Pandora's Bottle

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According to Clarke, the massive bottling operations of the leading water brands also amount to a form of de facto privatization. Municipal water utilities often charge bottlers preferential rates. And two of the most popular brands in the United States, Coca-Cola's Dasani and Pepsi's Aquafina, are nothing more than tap water, drawn from municipal supplies, filtered, and sold at a huge profit.

These sorts of tactics make for a thriving business: Consumers are spending more than $100 billion a year on bottled water, reports the Earth Policy Institute (www.earth-policy.org). At the same time, water shortages near bottling plants have been reported everywhere from villages in India to towns in Wisconsin, Texas, New Hampshire, and Florida, as companies extract water to sell elsewhere. This as the United Nations tries to convince its members to double their spending on water sanitation, to $30 billion annually, in order to halve the number of people who will go without safe drinking water by 2015.

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