Washington-SANA
The move recently announced by the Wall Street Stock Exchange, the main interface of the US market, for trading water futures contracts along with gold, oil and other traded commodities, did not carry threats on its face, but it is a step experts warned that it might spark a global water war.
And following the decision of the Chicago-based CMI Global Group to launch the first of those contracts related to the spot market in California on the seventh of this month after it was announced last September, fears of dealing with water as a commodity like oil and gold have increased for trading in the financial markets.
According to the US "Business Insider" website, those contracts will allow investors and farmers to bet on the price of water in the future and will be linked to the "Nasdaq Felice California" water index, which was launched two years ago.
This step comes as a result of repeated warnings issued by the United Nations earlier that the future wars that the world may witness will be due to water scarcity in light of climate change and successive years of drought in more than one region around the world.
Although the officials responsible for this step said that it aims to regulate crop cultivation and protect farmers from the sudden rise in prices, it angered the United Nations experts, led by Pedro Arujugudo, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to have access to drinking water at the UN, saying, "It leads to speculation by financiers who may trade in water as if it were another commodity, like oil and gold."
The Special Rapporteur added, according to the UN website, "In this dangerous context, it is the major agricultural and industrial facilities that will be able to purchase, which will lead to the marginalization and marginalization of the weak economic sector such as small farmers."
According to the expert, ongoing global discussions about the environmental, social and cultural values of water show the news that it will be traded in the futures market on "Wall Street" that the value of water as a basic human right is now under threat.
The contracts were announced last September, the first of their kind in the United States, after heat and wildfires swept through the West Coast of the United States and as California emerged from an eight-year drought.
Tim McCourt, global head of the CMI Group's Equity and Alternative Investment Index, has warned that nearly two-thirds of the world's population will face water shortages by 2025 and that water scarcity will pose an increasing risk to businesses and societies around the world.
In turn, Dean Dray, Managing Director of RBC Capital Markets, suggested that climate change, drought, population growth and pollution would make issues of water scarcity a hot topic in the coming years, while the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, Hans Van Ginkel, considered that wars over water threaten to become a component. President of the scene of the twenty-first century.