On 2/25/2021 1:08 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
^... Although some urban-rural manure trade continued until the early
twentieth century, it declined sharply after 1815. It became less
attractive to buyers and sellers because large cities produced far
more excrement than nearby farmers could use, leaving the middlemen
with unsaleable surpluses; because the increasing distances between
cities and farms drove up transport times and costs; and because the
growing popularity of flush toilets in the homes of the rich diluted
the night soil and often sluiced it directly into city sewers.
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/cesspools-sewage-and-social-murder/
Thanks Louis, this essay is really excellent and enlightening. Wish I'd
seen it earlier; I try to get to /MROnline /every day but sometimes not.
Actually, I was extending my critique of the neoliberal loo a few
weeks ago for another obscure academic publication, ugh. From that,
here's an excerpt updating Ian's London observations to other sites a
century on, with a hero of Third World sanitation, Abel Wolman, who's
easy to contrast with the likes of Gates:
***
In late 2019, to the delight ofcomedians, the world was treated to a
critique of neoliberal sanitation managerialism by the most powerful man
on earth, Donald Trump. Economist Stephen Mihm (2019) explains,
As the president made clear, the toilets of old were far superior to
today’s appliances, which leave red-blooded Americans “flushing toilets
10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.” While the president did not
make it entirely clear who was responsible for our downfall, suspicion
naturally gravitates towards liberals and their high-efficiency toilet
regulations… state and local governments embraced 1.6 gallon-per-flush
toilets in the 1980s. Builders happily installed code-compliant toilets,
little caring for whether they worked well. After all, the regulation
made no distinction between compliance and quality. Inevitably, many
low-flow toilets became known for their failure to flush.
Free market fundamentalists began complaining about what the/Wall Street
Journal /memorably described as “toilet totalitarianism.”
Environmentalists rightly retorted that some models on the market did a
bang-up job despite using very little water. But what got lost in these
exchanges was the simple fact that high-quality low-flow toilets came
with higher costs, and builders in apartments and subdivisions had
little direct incentive to install them. And homeowners with older,
conventional toilets had no reason to change their ways: Water was as
cheap as ever. Only the proudly planet-conscious would bother to get rid
of their old bowl for a pricey Swedish number.
This was the problem in the North, but in the South, the dilemma was
whether to give poor people /any /water in their toilets. A group of
sanitation specialists and businesses known as the Toilet Board
Coalition was founded in 2014, and by 2019 it was chaired by executives
from the multinational corporation Unilever and Swiss fragrance
manufacturer Ferminich. The objective was to take forward Dublin’s
‘economic good’ concept:
The new sanitation economy presents vast potential for global economic
growth, while addressing one of the most urgent challenges of our time,
notably achieving access to improved safely-managed sanitation. It
monetises toilet provision, products and services, biological resources,
data and information, to provide benefits across the economy and
society… The total market for construction of individual and community
toilets, deployment of portable toilets, maintenance, repair and
cleaning is estimated to be worth $14 billion in 2017 and could more
than double to $31 billion by 2021 in India (Toilet Board Coalition 2017).
This new logic of for-profit, neoliberal water and sanitation
managerialism decisively emerged from the early 1990s. In 2019 it gained
greater momentum in South Africa when the Gates Foundation donated funds
to the Water Research Commission to aid the Reinvent the Toilet project.
But it is in sharp contrast to a genuinely modernising, /developmental
/tradition in which ‘water is a public good,’ as I was taught during
doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Geography
and Environmental Engineering (DoGEE). At the time I was enrolled in
DoGEE, from 1985-93, Reaganomics was hitting hard. The Volcker Shock,
comprised of unprecedented Federal Reserve interest rate increases from
1979-81, had shifted resources from the real economy into speculative
assets, kicking off what we now term the ‘financialisation’ epoch. Third
World countries suffered unprecedented foreign debt crises and state
fiscal austerity imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund. There was then, nevertheless, a profound commitment in DoGEE to
maintaining the traditions of departmental founder Abel Wolman. The
homegrown Baltimore civil engineer had his professional debut in 1914,
and spent the subsequent 75 years until his death introducing
properly-chlorinated water supplies and promoting wastewater treatment
in even the poorest urban slums especially in South and Southeast Asia,
saving countless millions of lives.
