The poisonous global politics of water

THE WATER thieves come at night. They arrive in trucks, suck water out of irrigation canals and drive off. This infuriates Alejandro Meneses, who owns a big vegetable farm in Coquimbo, a parched province of Chile. In theory his landholding comes with the right to pour 40 litres of river-water a second on his fields. But thanks to drought, exacerbated by theft, he can get just a tenth of that, which he must negotiate with his neighbours. If the price of food goes up because farmers like him cannot grow enough, “there will be a big social problem,” he says.