Call for a grassroots Forum, alternative to the Euro-Mediterranean Water Forum of corporations and official institutions

22 March 2026

The Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua (FIMA – Italian Forum of Water Movements”), together with the European Water Movement and the People’s Water Forum, call for mobilization at the end of September 2026, 15 years after the Italian referendum was betrayed.

Background:

In 2011, Italian people, grasping the danger of a privatization of water resources, expressed unequivocally their will of living and developing in a society whose natural resources and commons be put at the service of people, outside the market and commodification logic.

Since the day following the referendum victory, private market powers immediately started, inside and outside political institutions, their campaign of obstruction in order to divert an historical decision that would have ruined big business in the immediate and, on the contrary, met precise requests and needs, limiting and reversing the course toward the neo-liberal project dominant classes were injecting into the globalization process.

Unfortunately, political forces that pledged to respect the referendum outcome, didn’t act consequentially so that, in subsequent years, the privatized model, unhindered by political brakes, contributed to raise problems about this precious ecosystemic good, and the deepening of for-profit dynamics compromised several positive social processes and increased seriousness of the problems concerning the water issue.

Today:

Missing to take the right path defined by the referendum for a public and participative government primarily aimed to the collective welfare and health, has led to an increase in all existing problems.

All this not only concerned the ethical-political-ontological dimension, but also led to a real impaired quantity and quality of drinking water and natural water bodies.

Water scarcity was induced also by climate changes (on which there was no willingness to act), by the lowering of quantitative and qualitative limits of all sorts of pollutants (i.e. PFAS), by private dividends blown up at the expense of maintenance and restoration of rundown water distribution networks, by increase in the anthropic pressure on natural water bodies and related ecosystems and by their overexploitation, including new technologies like Data Centers and IA.

The first conflicts involving entire populations in the contention for the little water left are already looming up, as in Sicily, Calabria and Basilicata.

It’s in this context that the first Euro-Mediterranean Water Forum of the rich, the powerful and the institutions prone to the corporations will take place in Rome from September 29 to October 2.

This Euro-Mediterranean meeting widens, for the first time officially, its neo-colonial vision also to Africa, where the water issue seems in some way to be included in or matched with the insolvency “Piano Mattei”, to Balkans and to Middle East (in this region, without the minimum problematization of the scenario of infringement of human rights, where, inter alia, even the access to water is used as a weapon throughout the region, especially after the spread of the war).

An exhibition/expo with an area of 7000 square meters will be placed alongside the meeting, to promote technical and economic solutions more functional to financialization of the ecosystemic good of water, in order to push it at the mercy of stock quotations and management by investment funds, such as BlackRock, well-integrated into many economic realities and well protected by powers that matter and, not surprisingly, promoting the September event.

Lastly, the Rome meeting received its “endorsement” in Bali in 2024, within the frame of the World Water Forum hold by the World Water Council (WWC), subject representative of corporations, just while social movements for defense of water, come to express their opinion, were blocked by paramilitary and enclosed in hotel throughout the meeting.

That’s why, in view of such a brazen and murky event, we call the water people to mobilization and propose to build an alternative and solidary meeting of movements, civil society, scientific and academic organizations with civil conscience and of the world of the arts.

With the aim of resuming the path traced by that referendum season of 2011 and reviving the construction and organization of our alternatives in opposition to current neoliberal paradigm, to exhumed and imposed warmongering scenario, and capable of tackling the problems induced by pollution in the face of 15 years of inaction, climate changes and apparent increase of extreme water events.

As during the referendum years, we intend to build an alliance for water, as broad as possible, to give the word to movements and realities that struggle against commodification and privatization of the ecosystemic good of water, starting from the territories.

All this by giving word and rise to real alternative proposals in order to face problems caused by drought, flood and environmental disasters, or induced by extractive and polluting industries, and the consequences of a climate change occurring throughout Italy, Mediterranean area and beyond, and that many pretend not to see.

LET’S EXPOSE THEM !