Social Reproduction of Water in a Bottle: Contamination, Commodification and Debt in Mexico
Channel: Institute of Development Studies
Date: 2021-04-21

What happens when the provision of safe public drinking water is forgone and left to the market in a context defined by transnational corporations, corruption, deregulation, financialisation and debt? What is the price the market will bear when rivers, lakes and aquifers are too contaminated to drink? 

Utilizing ethnographic case studies in five regions of Mexico, framed in an expanded Social Reproduction Theory approach, this research shows the consequences at the level of the household, highlighting the industrial town of El Salto, Mexico where families live in social housing along the banks of the nation’s most polluted river and are completely reliant on bottled water for drinking, cooking and frequently, even bathing. Mexico’s bottled water market has grown to lead the world in per capita consumption. 

Transnational bottled water companies have referred to this development as the “Mexican model”, yet surprisingly, on the ground we find that as much as 80% of the market is controlled by frequently informal and poorly run small water providers.

Speaker:

Joshua Greene recently completed his doctoral degree at the University of Geneva, presenting the thesis What Happens When Water is Commodified? Case Study Mexico: Dominant Movements and Alternative Discourses in the Access to Water Landscape. He has returned to western Mexico where he is currently carrying out ethnographic research in areas confronting extreme environmental contamination and violent criminal organization, examining issues of post-rural development and the 6th Extinction.

Chair:

Phil Mader