Quantum of Solace: When Water Rights Meet the Mainstream

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace (2011), with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.” These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of
Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). 

Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155). 

Quantum of Solace takes the appropriative doctrine further, since it puts water at the center of an international film genre, the James Bond film. Juxtaposing a secret organization fronted by what looks like an environmental group against Bond and the British Secret Service, Quantum constructs water as a commodity worth more than oil, the resource the organization, Quantum, claims to be seeking on its now environmentally protected lands in Central and South America.