Sunset over Cocopah Mountains, Copper River Delta, Mexico, April 2004 © Pete Lavigne

Global Water Policy Initiative

This initiative works at the heart of water policy issues, especially the global debate on the privatization of fresh water resources and growing water supply controversies throughout the United States and the hemisphere. We believe that all children and all people deserve clean water, and that access to a subsistence level of water is a basic human obligation. Continue reading below for more about this initiative, or go to Clean Water, Biodiversity, and Environmental Justice to learn about RFA's other main initiative.

The US-Canada Columbia River treaty has key components coming under review in 2006, and conflicts over various US-Mexico treaties, state compacts and other agreements on the Rio Grande and Colorado are volatile. In addition, although 2003 was the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Year of Water, North American issues were barely touched because the Bush Administration did not participate. Major opportunities include the U.S. Department of Interior's new focus on western water issues, the continuing drought in the North American Southwest, and increasing population pressure combined with climate changes that are straining both urban drinking and industrial water supplies and rural agricultural and ranching uses.

Human Health

Among the many issues related to the water policy initiative, RFA is focusing on links to human health in two areas. First is the disproportionate impact on indigenous peoples of bio-accumulated poisons in their foods. For most tribal cultures, wild foods, particularly fish, form a pivotal part of individual diets and these foods are often central to the spiritual and cultural tribal practices. Numerous studies have documented the increasing concentrations of mercury and many other industrial poisons in reservoirs, lakes and streams and the resulting bio-accumulation of these poisons in fish and other animal tissue. The major pathways for these contaminants include rain deposition of air pollution, direct industrial discharges - both legal and illegal, along with runoff from land surfaces to reservoirs, lakes and streams. Because native peoples eat more fish than the general population their health impacts are more severe. We intend to fund more research and restoration projects, as well as more education campaigns to begin to reverse the increasing amounts of poisons in wild food supplies.

Second, we are actively supporting efforts to limit the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in animal feeds, and to curb unnecessary use of antibiotics for non-responsive medical conditions. The overuse of antibiotics and growth hormones has several negative consequences for water quality and human health. First, the use of antibiotics as growth stimulating compounds in chickens, cattle and pigs leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria and to increasing concentrations of both these bacteria and the antibiotics themselves in our rivers and streams. The use of growth hormones has similar problems. The effects of these water contaminants include interference with the reproductive cycles of some organisms including frogs and toads. We are actively supporting educational and advocacy campaigns seeking to stop misuse of antibiotics and growth hormones to protect their use for treatment of disease.