Volume 8 Final Chapter Chapter 1071: Forward! International Brigade
Zelman spoke eloquently about a long list of conjectures about water strategy. After he finished speaking, the conference room had an in-depth discussion on the conjectures put forward by the Freshwater Group.
It is hard to say whether the water strategy will become a reality. It is a double-edged sword that hurts both the enemy and oneself. However, there is no doubt that the idea of water strategy will be put forward in some countries.
During the Cold War, the arms race between the two major camps had pushed military technology theory to a level that could destroy the earth hundreds of millions of times. Space and superpowers had already been studied, so how could we ignore the fresh water that we can see, touch, and rely on every day?
Thousands of years ago, water attacks and poisoning the enemy's drinking water sources were already important means of defeating the enemy. Today, modern people's methods are only more diverse and more imaginative than those of the ancients.
Putting aside whether the water strategy will come true, the earth's water resources are not optimistic, and the foreign investment in water companies mentioned by Zelman is actually happening.
At present, the drinking water problem of the general public in China is not optimistic. Only cities have water supply from water plants, while the vast rural areas still mainly rely on deep wells and water towers built by village collectives for water supply, or carry water from self-dug wells, streams, and ponds.
In cities, tap water usually has the problem of insufficient water pressure. As long as you live in a higher place, sucking the faucet is a common thing to do. Many residents living on high floors of buildings have had the experience of cursing the residents downstairs for always using water, resulting in no water coming out of their own faucets.
In rural areas, there is a problem that does not attract much attention, which is the excessive exploitation of groundwater, which leads to a series of hazards. The second is the hygiene problem. Almost every household has a water tank, one for storing water and the other for sedimentation. If you open the lid of the water tank and take a look inside, you can usually see red nematodes, and sometimes even leeches.
Children are often told by their parents not to drink raw water because it will cause diarrhea.
Water projects require large investments and have a long payback period. Domestic water resource allocation is too much of a burden for municipalities due to the vast geographical area and large population, both in terms of personnel and funds. It is a better solution to open up the water resource market and allow water companies with expansion capabilities and a certain scale to cultivate large-scale cross-regional water groups through mergers, overall acquisitions, cross-holdings and other forms.
As a result, last year, the French General Water Company entered the country and acquired a stake in a water plant in Tiangang, opening a new chapter for foreign investment in the domestic water supply sector. Another French company, Suez, has also been eyeing the market and is ready to enter at any time.
[General Water Company, which will later be renamed Vivendi, is the parent company of Blizzard and Ubisoft. Around 2000, it spun off its water supply and waste disposal business and other public utility services into Vivendi Environment, which was later renamed Veolia Environment. ×× Veolia Water Co., Ltd., with a blue background and white letters, does anyone recognize the sign? This paragraph is off-topic, from a God's perspective, Nan Yi doesn't know. ]
It is hard to say whether General Water Company had other purposes besides pure commercial interests when entering the domestic market. From the perspective of commercial interests alone, the returns from investing in water plants are still good.
For the Nan family, which needs to make risky portfolio investments and try to avoid a collective collapse of investments, large investment scale and long payback period are not big disadvantages. As long as the policy continuity of the target country of investment is good and there is no two-level policy reversal during the cost recovery period, the funds can be invested.
The best business in this world is a monopoly business. As long as you monopolize a certain field, the service quality can reach the lower limit, the profit can touch the upper limit, and the frog in the boiling water can be boiled. Between the time when consumers complain and the time when they take actual resistance actions, you can continue to make weird operations, and the price will keep changing, sometimes it will become an S, sometimes it will become a B.
A small adjustment of two cents upwards, or a substantial price reduction of two cents downwards, as long as the consumers can be fooled by the tricks, a lot of money can be made. In the end, consumers will even sing "Thank You" with tears in their eyes.
There is no capital that does not like monopoly business. In order to obtain monopoly profits, capital will be almost crazy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the wind of free economy blew strongly from Britain and the United States to the world. Free economic theory emphasizes that efficiency is the core of the economy. To maximize efficiency, the best way is to marketize and privatize it.
In the mid-1980s, the privatization trend in Europe became unstoppable and soon became the mainstream in the world.
A guy named Michael Hudson once said: "The liberalization vigorously promoted by the United States is not to promote real innovation or development. Its interest is not in creating new wealth, but in taking over the wealth of the people in the Third World in the name of liberalization, such as resources and real estate, or seizing the monopoly of public services such as water, electricity, and transportation in order to make huge profits."
If this guy didn't have someone behind him, Nan Yi would have sent someone to warn him not to meddle in other people's business.
Liberalization is not only a feast for capital, but also a feast for power monetization for the powerful aristocrats in some countries. Families that are showing a trend of decline and for whom it is no longer possible to pass on power from generation to generation may take this opportunity to carry out deeply hidden privatization of power monetization while continuing to use the cloak of public ownership in certain areas.
Under the influence of the wave of liberalization, a new concept has emerged: anything can be sold as a commodity, even some aspects of human life that were once considered sacred and inviolable, such as health, the right to education, culture and tradition, genetic code and seeds, and even natural resources including air and water.
It is hard to say whether the trend of liberalization has reached the water sector due to the influence of the "new concept", but it is certain that it has been influenced by the World Bank.
The World Bank has always been an active promoter of water privatization. Economists trained by the World Bank have put forward a scientific and rigorous statement: the root cause of the world's water crisis today is that water is too cheap, almost free, and as a result, a large amount of water is wasted by people. People will cherish water if the water price truly reflects the cost, and this must be regulated through market mechanisms.
The "liberal" economists also took this opportunity to tailor a set of economic freedom policies for monopoly capital, which a man named John Williamson named the "Washington Consensus." This consensus was favored by the International Monetary Fund, which has been acting as a voluntary promoter and has spared no effort to promote it to countries around the world.
Seeing that the “international” was alone, the World Bank sang “Forward! International Brigade” and held a photo of Marina Ginesta in its hand, echoing the International Monetary Fund and never stopping promoting privatization and marketization.
In the conference room, Nan Yi and his group discussed some theoretical matters. They were not in a hurry to discuss how freshwater investment should be carried out in the water sector. Instead, they discussed "should having drinking water be regarded as a human right or just a human need?"
If it is just human needs, it is best to be met by the market and private enterprises. Eighty years ago, "people-oriented" was already one of Nan's important principles. Meeting "all human needs" has always been the noble cause that Nan has been striving for, and the small matter of drinking water is naturally included.
