 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this second seminar in the Water Death series. It is a mini-series set in the seed semi-art of our political symposium program. Because Richard and Nidhi are the core course of political development this year and that's what we, with that context, we organize the seminar series. This water part is done in collaboration with the Centre for Political Development, and it was heading that. And then because I happen to be at the London International Development Centre I also congratulate you on it. So it sounds very grand and I'm happy to have you here in the room. Today's speaker is Nadine, Dr. Nadine Weiss. He works at the Geography Department of the University of Bohm. Has done long standing for a long time fieldwork in Mexico. She spent a year and a half before on illegal water markets, which is also a part of the talk today. Now set more in the context of a broader development perspective related to financialization in the housing sector. We will hear all about it. So I know it's a very interesting work. Very detailed fieldwork, so I hope you have many questions. Also beyond and in connection with the paper, so the floor is now first. Thank you Peter. Yeah, welcome everyone. I'm happy that so many of you are interested in this topic, finance and water. I've been doing research in Mexico for quite a while, 12 years, 13 years. Starting with my Masters and from my PhD I actually went to Vietnam, which is another story. But then I went back to Mexico and I have a project at the moment that's actually about land and land control. But also always following up the more water issues. And of course finance, which is my main topic at the moment. So this presentation is based on several stays in the field over the course of the last years. And yeah, since 2012 I've had several stays in the field last year I stayed there for half a year. And I'm going to talk about water and finance today because I realized more and more, the more research I did there, that you can't actually understand anything that's going on in Mexico without looking at finance. So that's why I started getting into this topic. So in my presentation today, which is largely based on a paper for globalization. And also on an earlier one in water alternatives that I think some of you know that we've discussed with some people here before. My aim is to explore how natural resource regimes and here the focuses on water interact with an accumulation model that is led by Finance Capital. And my main argument will be that Finance Capitalism is a socio-ecological process coming along with a shift in control of our water resources in Mexico. However, it's not so much a direct form of taking over control such as water grabbing. But rather it's a control shift that works through more complex causalities. And I think that Jason Moore's concept of the web of life could be a nice way of grasping this more complex set of causalities that aren't worked here. The argument is based on the case of the interaction of the financialized housing sector and water in my study region in Mexico that I'm going to introduce to you in a moment. So after the introduction of the study area, I'm going to talk about the financialization of the housing sector and show how housing policy serves as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from the working class. In Mexico, two globalized Finance Capital. I'm then going to talk about the role of water in this process and I will show first how housing projects come into being through an existing water governance regime. And how this has led to new structures of access to water with far-reaching social and ecological implications. Finally, I'm going to talk a little bit about the financialization of the Mexican economy at large, which is something I've been engaged with over the last month and explore a little bit what may be the further implications of this in terms of water. So my research area is the Toluca Valley. Toluca is the capital of the state of Mexico. It's the Estado de México, which is the state that surrounds the federal district of Mexico City. And this area has been characterized by fast development since about the 1970s. And this development took off with the earthquake in 85 in Mexico City when a lot of industry moved from Mexico to Toluca and especially then in the 1990s of course with NAFTA when a lot of industrial parks were set up in this area. So there's been development in the sense of industrialization and a transition away from agriculture along with urbanization and high population growth. This is the city of Toluca. It has about two and a half million inhabitants now. In the last two decades, the valley has seen a process of vast territorial expansion and urban sprawl, especially since 2000. As you can see on this map, there's been a massive increase of dispersed settlements. These are all the red zones you can see on the map is red spots in the periphery of the city. What has happened there? The growth of the dispersed settlements in the periphery of the city in the last 15 years is mainly due to this phenomenon. These are huge housing colonies constructed by private real estate investors called conjuntos urbanos. And these investors construct 10,000 houses at once up to 10,000 houses. Not all of them are that big, but there are colonies that are that size. Between 1999 and 2014, the government of the state of Mexico authorized the construction of almost 500 colonies. That is a total of 730,000 houses that were constructed in the surroundings of Mexico City. All of this goes back to the financialization of housing policy in the course of the neoliberal restructuring of the country. So in the 1990s, the Mexican government introduced a policy reform, which implied that the government completely withdrew from the direct involvement in construction of social housing and instead took over the role of a mortgage lender for the working class. And a major part of this reform was the inclusion of private real estate developers into the construction of low-cost housing. And the real boom of this started in 2000 with the creation of the Federal Mortgage Company, the Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal. This is called in Mexico, which was mainly financed with a loan from the World Bank, which is actually the largest loan that Mexico ever got from the World Bank. That was used for creating or setting up this Federal Mortgage Company. And what it does, or what it helps the Mexican state to do, is to securitize these mortgages, to pack these mortgages into packages and sell them off in portfolios to international investors. And the consequence of this was the mushrooming of low-quality housing colonies in the surrounding of Mexico's large cities. So not only in the Mexico City area, but also in the north or more to the south of the country, but particularly, of course, in the state of Mexico, where a lot of population is concentrated. What you see here is a simplified model of this housing financing in Mexico. The main funding agency is called Infunavit. It has about 70% of the whole mortgage market in Mexico. Infunavit is a national housing fund where all workers that are formerly employed in companies in Mexico are safe automatically 5% of their salary into a fund, and out of this fund they can take mortgage to buy a house. But actually the only houses that are available are the houses that are in these colonies that are constructed by these private companies. And Infunavit has issued more than 8 million credits in Mexico up to 2014, I think is the data, the great majority since 2000s in like 14 years. It's the largest mortgage lender in Latin America and the fourth largest in America. Mortgages are also financed through the so-called software banks and software banks. These are private bank entities that are run by private banks like Santander or banks in Mexico or the real estate companies themselves. And these were also created