May 06, 2008

Today I took a look at the County of Maui’s Department of Water Supply website. Looking through the rate usage chart, I saw three categories:  General, Agriculture and Non-Potable. Staring at that chart, something hit me like a bolt of lightning: Where are the charges for the water exporters? Then it dawned on me – Oh my God! They are charging the water exporters exactly the same rates as the local residents! We have lost billions of dollars in royalties from  exported water for the past 100-plus years!

You see, folks, the biggest businesses on this island, namely sugar, pineapple and tourism, have been and are being treated as local entities, just like residents. That’s because, through their power in government and media, they have succeeded in having water treated as a “public resource” while in reality water is a very precious commodity, like oil or any other mineral you take out of the ground. The public meanwhile doesn’t know any better. In fact, these powers have twisted the paradigm around so much that residents actually believe that water is treated as “just another commodity” and must now be treated as a “public resource.” Big mistake.

We must view water exactly how the big businesses view it: precious, quantifiable, exportable in many forms, transmutable and profitable, just like oil. The moment we view water in this way, we start seeing things differently. We start looking at those sugar cane and pineapple fields as, for example, massive fields of plastic water bottles filled to the brim with Maui No Ka Oi water ready for exportation. We start viewing tourists as walking water bottles filled with our most precious commodity. The moment we see that, then the lightning bolt hits us: These businesses have been bottling and exporting our precious water without paying a fair price for it!! We should be as rich as the oil sheiks in the Middle East!

If they were paying a fair price for it, there would be another designation added in the water department usage/rate chart: EXPORTERS. And it should be the highest rate charged, to make it profitable for the county. It became even more surreal when I saw the funding chart on how our water is paid for: we have to borrow money in the bond market to cover about ten percent of our expenses. We’re actually going into debt subsidizing the exportation of our water!

It’s high time we viewed water differently. Water is a commodity more precious than oil, gold, silver, or any other mineral taken from our environment. It is quantifiable and it is sellable.

In that case, why are oil and mining companies paying royalties to countries and residents for the privilege of extracting oil and minerals and selling them in the open market, while our water exporters are not? Let’s start charging them a fair rate – enough to enrich us all.

We must stop seeing these firms as kama‘aina even though they’ve been around for like forever, and see them as Shell Oil, Exxon, BP or Newmont, Goldfields, and Barrick, just like the mining firms that they are.

The moment we see our island water as a precious and quantifiable commodity, we can do two things that will enrich us immensely: charge for its exportation, and use it as backing for a local currency. By creating a stable, non-inflationary local currency, (which is legal in the U.S.), we can go on a crash course to sustainability as hyperinflation sets in, in the world economy. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a while, you’ve seen prices in gasoline, food and other necessities skyrocket this year. You should have seen the rice “panic” in Costco this last week. It was just a small inkling of what’s to come as the dollar continues its death plunge to oblivion. Not to mention the rising bankruptcies like in Aloha Air and other airlines and local businesses, due to high oil prices. 

It is not yet too late to make drastic changes in our local economy as we prepare for the future. But it first requires a complete change in the way we view our most precious physical resource in this island. We can either succumb to doom and gloom, or we can envision an incredibly abundant future. It’s up to each one of us.

Peter Nebres