Karen Piper
Mubarak’s water policies contributed to the Arab Spring Protest movement
Rising water prices forced some Egyptians to draw water from polluted canals. (Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com)
The American media focused mainly on internal corruption and oppression [as causes of the Arab Spring revolution last year]. They did not report on the role of the international superpowers in influencing the Mubarak regime to privatize the country’s public land and water; they did not report, for instance, that since the 1990s the World Bank has argued that privatization enhances “efficiency” and has mandated the policy as a condition for making loans; and that in 2004 this mandate led the Egyptian government to privatize its water utilities, transforming them into corporations which were required to operate at a profit, and which thus began to practice “full cost recovery”– passing along the cost of new infrastructure through rate increases.