with the funds from the federal mortgage company, this government institution. Now both mortgages from software less and from the national housing funds are sold to international investors as the government states to increase the funding for housing that's available. And these mortgages they've been highly attractive for investors because first of all the default risk is completely taken over by the state through this federal mortgage company through state guarantees to investors. Then these mortgages they have until recently been inflation adjusted. So this means a yearly automatic increase of the mortgage principle with the inflation rate. And at the moment there's also a high interest rate which is now at 12%. So this means that you basically could not lose as an investor in this whole project in the story. In 2013 the party was over was what one agent of one of the big real estate companies said to me. There was a big crash in the market where three of the four big real estate companies went bankrupt. And it was caused by excessive numbers of people abandoning their houses. The companies not being able to sell all the houses that they had constructed already without selling them before or having the guarantee that they could sell them. And the investors in turn withdrawing their money. There are different ciphers of empty and abandoned houses they vary between two and five million in Mexico. This includes the houses that were finished and not sold or the left unfinished due to the bankruptcy of the developers. The main reasons for why the people left were the remote location of these colonies as you saw on the map in the outskirts of the city without public transport without public infrastructure. Also the poor construction quality of the houses the houses were partly as I saw this they were constructed in in flood flooding areas. For example, and people that come from other from other regions in Mexico don't know that this is an area that's usually flooded every year. All this kind of stories. So oh and also lots of employment was of course a factor in this. The end of the game was that the borrower's and the state where the losers in this hundred thousands of people they remain indebted. While they've lost their houses and the non performing loans they were left with the federal mortgage company, which is the state which remains with a debt of more than two billion US dollars out of this. So I think that this story in itself is already worth being told. But the question that I want to turn to now is how this form of accumulation actually materializes on the ground, how it happens locally. And what I'm what I'm going to argue is that water and the actors controlling it play an essential role in it. This is because the local materialization of financialized accumulation is also dependent on material resources such as land and water. And it's those actors that are in control of or that are able to gain control over water that are able to appropriate these newly available resources at the local level. And also through the access to water rights that they have shape how finance capital spatially materializes. And this process has led to new structures of access to water that persist up to now as I'm going to show you. So finally we come to water. I guess many of you here are interested in water. So this is the aquifer of the valley to look and groundwater is the most important or basically the water source in this area since the semi area area. And on this map you see the limits of the aquifer and the points of water extraction. This is a map that was made by a project by the German Development Corporation in 2004 when I did my internship there as a student. The idea of this project was to counter groundwater over extraction by setting up a participatory groundwater management council committee. And I guess you might be able to get an idea after I explained how this illegal water rights market emerged why this project was not successful in the end. So this valley of to look at belongs to the highly over exploited aquifers in Mexico and the groundwater tables have been falling. The wells have now an average depth of around 200 meters and in the industrial zone in the center of the valley there aren't 600 meters deep. The new wells are 600 meters deep. In Mexico water is by constitution a property of the nation managed by the National Water Commission Con Agua. With the Water Law Reform in 1992 the government introduced a system of private water rights concessions in so-called prohibition zones. Sona Cveda which was in 2012 around 55% of the country these are all the colored areas on this map. At the white zone are free access zones where anyone is free to drill a well and extract water. In prohibition zones while water is of course still considered a common good there's now a system of water titles that allows registered users to extract a certain volume of cubic meters per year. So this implies that there are no new concessions anymore but yeah there are no new concessions anymore since this regularization process was finished in the end of the 1990s. So it means that if you want the right to extract water from the aquifer the only way to get it is via a transmission of rights from someone who sees these rights in this same aquifer. And since water is a common good these water rights transmissions are in principle free and only involve a service fee to be paid to the National Water Commission. So what does this mean for a real estate developer who wants to construct a new colony? Because of the high population growth public water utilities in the Tunukka Valley they operate at the limit of their concessions already and they cannot supply the new inhabitants of these colonies with their existing volumes that they have. So this is why the municipalities before they issue a construction permit to the real estate developers they request a water concession from them. For the volume that is necessary will be necessary to serve the future inhabitants of this colony. And this fact has created massive demand for water rights concessions by the housing construction sector and it's led in turn to the emergence of an illegal market for water rights which is quite profitable. This is what is turned over in what can be turned over in such a transaction. So on this black market as the locals call it and Mercado Negro there's a handful of brokers locally called Coyotes who manage and control these water rights transmissions. My study is largely based on the Tunukka Valley but I know from my interview data that these illegal market structures also exist in other regions of Mexico. How does the illegal market work? The central actor is the Coyote. Actually I found I used to think that the Coyotes they were all male but I just found last year there's also a female one. Unfortunately she was not willing to talk to me but maybe next time. So this is this intermediary that has the necessary knowledge like law, water law for example, has the social networks and also the experience in dealing with the water commission to be able to function as a broker between the people that want to see the water rights and the people that need water rights. And at the same time he can make this process through these abilities that he has. He can make this process look like a non-monetary seeding while actually payments are made. So what do you do if you need water rights? The first thing of course is you may have social networks. You may know people from other businesses that have gone through this process before and you can ask them how to manage the situation. If you don't know the area and you're new to the whole thing you may go to the local water utility or to the water commission and ask for a water concession for a new plant where they will tell you that there are no new water concessions but they may give you the contact of someone who can help you. With this problem and the person that hands out the right business card