In launching the field of Third World urban water and sanitation, Wolman
confirmed a straightforward solution to what appeared as even more
overwhelming financing and fiscal constraints. Initially, the bankers
Wolman approached when he worked in Latin America would not make credit
available for his life-saving water purification and treatment
strategies, because although these interventions represented public
goods of enormous merit, the infrastructure did not offer bankers
sufficient returns on investment. In Wolman’s 1965 /Scientific American
/article “The Metabolism of Cities,” he recalled, “a few years ago, when
loans for waterworks had to be paid off in six to 12 years, the total
value of external bank loans made to South American countries for water
supply and sewerage projects was less than $100,000 in a six-year
period.” This changed radically after “bankers were encouraged to extend
the repayment period to 28 or 30 years. Today [1965] the total value of
bank loans made to South American countries for waterworks and sewerage
systems has surpassed $660 million” (Wolman 1965:167).
Such reforms to banking were just one aspect of a more expansive version
of developmental finance in that modernising era (Bond 1998). In
addition, Wolman showed repeatedly how consideration of public health
improvements – integrated into project design as a benefit, to set off
costs – would logically induce improved water and sanitation standards,
as a matter of sound public policy. At the time, a more
tightly-integrated form of state management permitted centralised health
and water departments to directly interface. This was in stark contrast
to subsequent years, following the neoliberal passive revolution, during
which decentralised, excessively fragmented modes of urban management
began to stress the profit-centred (and at minimum ‘full cost recovery’)
role of any particular department.
For example, within many municipalities, newly-commercialised water
units work with a dangerous incentive: disconnecting non-paying
residents, without care for the public health costs incurred by the city
and society as a whole.[1] <#_edn1>The latter institutional strategy is
emblematic of neoliberal social policy; in South Africa, disconnections
affected more than 1.5 million people annually as municipal water was
commercialised during the late 1990s, leading to sharp resistance
especially in Soweto (Bond 2002, McDonald and Pape 2002, McDonald and
Reuters 2004). (By the early 2020s, the electricity parastatal Eskom’s
financial crisis was so far advanced that entire sections of Soweto were
disconnected by the firm. The vast majority of the township’s 1.3
million mainly working-class residents had been illegally connected, but
the cut-offs also affected the 15 percent who paid regularly.)
As Wolman discovered, the political-economic context is vital. The
metabolism of money was just as important to the construction of water
systems as was political will, in a Latin America whose 1950s-70s
Keynesianism thrived, albeit unevenly and always at risk of US imperial
intervention.[2] <#_edn2>Wolman concluded: “The question of fair payment
and allocation of costs is even more central to the problem of
controlling water pollution than the problem of providing water” (1965:
168). That broader social-democratic political-economic context made
possible the initial commitment to modern, water-borne sewage in even
poor countries.[3] <#_edn3> The crucial ingredients were long-term sunk
investments by the state, financed by credit carrying low real interest
rates. (In contrast, South Africa in the early 2020s typically pays the
third highest interest rate in the world among countries issuing state
securities, behind only Turkey and Pakistan, and higher even than
Venezuela.)
All that technical and health progress I witnessed at the time, and the
occasional DoGEE lectures I heard by an aged but ever-energetic Wolman –
codified in the celebrations of his work and life upon his death (age
96) in 1989 – today seem like a completely different era, on a different
ideological planet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] As the post-apartheid debate on water and sanitation standards began
in earnest, in the mid-1990s when the Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP)
Latrine was the World Bank’s recommended Municipal Infrastructure
Investment Framework service level for low-income households, David
Sanders and Pam Groenewald (1996) made the case that “(d)iarrhoeal
disease is the most important water related disease worldwide both in
terms of morbidity and mortality. Most of the pathogens causing
diarrhoea are transmitted via the faecal-oral route… Studies have
reported 0-81 percent (median 21 percent) lower child mortality rates
amongst children with improved water and sanitation facilities than
those without such facilities. Other studies have reported 40-80 percent
reduction in diarrhoea mortality in infants and children with the
provision of piped water in the house. Several studies analyse the
impact of improved water and sanitation on morbidity rates due to
diarrhoeal disease. The expected decrease in morbidity rates associated
with access to adequate levels of water and sanitation is regarded to be
between 22 percent and 46 percent. One study shows that a decrease of
between 35-50 percent can be expected, if improved water and sanitation
are combined with excreta disposal and hygiene education.”
[2] The developmental strategy was guided by Raúl Prebisch at the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America and led, variously, by Goulart in
Brazil, the Perons in Argentina, Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala,
and Torrijo in Panama – although many were overthrown in US-backed coups
as a result of their successes.
[3] Even South Africa’s white, coloured and Indian populations were
served in this manner during the 1950s-70s, thanks partly to urban
planning strategies that drew surpluses from the black African working
class. In contrast, during apartheid most urban black residents suffered
the ‘bucket system’ of night-soil removal by municipal workers. For a
similar study of Guayaquil, Ecuador, see research by another DoGEE
student, Swyngedouw 1997.
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