Ministers Draft the Rules for Water Nobody Wanted to Write

GENEVA — The document arrived in ministries this week under a title as bloodless as its subject is not: a model framework for the allocation and pricing of desalinated water. On the eve of the corridor-cities summit, the Global Concordat Council has circulated a template that does the thing a century spent avoiding — it sets out, in schedules and clauses, how to put a price on water once it becomes a manufactured good rather than a fallen one. Nobody in the drafting rooms pretended to relish it. Water was, within living memory, the one thing too elemental to invoice; the corridors changed that by making it a product with a cost of production, and a product with a cost demands, eventually, a rule. The framework tries to thread an impossible needle: recover the price of the plant without pricing a family out of the tap. It proposes tiered lifeline rates, public backstops, a floor below which no household may be cut. Critics call it the moment a right quietly became a rate. Its drafters call it the least-worst honesty. "We are not writing what water should be worth," one Concordat official said. "We are writing what it now costs, and trying to keep that from becoming the same thing." The ministers convene next week. The template goes with them, unloved and necessary.