in this situation will later receive a commission for establishing the contact from this coyote. Then you call the coyote to ask for the rights you need for his service. What does the coyote do? How does he get this water rights that you request from him? The first option is he's himself the representative of someone willing to seed rights. For example, he's employed as a water manager for a company that has improved its water efficiency and has surplus volumes that they want to sell on the market. The second and the most common way is to draw on so-called drumotores. Most users who are willing to seed rights up to now have been farmers. Although I have to say that this is up to when I did the research about three years ago, I think that this is slowly changing now because there are less and less farmers that have such high volumes of water rights. But the point is that for farmers with large land holdings under irrigation, the creation of this water rights system was turned their wealth into gold mines. So from motorists, they are people who go to the farmers and ask around who wants to sell parts of their rights and how much they want for it. And once this deal is done, these agents will get a share of the final price of the volume that was transferred. In the next step, the Coyote is then managing up there all the formalities of the transition with the Water Commission, which is a very complex and difficult process. We need a lot of experience and knowledge about law, water law, and especially what you need is social capital to know how to deal with the higher level officials that have the power to authorize these transmissions. That is to say that corruption payments are necessary to get these transmissions authorized. When the transmission is authorized, the new user gets this water title from Conagua. And finally, all compensations are paid. One cubic meter is now 35 pesos, which is now around 1 euro 60. It used to be a lot more two or three years ago, but it's still quite a lot, just to give you an idea. One cubic meter is about 160 and rights transmissions usually involve volumes of several hundred thousand up to 1 or 1.5 million cubic meters. You can imagine that this is a business that creates considerable profits for the brokers and all those involved in the process, including the state bureaucrats. One of the officers of Conagua told me that water is now more expensive than oil. To summarize this up to now, the financialization of housing has significantly contributed to the emergence of an illegal water rights market. This market is now a defining characteristic of the water rights allocation regime in Toluca and most likely elsewhere in Mexico. This market is determined by a powerful network of actors who benefit from water rights trading. This includes the intermediaries, the water users selling surplus rights and senior and lower level staff in the water bureaucracy. This is the interest that is also implicated within the state apparatus. What are the implications of this? First, in contrast to the original aim of the 1992 Water Law that introduced individual titling to counter groundwater over extraction, this is not the case because of the enormous economic interest associated with illegal water rights trading. This means that for water rights to function for ecological sustainability, regulations would have to be in place that allow the absorption of surplus rights for the restoration of the aquifer. For this to make any sense for ecological sustainability, you have to cancel part of the rights that are issued. The thing is that the Water Law in Mexico actually does foresee such a mechanism called Calucidad, meaning the expiring of titles for water volumes not used for two years in a row. But of course, I would say the private water users that have bought their titles for a lot of money on the market, even if it's a new legal market, they perceive their water titles as a private property. So with the help of lawyers, they've been able to resist such a cancellation of rights versus a conagua. And a conagua, the state, has solved this conflict by introducing so-called guarantee quotas, which allow the user to pay a fee for the volumes they don't use. So in this way, the unused volumes are made available for commercialization on the black market instead of for the restoration of the aquifer. Second, the implications of the illegal water rights markets. These structures have led to a quite ironic outcome regarding the further incentives for regularization of water rights, which is actually quite alarming. Mexico has in the last years been undergoing a process of further regularization of groundwater extraction. So in an act of emergency, President Peña Nieto announced the abolishment of all free access zones in Mexico on the International Water Day in 2013. This means that the whole country is now declared a prohibition zone where wells are being regularized and the drilling of wells is forbidden without permission from conagua. And in existing prohibition zones, there's an increasing monitoring of wells going on. On the discursive side, this is legitimized with water being an issue of national security that requires new and prompt solutions. It's considered a shift from a reactive to a proactive preventive approach, which will finally reduce the over exploitation of groundwater. Apart from this rational planning for national security explanation, there's also an alternative reading which is suggested by this statement by a retired senior official from conagua that I'm going to read to you because it's quite revealing. Last year on the International Water Day, the Peña Nieto government released a decree and established Sona de Vera in the whole country. So the market will continue in the same way. I asked in the whole country, but the Sona de Vera status depends on the availability of water, doesn't it? There are new studies of availability. It's not allowed to drill wells anymore. But is the information in these studies correct? Not even the public register is correct. It's for putting numbers. There are very strong economic interests behind it and political interests as well. It's very much money, including that people of the government, state and federal government have concessions of millions of cubic meters. I know of someone that had 4 million cubic meters. It is a lot. Two of these were sold to a housing company. I'd like to know how we got them. Later in the CNA, which is conagua, the director, his brother also did not have concessions before. Later he did. I asked, is there really water scarcity? In Zones, yes. In Torreón, Chihuahua, in the north of the country, there's a lot of scarcity. And in the center here, yes, there is. So he's referring to the federal district in Mexico City. Because if not, the government of the federal district did not have the necessity of transferring it here. You're probably aware of this huge water transfer scheme that transfers all the water to Mexico City from the outside. What about the value of Toluca? There is another situation. The water is, yes, there's availability. Just that they have restricted it with the data. I think that yes, there's water. First of all, in the value of Toluca. All these more serious studies, I think that yes, there's availability. But it's a very complex formula to measure availability. It seems that, as I say, it seems that it's not so important whether there is or there isn't water. He says, this is the key point. The issue is of cultural, political and economic kind. Water bears all these situations. So I can't, of course, verify this. But I think that considering the powerful interests associated with water rights trading, I would say it's at least doubtful whether ecological sustainability is the only incentive for the stricter regularization of groundwater extraction in Mexico. And I think it's quite paradox that the establishment of good water governance in the sense of a strict enforcement of this 