Article originally posted in the Rights4Water Website.
Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America (after Suriname), with an area of 176,215km2, making it about 15% smaller than Belarus and 35% larger than Greece. A total of 3,324,460 people call it home and about 1,947,604 (or roughly 57% of the population) reside in the Montevideo metro area on the Río de la Plata. In fact, its urbanization rate is over 95%, one of the highest in the world. Meanwhile (and perhaps contradictory to the previous statistic), close to 93% of its territory is apt for agriculture or pasture, and with existing cattle numbers surpassing 12.000.000 in 2014, Uruguay is world champion of cattle per capita. To reiterate: for each Uruguayan that lives in an urban centre, there are 3.6 bovines living in its vast fields.
The fertility of Uruguayan soils would likely not be possible without its vast river network, which is mainly defined by Río Uruguay and important tributaries in its basin, such as Río Cuareim and Río Negro; Río de la Plata and its tributaries (including Río Santa Lucía, which provides water for Montevideo) and others. OSE is the country’s main public water company, while DINAGUA (the National Water Directorate), along with MVOTMA (the Ministry of Housing, Land Management and the Environment) and a number of other government directorates are responsible for managing Uruguayan water resources.
Major basins of Uruguay
Privatization of management, with some exceptions, has been largely avoided due to the 2004 plebiscite promoted by the National Commission in Defence of Water and Life. The plebiscite, ratified by 64,58% of voters, resulted in a constitutional reform and the inclusion therein of the now famous Article 47. With it, the Uruguayan constitution was the first in the world to give the state sole authority over water management, making privatisation unconstitutional, explicitly stating that “users and civil society are to participate in all planning, management and control of water resources”. In addition, it declared water “a natural resource essential for life” and made access to water and sanitation “a fundamental human right”.
More than a decade later, management of water in Uruguay is now organised by river basins and hydrographic regions: they are the basis for the regional and basin councils regularly called by DINAGUA. These councils, which are meant to be tripartite, allow the participation of delegates from the government, the users (agriculture, pastures etc) and civil society, and are convened to discuss matters of water quality, regional development plans, emergency situations such as droughts, good practices etc. The inclusion of the citizenry in the management of water resources, as mentioned above, became a constitutional right as a direct result of the referendum. However, until now, these councils have been the only formal way of allowing the citizens to have any say in water management and control.
Regional council in Las Cañas, Río Negro
There have been more problems with the actual implementation of Article 47. Apparently, compartmentalisation of power over water resources has become a problem of management: “The water law (predicated by the constitutional reform) is based on management by basin; the territorial legislation law is based on management by political boundaries, by regional department”, says Carmen Sosa, current member of CNDAV and representative of the worker union of OSE in her interview to Rights4Water. “Since authorities for each river basin are so compartmentalised, we need to examine the difficulty of managing water in such a way. It was our inspiration to have a single organisation, a ministry of water, a ministry of the environment, which would bring all the powers together in a single place. For when authorities are so dispersed, when the responsibilities are so dispersed, in the end nobody’s responsible. Management is very complicated when there are ten different organisations in charge—and all with the same level of responsibility.”
Carmen Sosa
According to Mrs. Sosa, the state could make popular participation more viable by making the regional councils and the information discussed therein more accessible to the citizens. “Oftentimes the only thing people know about is the problems that they have: how their neighbour’s well dried up, or how their own water is polluted. But they do not have any information on the context and on what state the country is in for such things to happen.” Most of the councils are presently working with the most serious water-related problem the country’s facing right now: the contamination of the basins by run-off from its soy plantations and its pastures. We shall go more in-depth about this in our next article on water as a human right in Uruguay.
