Nestle CEO: "Access to water should not be a public right"

There’s some logic to his argument, but given his company’s history in particular (see Nestlé Boycott and Child Slave Labor Practices), the idea of privatizing water and putting control in the hands of corporations is absolutely horrifying.

h/t: Nestle CEO: ‘Access to water should not be a public right’ | Death and Taxes.

Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck:

Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world.It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.

The one opinion which I think is extreme is represented by the NGOs who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.

And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.

Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.

I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued longterm existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world. We’re in the position of being able to create jobs.

[later he praises a video of a Nestlé factory in Japan]

The Japanese. You can see how modern those factories are, highly robotized, almost no people.

Hypocrisy Much?