1992 water law reform under the present conditions would result not in ecological sustainability, but in a more tightly organized illegal water market in which money determines access to water. So in other words, the strict regularization would result in a de facto privatization of water resources, even if they're legally a common good. Before I conclude, I'd like to share a few insights with you that I gained over the last year doing desk research about the broader state of the Mexican economy. And what I want to emphasize here is that the securitization of housing is only one manifestation of the financialization of the Mexican economy at large. And the main point here is that because of the financialization of the Mexican economy, that is mainly a monetary policy made for financial investors and not for the domestic economy. There's a massive outflow of financial resources from Mexico that has to be countered with increasing exports and foreign direct investment for portfolio investment. And this has consequences for how water is allocated. So I made this nice graph of the Mexican current account. I can't go into detail. I've written all of this up also in another paper that's just under review and then I hope to publish soon. But I still want to mention the key points to you. So they've been increasing outflows of money from the national economy. There's a massive current account deficit that's been increasing over the years. This is the little chart for this line you can see here. Then you also see that the situation is quite bad at the moment. It actually worsened during the 1995 crisis. And the main reason for this is the green column which is called, for those who are more economists, I'm not an economist myself. So I had to study all of this. This is called net primary income. This is basically two things, interest and dividends. So first, why are there so many interests and dividends paid abroad from Mexico? The first thing is about interest. The Mexican state has to pay more and more interest abroad because due to reforms that were induced by the IMF in the 1990s regarding the monetary system, it finances itself through government bonds issued on the international financial market. So in these 2017 budgets, the amount that Mexico spends on the payment of interest abroad is larger than what is spent for the budgets of the sectors of health, education and social services altogether. Second regarding the dividends, a main feature of financialized countries in the periphery is high interest rates to attract the investors on the international market to their bonds. And these high interest rates, among other things, have led to a far reaching destruction of the domestic economy. That is because domestic firms, smaller firms do not have access to cheaper funding abroad. So this means that, first of all, there has been a concentration of transnational corporations, the consolidation of the power of these transnational corporations that of course take their profit out of the country. And also where Mexican companies were able to compete with these transnational companies, they underwent a process of transnationalization themselves because what they do is they don't fund themselves through banks, domestic banks anymore because of the high interest rates, instead they issue bonds on international financial markets. So that's cheaper to fund their activities. And the consequence of this is that Mexico does not also have to pay more and more interest abroad, but also dividends for firms. And why is this relevant in this context? Because to counter this massive and increasing outflows of money in the balance of payments, money has to come in. How can it come in? One way is, you see the purple one, it's the migrant remittances. So just to underline how important that is for the Mexican economy. But obviously it's not enough. So how can it come in? One way is to increase the debt, which is something that is happening. The debt has a crazy amount at the moment, at crazy levels. And of course this also reinforces the whole problem of the interest payments. And another way of countering this situation's negative current account situation is to attract more foreign direct investment and portfolio investment in the securitization of housing and other public infrastructure and services is one way to do so. Another way is to further increase the exports. The exports that you can't really see that in this graph because the trade balance is the blue one. You can see that it's negative, but you can't see the volume of trade. And the volume of trade has also massively increased since the 1990s. The exports have massively increased, but the problem is that the imports have increased even more. So the exports have to be increased not only to pay for the increasing imports, but also to counter the negative current account situation. And in consequence, the Mexican government further pushes industrialization. The demand for water rights at the moment in Toluca also comes from the industry because there are so many new industrial parks being set up. So the housing industry is actually quite bad at the moment, obviously, after the crash in 2013. And it's mainly the industry that buys water titles at the moment. Industrialization not only in manufacturing, but also in agriculture. So Mexican state, Mexican government pushes all forms of extractivism as it's been called lately in the literature. And the thing is that in a country that is largely arid or semi-arid, especially in the north and the center where the bulk of economic activities is concentrated, it's clear that all of this has consequences in terms of water, the new industrial plants need water, they need energy. Energy is a big issue in Mexico at the moment that is supposed to, and that's also the energy reform two years ago in this context. The energy is supposed to come from new dams and also from exploiting hydrocarbons through fracking, which also uses crazy amounts of water. What I want to say is that under the current conditions, I see the danger that available water resources are allocated ultimately to serve the needs of finance capital. And if this works through informal markets, this may also be to the advantage of the political elite, not only because they benefit themselves from trading on this market, but also because this reallocation of water rights takes place behind closed doors and without public notice in the end. So to conclude, housing policy is one of the policies in Mexico that has been adapted to serve the needs of the transnational finance capital. In essence, it's not a social policy, but it's a mechanism to redistribute wealth from the working class to global finance capital through the mechanism of interest. Even so, I would say that the case has shown that it's not only a simple story of wealth distribution from local to global, but there are also local actors that benefit from these new modes of accumulation. And these are, in this case, the actors that manage and control the resources that are necessary for the materialization of this accumulation mode through home building. And in Toluca we've seen that it's especially those actors that possess and determine access to water rights that have been able to benefit from this story. So financialization does not materialize by itself, but it must be made happen by actors and through resources on the ground as well. Second, how can we think about the commodification of natural resources under financial accumulation? The housing projects come into being only through an existing water governance regime with their specific hydrological conditions, their legal frameworks and the local networks of actors. But at the same time, these housing projects, this housing sector has also led to a new structure of groundwater governance in Mexico. And this may have profound implications for the access to water rights and culminates in the potential privatization of physical water resources. What this shows is that the commodification of natural resources under neoliberal capitalism may proceed through more complex routes than direct resource grabbing. In this case, I think Moore's Web of Life could be a neat concept to designate the complexity of the interaction of natural resources regimes with the financialized economy. