Water is essential to life…

Water is essential to life. At the same time, fresh drinking water (groundwater being a prime source), is scarce. Conflicts have arisen because of this. The recent California drought is one example, but there are many.

Political conflict and difficult decisions arose between Mexico and United States in the past. When Mexico's water supply was limited, they faced a difficult choice to either honour their water supply agreement with U.S. and limit water to its citizens, or face backlash from a neighboring country. See "Water and Climate in Mexico" document for one example.

Similarities exist with water bottling companies and municipal governments or whomever has the official right to the groundwater body. Another similarity exist if the water bottling company transports their products to outside of the watershed area. Social and political conflict may ensue if this risk is not carefully considered. Historically, we (Canadians) have been cautious of treating water as a commodity. See Stratfor on "Why Canada Cannot Export its Waters" and Canadians.org fact sheet on, "How NAFTA puts our water at risk".

Secondly, when water is transported outside of its region, there can be major consequences to the hydrologic cycles. Hydrologic cycles affect both human society (agriculture, energy production, quality of life, etc. - think water nexus) and ecosystems. See Zhuang (2016) on, "Eco-environmental impact of inter-basin water transfer projects: a review" for one example.

Third, water bottling companies seem to make a high profit margin because of the price we sell the fresh water to them. See Nestle website for $3.71/million litres extracted as one example. The article from Medium is fairly eye-opening as well, despite the rough calculations.

Despite this, we would be the ones incurring negative externalities (E.g. Risk to groundwater depletion, changes to hydrologic cycle from 2nd point above, future generation considerations etc.). Some additional literature include USGS, Nature article by Mukherjee et al. (2018) and Buried Treasure - Groundwater Permitting and Pricing in Canada.

Overall, bottled water privatization via permits has enough similarities to water exports between various boundaries. This makes it a fairly high concern. Whether that concern becomes reality or not requires valid data collection, information and studies. Therefore, a moratorium on water bottling permits to complete the water quantity policy, program and science review is very much welcomed to conclude one direction or another.