Since the beginning of time, mankind has considered fresh drinking water as a natural and eternal phenomenon. People have tended to settle in places where drinking water was readily available and it was therefore only recently that people started to realise that water is not an inexhaustible resource. So much so, that at the end of the 20th century, more and more researchers are predicting that a shortage of fresh water is going to be the most serious resource problem in the next hundred years. Water has thus become a political problem, rather than a technical problem. Access to drinking and irrigation water has always been a political issue.
Any society needs to find ways of regulating ownership, modes of production and human relationships.
More and more, the awareness that water is not the least important in this series is growing. Increasing shortages of water in some industrialised countries, as well as power struggles over access to water by the growing populations in the developing countries, have led to an increased awareness about the need for a more economical and sustainable use of water resources. As with food, the problem with water is not one of global shortage, but one of uneven distribution. There is plenty of water on Earth. At the same time, it is one of the few renewable resources.