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Daddy. That was an extremely rich talk with a lot of people in it. So I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting questions to think about this. Further, and to expand the argument that you like, as a water scholar, I like the paradox of a regulatory regime de facto producing privatization, which is hardly observable to the general public because it happens somewhere else. But of course also the, I think analytically, the link between water resources, housing, financialization, national and global capitalism, that's also quite interesting, the implications for sustainability. So there are many, many issues here that could be addressed. The floor is open for you to comment and question and answer your questions. Please say your name when you speak. Yes, I guess so, Mike. Are there any social movements that are actually aware that the poor of people through this housing situation are being used to financialize things far beyond? And are they aware of that? You wouldn't meet people. Are they completely unaware of it? There is something, I'm not sure if I would call it social movement. This one person, I also talked to him. Yeah, it's basically that's the thing, it's one person, he's been fighting this out for more, not so much the infunded housing, but because I think he was also had problems himself also in this whole story. And he's become a social activist, gathering the people and fighting it out in front of the National Court and everything. But yeah, actually, they put him in jail. Two years ago, he was in jail for a year, he put him in jail because they said he stole a mobile phone. And yeah, that's about the story. So that's critical. Yeah, newspaper, La Tornada, they report about that, but I'm not aware of any other social awareness. So it's happening without people basically knowing what to do. Thank you. Please say your name. I'm a student at the RAS, a PSU student at the RAS. So what kind of representation do you see in the camera? You said that financialization of housing has led to the existence of new and better markets. So I was wondering if you could speak a bit about other factors that might have affected people to the existence of new and better markets. It seems like it's just, it appears like it's just this big factor that's the thing that I was thinking about. So I think those are the things where the new and better markets exist and there are the new. I'm very interested in that. Yeah, I think it's a very good point. I mean, it's fun. I've been thinking about a lot of course. I think that it's also been, I mean, it was also this coincidence of both happening at the same time, this regularization of water rights and the financialization. And I mean, to an extent, it's not so much a coincidence because it's part of the same neoliberal policy, ideology that's behind both things. But I would say that, yeah, it was in this case the main reason because the demand, because it was what pushed the demand of the water rights. Yeah. Thank you very much. That's really interesting. And the illusion of an academic and a sense of the environment of policy here at Starks. A couple of questions. When you say got your thing, when you say got your thing. Oh, no. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sometimes that word has different meanings. Sometimes it's associated with other, it makes it feel like a few such as drugs and, you know, other kind of stuff that you don't have to take through customs, shall we say. And at that point, some of my mind was just wondering, are these people who are just selling water rights or have they got other stuff going on? Is there other links that organize crime in other ways? So that's one question. The other question is, what, just to give a little context. You talked about one of these private, you know, formal housing developments, but informal housing is probably happening in a greater, in an informal assessment of construction is probably happening at a greater rate. I could be wrong about this. I haven't been able to find as reliable sources with respect to Mexico as I would like it. I'm not a massive specialist in Mexico, just down a little bit of research. But there's a huge amount of informal construction going on. And how does, you know, how do these questions of water sort of play out in that regard? And sort of to what extent is that the bigger question, the biggest picture when it comes to water access for poor people and for the poorest people in Mexico? These are the, these housing developments, which I would imagine that if you're able to get access to seeing credit for a loan, even if it's going to go south pretty quickly, that's going to be one of the poorest of the poor. So, very nice questions. Thanks very much for these questions. First one, the Coyote, yeah, that's right. It's a quite widely used term in Mexico. So not only in the water sector, but also in the most famous, of course, the ones that smuggled people from Mexico across the border, the ones that you refer to in the zone by Manuchel. But also other, yeah, when I found out about this story, I asked people about Coyote and what it means to them, who is it? And it seems that it's something that was much more widespread in the past, that there were a lot of people, for example, in front of, before you could do things online, there were a lot of people in front of government buildings, Coyotes, that would get your driver's license and all kinds of intermediary between formal, a lot of, yeah, between formal and informal or between the citizen and the state. And these Coyotes, they are, yeah, they may have quite normal at Mexico, many people. I would say most people that have money, they have different kind of businesses. They have, like, they're active in different spheres, but organized crime, I haven't got across that. I think it's, and this water business, I know that it's a very big business, so it's, in this case, it would be a main business. The informal housing, that's a very interesting question. So thanks for that. Because, and that's actually something I wasn't expanding on here because of the time. Because one of the things is that when municipalities ask the real estate developers to bring the water concession for their conjunto that they're constructing, they ask, they have this calculation about how many, how many people are going to live there, how much water they need, there's a standard formula, and they add something on top because there's so much informal housing, like informal housing, like people, especially in Mexico, they have these hills on the communal land where people construct houses. And it's, from what I found so far, mostly, like, not what you would think, because these people actually have quite a lot of leverage against the municipality and against, versus the state. So once there are enough people, they go to the municipality, they request their water, and then they have elections every three years on the municipal level. So there's a high benefit for local politicians to serve these areas with water. And so what the municipalities do is they ask actually the real estate, because the thing is they can't buy themselves because it's an illegal market, it's a little tricky to budget for something like that in the official state agency. So they ask the developers to bring them these additional water rights that they need to serve these colonies, which I think is quite absurd as well, that the state, local state itself sources water rights through illegal markets. I guess I'm just, maybe I've missed it in my entire, just trying to get a sense of