch office of Jacoby & Meyers, the divorce and personal-injury lawyers). So she has decided to "tell all" about the royal foibles, breaking with protocol. She claims her grandfather, Prince Bernhard, husband of beloved former Queen Juliana, had a 20-year affair with his secretary, Cocky Gilles (I did not make up that name), and that several royal family members have strong liking for alcohol (obviously, her parents do, and it should be apparent why), and one of them even gave the universal digital symbol of displeasure to some commoners. She has caused such a fuss that the Dutch prime minister took a break from his crossword puzzles to defend the royal family in public (why would he do it in private?). I will try to keep you updated on this important story.
I'm now watching a Japanese variety show featuring karaoke performances by audience members. The current group is doing the Platters' memorable "Only You" in blackface. Perhaps it is I who have had too many margaritas.
I went to a 3WWF session entitled "Protecting the Global Water Commons". It was an "open microphone" session, where people got up and spent five minutes describing their fight against some gargantuan entity, invariably The World Bank, IMF, or some large company that had polluted, privatized, or had attempted to privatize, their water supply. One irony: a man from South Africa related that under apartheid his water was free, but now that he lives in a "democracy", "his people", the ANC party, had privatized his water company without consulting the people and now the company has shut off his water for non-payment of his water bill. Go figure…..There were some interesting USA examples: the fight against the Cadiz Corporation, which was planning to pump ground water from beneath the Mojave Desert and sell it to SoCal, the Detroit water system, Nestlé pumping ground water in Michigan, etc. Some of the stories were really quite moving and inspirational, but it was apparent to me that most of the speakers could not distinguish between the actual cost of the water itself and the cost of distributing it.
Contrast the above session with the CEO Panel, a group of mostly OWGs and MAWGs ('Old White Guys' and 'Middle-Aged White Guys'; also disparagingly called "suits") created in 2000 at the Second WWF in The Hague. No women were present on the panel, except the ubiquitous Japanese young women who kept coffee and tea cups filled. Major corporations and organizations are represented on the CEO Panel. The panel reported on its major project since 2WWF, a video for the children of the world describing the importance of water. This was a mammoth undertaking, made possible only by the prodigious resources, collective creativity, and talent pool of the constituent organizations: the World Bank, IMF, Suez, Thames Water, Vivendi, Unilever, Heineken, Procter and Gamble, et al. It is indeed a tribute to the ingenuity and dedication of these benevolent organizations that they forsook their very own profits so that the creation of this remarkable piece could be realized. I have seen it, and I have been transformed. As one wag said, perhaps for 4WWF the panel will create a video to educate themselves.
If you love buzz phrases such as "Weapons of mass destruction" you'd be in hog heaven at the 3WWF. My favorite is "Public-private partnership" (PPP), which translates as: "The public sector supplies the money and assumes the risk, and the private sector takes the profits". Then there's the similar one "Private Sector Participation" (PSP), which means "Count us in if there's money to be made". Or how about "Mainstreaming poverty reduction" ("Helping the poor"); or "Sustainable development" ("Will I have a job tomorrow?"); "Facilitate and enable users to access information" ("Make data available"); "We need a holistic, integrated approach" ("Everyone must work together"); and the favorite of donor organizations, "This will help create an enabling environment" ("We will be flying around the world in business class").
The other day I was accosted by a Japanese TV reporter and after she spent 10 minutes apologizing and begging my pardon for disturbing my reverie, she interviewed me about guess-what and you-know-who. If I don't make it back into the country you will know why.
We all remember the infamous "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Well, according to an unnamed State Department source (after some sake, Asahi beer and Polaroid pictures), the original "axis of evil" was Iraq and Iran. Someone noted that it would look real bad if we just had Muslim countries, so North Korea was tossed in. We all know how they reacted to their inclusion in such an exclusive club.
There are a lot of one-trick ponies here, and not all of them are CEOs. Activist groups abound, and use every opportunity to pillory some organization, usually the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, or privatization (we academics are immune to this criticism, as we are perceived as being unable to do anything, good or bad). To listen to some people, the World Bank is the embodiment of pure evil. One woman pitched rainwater harvesting whenever she could. I've seen her at three different sessions, giving the same pitch during the Q & A, regardless of the session topic. Incompressible flow in estuarine environments? Not a problem - she'll tie in rainwater harvesting. During my session, in which I discussed arsenic and fluoride in ground water (sponsored by Procter and Gamble's Crest Toothpaste), she responded by launching into her pitch, oblivious to the pleas of the session chair to limit her comments. God bless her.
A number of countries had displays here - the ones you think of when you think of "water assistance" - Sweden, The Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, USA, UK, Canada, Switzerland. I have also never seen so many glossy publications - literally hundreds of them.
On 21 March I had an interesting experience. About 300 of us were selected to meet with 200 ministerial representatives in a dialogue designed to answer two sets of questions. My group of 250 was assigned "What are the three biggest challenges that must be overcome to address Water and Poverty?" We sat at small tables (no more than 8 people) and brainstormed, with a facilitator annoying us. The Thai ambassador to Japan was seated next to me at my table, along with a Canadian, Pakistani, Japanese, and Ugandan. Would you believe we all knew the words to "Take It Easy"? Probably not. Our other ministerial reps, from Gabon and Brazil, were no-shows and went straight to the reception. Mr. Ambassador looked like he wanted to be someplace else. The session went fairly well, although after a bit, it degenerated into polemics. The reception was good, and a great place to pick up scuttlebutt, a Japanese delicacy related to cuttlefish. I did get on TV - a friend told me my table was one of the ones shown on the evening news. He said I was waving my arms, so I must have been talking. He also said the small Asian man sitting next to me looked frightened. So what are the three biggest challenges? I don't know; we generated 54, many of which were not challenges but political statements (e.g., "George Bush spending billions to subjugate the Iraqi people to secure their oil") that served little purpose. Sometimes I felt that complaints of "nothing will get done at 3WWF" became self-fulfilling prophecies.
The most memorable and funniest moments occurred almost simultaneously. On the afternoon of 20 March, several of the huge HDTV monitors were tuned to CNN and the unfolding war in Iraq. Many of us stood transfixed, watching the bombardment, in that eerie green light, in real time. Not a peep from anyone - silence. Then, after a few minutes, CNN replayed President Bush's address to the nation in which he announced the invasion. A woman behind me uttered to no one in particular, "My God, he does look like Alfred E. Newman!"
How can I top that? Time to go; it's 2013.
Happy April Fools' Day! !Feliz el primer de abril!
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