The crisis over the availability of potable water in the world is temendously complicated. The poisoning of aquifers is endemic. The shortage of waste water treatment plants means that polluted water often contaminates the uncontaminated ground water. Global climate change has made certain areas arid and global unrest has made the transport of clean water to these arid areas problematic. So far the corporate world has had very little positive influence on the matter, but that is a dynamic that must change.
Corporations obsessed with short term goals and temporary profits are sometimes part of the problem. Desaliation is too expensive and its profit margins are too thin to really make investment in the research required to make these palnts adequately viable in the marketplace. So corporations do nothing. Treating waste and conscientiously disposing of polluting byproducts of industry trims the bottom line, so corporations do nothing. The third world is in an environmental crisis, but corporations cannot see a way to profit from it, so they sit and watch the crisis get worse.
Corporate involvement in the water crisis must always follow the rulse of self-interest, and so the solutions generated by the global corporate world are primarily flawed. Consider one example: the generation of terminator genes in crop seed. Corporations spent a lot of money researching and designing crops that would grow with less water and that would be more resistent to blights. But they understood that farmers in the third world would buy their seeds once and then use part of each harvest as seed for the next years. So the corporations designed their seed with a terminator gene that would make the seed grow from each crop sterile. The third world farmer would be required to come back to the sorporation for his seed every year. (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/465222.stm)
This kind of thinking is terrific for the bottom line and great for the millions of people who depend on the corporation for the health of the investments, their retirement account or their jobs. But for the third world, it does little to solve the problem. The same paradigm exists for the water cirsis. Corporations must be part of the solution, but they cannot be the solution. Buying clean water at a low price and selling at a high price is perfectly reasonable, as one saw during the Hurrican Katrina debacle. Corporations are machines that are ethically ambivalent. Humans are not.
Government intervention is an absolute ethical requirement. Throughout the twentieth century we have seen example after example of corporations abusing the environment in order to pad their profits. Only governmental regulations, rationally and reasonably applied and monitored, can stem corporate excess. Government must be the ethical heart within the corporate machine. If governments can make it profitable for corporations to invest in the research of sustainable desalination, the preservation of pure aquifers and the reclamation of wastewater, then corporations will follow that money.