relative water access as mediated through private development. It's a clean enabler. It's going to be crazy what's going on, and that's the very powerful message from your research. I'm just trying to test whether in terms of people getting access to water, and if most people or more people, especially for the informal sector, it's how big a phenomenon is in its national level. What, you know, these developments, these formal developments, what proportion of, you know, the national sort of, you know, settlement of construction if you include informal settlements in them? Is it so that we can get a picture of it? It's very big, or it's actually just relatively small? You mean in terms of space or area? What are people, volumes of water? I didn't know how much volume of water people get from the informal sector. Volume of water, I wouldn't know. Yeah, I mean, spatially, it's surely a lot less, a lot less than all the Aikido settlements that are huge, as you see on Google Maps. They're huge, so the conjuntos there are just little spots between that. And in terms of water, I couldn't say really. It's hard to tell because, yeah, it would be great to have the data, also about water availability and so on. I mean, I know there are a lot of zones in formal settlements where people only have water a few hours per day, and so on. But, yeah, it's always difficult to establish direct causal relationships between one and the other. Sure. Yeah, so I hope that has a good question. Oh, and just to mention, because you were saying that they're not the poorest of the poor. I'm guessing, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Maybe they're not the poorest of the poor in the sense that they are formerly employed. But if you see what it means to be formerly employed, it doesn't mean much in Mexico. The minimum wage is like the lowest of all, even in Latin America, the lowest. It's not, it's even in Mexico below the poverty line. You know the national poverty line. So, yeah, it's also, I would say it's also largely what we consider poor people that think, yeah, fulfilling their dream of finding a house in these colonies. Yeah, because if I could, if I could nicely show the role of the international investors, like to fuel the demand and supply on the one hand and the other one. You're nicely sure they're on the left or to fuel the demand side here on the supply side. And then what comes to mind is that on the left, you find like a public private partnership scheme where you have joined the financial contribution of the public sources of finance and the private ones. What comes to mind is that the people in PDP schemes, the PDP does not do any work. It is the public sector's side that provides guarantees to provide the expected return of investment to the private sector, which means that incidentally it is also taxpayers which are to lose out of the scheme. Which are consequently also taxpayers. Oh, yeah. They have to be called to contribute to this scheme as a more obscure losers within this framework. And the current population is on the supply side. I just think that if there could be also someone more to gain out of this scheme, which could be speculation of the increased rate of land for example. And that is why they are also supposedly some cause of this because at least this kind of when there was the housing crash, possibly also some real estate companies found themselves into trouble. Yeah. And so just comes to my mind how they're spreading the gains and losses to extend also to taxpayers and the taxpayers of land and the real estate. Yeah. Yeah. I know that. Yeah. Yeah. That's very. Yeah. I've tried actually. I've tried to dig more into that also that the companies that that these four companies that are three companies that went bankrupt and it's quite difficult to get. I mean, they're still talking about that they're going to bail them out somehow and say apparently they got money from the state. Again, also to save these companies because they have so many houses. And but yeah, it's quite difficult to get the data. And then when I was there last time, my focus was was not on this part on the on the land issues with the farmers and so on. So then it's also always a time constraint as a person to follow up. There's so many things to follow up in this. Yeah. But I mean, I'm sure that I'm quite sure that the people that all these companies probably themselves so much money. The banks actually lost the banks that invested directly in the supply side that they invested directly in the companies. They they lost at least what it looks like. But what's been going on behind closed doors. Yeah, who knows. And actually after this. Oh, I could bring more and more stuff because after 2013, the business before 2013, right, this graph that the federal mortgage company only ensured the demand slide. And now it's also the supply side. So they also get also service intermediary between the direct the real estate developers and the financial market was like that before. So they pushed a lot of more money into this whole thing after 2013 to encourage the market again. Wonderful business. This scheme. So where. What is the right timing to take that to go out of the business. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. I'm just wondering in some broader ecological system, because scarcity, regularization of ground water seems to I mean, that's one of the You know, so for regularization of the scarcity, so we need to manage this better. One of the inputs into construction of this housing is obviously ground water going into the construction processes. And I see this from experience in India, where in the last few years there's been a lot of focus on how to get builders and developers to use recycle the water instead of using this pure ground water because of impacts on the quantity side was the qualitative side. So it's just wondering whether from an ecological sustainability perspective, whether there is any strength in environmental laws in Mexico, any demand for such levels of regulation. And also whether there's a market for recycled water because that is just something that is emerging, not just pure water but also recycled water. Interesting. Yeah, I did actually. Interesting point. And two ways. One is that the InfoNavid, they are now well, displaying themselves as a green kind of green agency. And they have things like rainwater, high-wasting and so on in these new colonies that they constructed in the new buildings. Although they gave me a presentation about this. I haven't done research about it. I don't know. A GTSET, the GIZ, the German Development Corporation is actually involved in that financing it. I don't know to which extent it's working or successful. And what are recycling is also happening, but it's in the industry. And that was also, it must also be further now. I should also have a look into that again when I'm there next time, because they've started about three years ago, I think, establishing a, among the industry, water recycling plant where an industry can buy water from this plant for cheaper, of course, than from what they'd have to pay to Kondakwa for groundwater. And so that's something that was a complete private initiative by all the companies, the industrial parks in this area. Yeah, the state had nothing to do with it. So that's also quite interesting, I think, but I don't know how far it's now, if it's actually working now. So what's happening with wastewater that comes out of the house? Because there's not a lot of water consumption in that domestic use. So most of it must go back to the environment in some form or another. How much of that is recycled? Is that the recharge of the aquifers? Or is it the pollution of the rivers that they'll receive? Or what's happening with that? Mostly in the outside, it's mostly channels, rivers. It goes in the river Lärmö, it's the river. There's very few, there is very few wastewater treatment plants, especially in the public. The private companies, the big ones, the transnational ones, they have their own plants, because of image and so on to the outside. But the municipalities, there's very few plants and working plants in the area. So a lot of the wastewater actually leaves the valley through the river? Yeah, it leaves the valley, it goes to Laguna Chapala, to the Pacific Frens. