Vandana Shiva, one of the world's leading environmental and human rights activists, outlines the historical roots of our corporate-run culture and the erosion of communal water rights. 

 In her book   Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit,  she explains that while drought and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match-or even surpass-the oil wars of the twentieth. 

Its a dire situation. Water shortages have been intensifying globally as the demand for water, much of which is used in animal and industrial production, outpaces the supply. Pollution from domestic, industrial and agricultural sources continues to affect the quality of drinking water and climate change is having a profound impact on rainfall distribution, affecting many regions of the world with unprecedented droughts, floods and storms, and their associated economic and social consequences.

Meanwhile, the Global population is still growing. Of the 3 billion people projected to be added to the planet over the next half century, most will be born in countries that are already dealing with severe water shortages. To make matters worse, urbanization and industrialization means that many of these people are moving from villages to large cities where  they will demand much more intensive residential water use.

The dietary choices of the more successful nations may play an even greater role in the world water crisis than the growth of human population. More than 50 percent percent of the water consumed worldwide, including both water diverted from rivers and water pumped from underground, is used for irrigating animal fodder. Because it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, and the average carnivore in the wealthier countries consumes nearly a ton of grain in the form of feed for the animals they eat each year, the same amount of water could have produced far more vegetable protein. So those shifting their diet towards plant-based rather than meat-based proteins are also helping the world’s poor and its dwindling water supply.

 The world desperately needs some sort of  "World Water Protocol" to establish clean water as a global resource for all humanity, not simply as a private posession to be seized and hoarded by the privaleged and powerful. Currently, over 1.2 billion people worldwide are without access to  safe drinking water and more than 5 million people die every year from preventable water-related diseases.