There is no doubt that the developed world is hooked on gadgets. There is the ipad, the ipod, the Kindle, the smart phone and too many others too numerous to mention. The question is is this proliferation of gadgets really going to save the world, the environment, the planet. Or is the proliferation of gadgets as a world changer a pipe dream in the mind of some CEOs? In the August 19, 2010 edition of the San Diego Union, Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, says this: "I think the thing that excites most Qualcomm employees is the idea that we can literally change the world with our ideas because we can get those ideas and put them into the hands of 100 million people in a matter of three months." Well exactly how Mr. Jacobs intends to change the world isn't specified. Another app for the iphone perhaps?
I can see how an African wife that has to walk eight miles each day to a water source and then haul water home could be enabled to talk to her family via cell phone during her long and arduous trek. However, what might improve her lot even more would be a source of fresh water in her village so that she wouldn't have to make the trek in the first place. The infrastructure necessary to guarantee each of the 6.7 billion people of the world a supply of clean water close to their home is not high tech. Nor can another gadget bring it about. It's not so exciting to think about the provision of clean water and adequate sanitation facilities to everyone, but that would do more to reduce child mortality and water borne disease throughout the world. On the one hand you have a CEO of a major Fortune 400 corporation proposing that the proliferation of gadgets is exactly what the world needs now. On the other you have the reality that what the world really needs in order to reduce disease and drudgery is basic infrastructure. Which is it?
While Qualcomm stands to make money from the proliferation of cell phones and other smart gadgets, who stands to make money off of the provision of clean water and adequate sanitation? They tried the privatization of water in Bolivia, and the result was that the desperately poor people who really needed it could not afford it. This is what happened when water was privatized:
Etched deeply into the granite walls just inside the entrance of the World Bank headquarters in Washington are the words, "Our dream, a world free of poverty." Earlier this month in Bolivia, the citizens of South America's poorest country sent the bank a message once again that the poor aren't too keen on the part of that dream that involves handing their water over to foreign corporations.
On January 10 the citizens of El Alto took to the streets en masse to demand that their water system, privatized in 1997 under World Bank pressure, be returned to public hands. Three days later Bolivia's president issued a decree canceling the water concession, led by the French water giant Suez, and an arm of the World Bank itself. The El Alto water revolt follows, by five years exactly, the now famous revolt against water privatization in Cochabamba, in which a company controlled by the Bechtel Corporation was ousted from the country.
Together, these two revolts over water should send an important message to officials at the World Bank, if they are willing to hear it.
The people of Bolivia did not choose to privatize their public water systems. That choice was forced on them, as it has been in many poor nations around the world, when the World Bank made privatization an explicit condition of aid in the mid-1990s. Poor countries such as Bolivia, which rely heavily on foreign assistance for survival, are not in much of a position to say no to such pressures.
World Bank water officials claim all the best intentions when they make the push for water privatization. The bank has argued that poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped to run public water systems efficiently. Handing water over to foreign corporations, the bank has said, opens the door to needed investment and skilled management.
However, to borrow a phrase, the road to bad public policy is often paved with good intentions. Bolivia's experience with bank-forced water privatization is a striking example of the yawning gap between World Bank theory and how things actually work in the real world for the poor families who have to live with the results.
In Cochabamba five years ago, the water contract with Bechtel and the Abengoa Corporation of Spain paved the way for rate increases of double and more for poor water users. Those steep and sudden price hikes, needed in part to finance the 16 percent annual profit demanded by the companies, led to citywide protests and eventually to Bechtel's and Abengoa's ouster.The Bolivian government declared martial law in an effort to save the companies' contra ct, leaving one teenage boy dead and more than 100 people wounded.
In El Alto the chief complaint about the Suez/World Bank privatization is that it left tens of thousands of poor families with no access to water whatsoever. Fortunately, no one was killed or wounded in this latest water revolt, a credit to President Carlos Mesa, who agreed that the water contract was inadequate and approved its cancellation.
It's true that gadgets have marginally improved the lives in the developed world for people who already have a considerable amount of wealth and who have adequate supplies of fresh water and adequate sanitation. For such people a new gadget is like another new toy to put under the Christmas tree. But for a CEO like Mr. Jacobs to be so misguided and out of touch with the world situation to state that another gadget will "change the world", shows a lack of understanding and empathy for anyone except the class of people that can afford to buy the gadgets that Qualcomm produces. In the US today 15% of the people live in poverty. I don't think they represent the market for the next "smart" cell phone. And who exactly are the 100 million people that Mr. Jacobs can put Qualcomm's ideas into the hands of? They sure aren't the people that are living on a dollar a day or have to walk miles to get water that may or may not be contaminated.
The problems facing the world today can't be solved by the proliferation of gadgets. And basic infrastructure can be better provided by governments and not private corporate capitalism. It would be less arrogant if Mr. Jacobs had said something like "we can't solve the world's problems with our technology but we can make life marginally better for the world's affluent." That kind of a statement would not only be more accurate, but more in an appropriate spirit of humility.