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I'm Richard, actually, I teach on the Political Ecology Development Course here at SAS. I also do some work on labour contractors in India, so I'm interested in that aspect, and I'm going back to Andy's question about the realities. You mentioned social networks and social capital. I assume when you've met and interviewed many of these people, do you get a sense of their careers, what they did before, how you become a coyote over time? Do they have relatives that work for the state? Do they gain that sort of knowledge? And related to that, do they have links with, for instance, politicians? Is that how they achieve what they do? They're not simply a bridge between buyers and sellers, but they're able to do that because they have political connections. And the second part of the question is what makes a good coyote? How are you successful in that? Both to the bureaucrats, the people that sell it. I mean, how do people become aware of a coyote? And they're not just presenting themselves to those two buyers and sellers, but also presenting the results of the transaction between them. So the actual finals, how do they present that way? Yeah, exactly. It's presented as a very formal and legal, not illegal. It's not illegal, because it's not stated anywhere in the law that it's illegal. It's not allowed. And I think the most important is because there's been a lot of problems, apparently, with fake titles. So it's a trust. Yeah, so that's a recommendation for people. And it's a very serious, like a consultant. Like a consultant. Can you say something about it? It's kind of different. Yeah, because on the one hand, people call it the black market and the coyotes. But on the other hand, it's also something very established. It seems like it's something totally normal. And yeah. And of course, what you need is good relationships to Guanagua. That's the first thing. That's the most important thing, because you need the trust to people there, that you don't, yeah, because you give them money. You know, it's like, it's also corrupt business. So yeah, you need a lot of, and you need a lot of legal expertise because for one of these transactions, it's like this big of a document, a folder document, you have to submit to Guanagua with all the necessary studies of technical details, environmental assessment and so on. And I was thinking, where the police would investigate, who would investigate these acts of corruption? Does that happen often or who would be responsible? It happened. I guess it's mostly if it happens related to political... Well, I've always said that... Yeah, I think it's mostly that, because it happened that they fired people. They fired the director and the sub director of legal issues or something a few years ago. They were involved, that's in this water returner paper. There was this big company, Coca-Cola actually. They had a concession for 40,000 cubic meters and they used 840,000 people, cubic meters and they paid the money to them so they let it happen. And that's something they exposed. But of course the Coca-Cola was not exposed, people were fired. And later, I don't know, anti-corruption, it's very big officially, but informally I guess in most areas it still persists. And have you had an example of the biogas of these people? What kind of people are criminal cases? Yeah, people that used to work at Guanagua themselves before. Or people that just have a good sense of business. And yeah, they've known these people for a long time, have done business with them. I don't think it's possible to... Because there's not many of them, there's very few that control this market. And yeah, it's not easy to enter the market and become a coyote, I think, because of that, because you need the trust first of all. So from people that has recommendations, because it's something a little tricky, especially for all the industry, the foreign companies and so on. Something you don't like to be involved with but you have to, so you need someone that really manages the stuff in a good way. And it's all taken care of in a good way. Is there something... Oh, I'm afraid. Is there something stopping the government from legalising the trade of these worst possessions in order to regulate the tax? Yeah, I guess it's the idea that water is a common good. And that's something that's... It's legitimacy factor but there'd be a huge... Because it is something that brings people together in Mexico. Water isn't an issue. There are social movements and so on around that. So I guess, yeah, I consider it to be privatised. But I mean, most people, they don't know about this illegal market. So only people that are involved in the housing sector or in the industry, industrial parties, of course, everyone knows, and the farmers. But normal people don't know about this. That's also why I'm saying it's also the danger of it and the nice thing for politicians also because it's re-allocation of France. It's really completely under the table. And you could find out about it, looking into all the Excel data or whatever is online about who has the concessions and so on, but who does that? I think you were... Thank you very much. I'm a PhD student at Cambridge and I'm looking at water access in Cairo and even so, there's a lot of money there. I was actually interested in understanding how the market and the role of the World Bank and how it kind of seems like it started kind of the school process a little bit by the beginning funds. And you can see, as you mentioned, that this is kind of a trap to the George's privatization and it's a legal characterization. And you can see kind of like an ongoing emptiness by international organizations kind of on that trap. The other question I had was about the real estate companies, so the housing developers. I'm kind of curious to know who they are. Are they connected to the state? Are they state owned companies? How did they kind of get into the stiffness of both income housing and their relationship with the state? Yeah, that's also a good question. To start with that, that's also, of course, I'm almost inclined to say, yeah, people, it started apparently also during the Fox government from 2000 because of personal connections to the construction industry to one of these firms that, yeah, policy was also made a little bit in favor of these people's companies. The political elite itself is very much involved in this. Not only in housing also and further infrastructure, I also looked into highway projects and it's also, it's really bad, yeah. And the World Bank, were you referring to the housing or the water? Because I mean, they're both involved in both. So I guess both, but kind of like if there's an amplification of water happening soon, that's kind of leading towards, yeah, tomorrow's World Bank. I'm not aware that the World Bank manages for privatization of this. Yeah, no, I'm not aware of that. I mean, there's also a difference between privatization of water resources and water supply. And what both is officially state service in Mexico and would be problematic, I think, to privatize it in terms of social resistance. There's strong resistance in terms of water. And it would also be interesting to look at the personal relationship, the careers of some of the Mexican civil water officials in the World Bank. And one of the former heads of Conagua has been the senior irrigation advisor of the World Bank. You would also have to look at, so Mexico is very well-present in armed wars, I don't know for recent years, but previously Mexico was very well-present in debates with the Bank on water, as he did for that matter. So, yeah. And you answered those, I guess. I just have a question about the license holders and the license holders, who I guess have found themselves in the gold mines. Who are they? Are there any examples of small-scale license holders who make lots of money through this? