Is Water a God-Given Right?
Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:42AM (from Thomas Johnson on the Church Herald blog)
A World Communion of Reformed Churches press release ( http://wcrc.ch/node/624 ) was recently entitled “The right to clean and free water is focus of Latin American church meeting” . The churches at the XI General Assembly of the WCRC Latin American region declared that “Water is a gift from God and a human right” andthat “water is not a commercial commodity but a common resource to be protected.”
While I'm all for clean water, advocating for free water is the surest way to get neither. There's always going to be a cost to get potable water to people. It’s much better, in my opinion, to pursue strategies that promote ACCESS to good drinking water in the most affordable manner possible than to categorically argue that water should be free.