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not aware that there are any. So, that's one of the questions. Also, yeah, we need more time again to do research about it. There's a lot of community lands. They also had water titles for irrigation. But, yeah, it's also difficult to find out. I guess we also would need to be lucky to find out, because stuff had happened in the past. The presidents of the Ixidos, they had changed. They changed like every two years or something. So, and there's a lot of corruption going on in there as well. So, there have been stories of Ixidos presidents, for example, selling water rights of their own, whom you know, Ixidos. And, of course, without the people knowing about this. But I don't have any hard data about it. Yeah. And at the moment, it's mostly the, mostly the industry that's trading the rights. Yeah. Any other comments or questions? It's a very interesting question about the whole financial and financial issues. My name is Bracken, I'm a student of Ixos. Because, to some extent, we're a person of the kind of financing mechanism. It's expected to benefit the farmers and the small farming households. So, in this case, whether these communities are large or it's individual farmers benefiting from this whole process. So, how is the idea of electricity in that process as well? This could be a very interesting question. Whether these communities are benefiting from the whole financial model, this one. The farmers? The farmers, the community with the numbers, for instance, if they're done, the water is owned by the whole the entire village. So, I mean, it's very interesting because whether this kind of financial addition is benefiting these communities are very important. You mean the water? Financialization of the water? Yeah. Yeah, so the question, yeah, I mean, it's related to the same point, right? Who were the ones that sold or that were able to sell or are able to sell water rights? And I think, first of all, the big line holdings and the irrigation, they were the big farmers. So, these were the first ones benefiting. Also, in terms of land, because these were also the ones that sold their land for the construction of these colonies. And, yeah, in terms of the water, I haven't heard of a case where a HIDO as a total, I mean, they have hundreds of people usually. So, they sold their water rights and profited from that. And, yeah, I doubt it, how that has happened. And mostly it's not a revenge line anyway. So, there have been some, but more surface water. I think there have been some with groundwater, but I don't think it's the majority of the HIDOs. But it's something really it's more speculative because I haven't had the time to look into it. And it'd be quite difficult also because you'd have to go with the list of all the concessions, with the list of all the titles, you'd have to go through Iran and this is also a huge area. So, it's like hundreds of titles, hundreds of wells, you'd have to go and ask people what happened to the rights and so on. So, yeah, it'd be a bigger project to do it. Nice one. I was wondering actually, curious how does the media respond to what the markets in Mexico, especially in Mexico, do they actually do that? Yeah, I haven't seen any media reports about it. And anywhere in Mexico where I talk to people know what I'm about to do. So, yeah, the media it's depressing. Yeah, the media is not working very well, I would say from from my outside perspective. Hi, my name is Nini and I teach at Source. This is very very important to end the presentation. I just reflected on the roles of the quality and the work of questions about and the fact that I said those people are not pretty moving, so there's no way in the law I specified what they're doing to me. So thinking, I've been trying to work here to follow between what's formal, what's legal, what's legal, what's important. So this process between the guarantee and informality informality and the guarantee because that's something that in France is defined. How can we see the quantities of formal legal formal description? Yeah, it's a tricky question because I mean, what is of course legal and that's how they sell themselves. Is there consultants? What are consultants? They facilitate what are rights transmissions. Nothing is illegal about that. It's just illegal to take money for it, to sell the water rights itself. And that's the thing that is yeah, that is not formal and that is yeah, but I don't know if there are do you were asking about my personal opinion about whether it's illegal or should we should call it illegal? Not actually that unique example but it's also a description, which is what you just said. Legal, what you call just to be clear. Yeah, I mean, everyone knows obviously still it's a kind of illegal, otherwise they would call it the black market. Right? The money transaction part of this definitely. The money Yeah, it's illegal, but yeah. It's like the kind of transfer process in India where politicians formally say there are committees for arranging the transfers of government officials every three years and that's all formalized it's all in principle okay but then of course it's not legal, but there's a whole market for public office doing that or part of it now and that's the illegal part. So, yeah, there is and the broker I think has the capacity to move in both words and exactly because it is united in one person there is no contradiction or everybody nobody has to experience contradiction because you concentrate it in one point in someone who is willing to make a business out of that that's the wonderful way and the other but we do that in many ways also that's what we call this for carrying transaction costs isn't it? Any other last comments before I'll let it open up just how they find it exactly, just a nice comment that brings to the mind how they can penetrate with each other such an important arrangement of the broker role which plays a very important function for all of this mechanism with a very formal integrated financial system we are building two different worlds coming side by side with each other and the first is certainly the second one because you can think of a perspective of a rational investor here and not going to be running into a house that cannot say that the water would be supplied to this house and so just to realize that there is a normal mechanism in many ways we can ensure that water will arrive in the house and your own vehicles obviously can it's a very smart idea okay any other things you're welcome to chat informally after this we are going to announce the next seven months next week seven months yes next week's seminar will be right here at the same time by delivered by the towering system yeah we are talking about neoliberalization and sort of plays around but from the TVT and now markets are constructed I look forward to that because it's sort of my own your work and the third episode of the water series will be on the 22nd of February I think that is a Wednesday in three weeks at least it must be because today is the first and it is Antonio Jolitz who is in Cardiff and works on water in cities in Latin America as well so there is a sort of a connection here that emerged through that interpretation but I think his work is more more so please come again I connect and then on the 8th of March we are going to talk again about infrastructure and financialization in a broader sense so okay thank you very much thank you Nadine particularly very much for this excellent presentation thank you and we hope to see you back after some time with all the trench-like remaining trophies thank you and see you thank you thank you thank you