It's renewable, but it's finite, and so water supplies per person tend to decrease as population increases. We currently have about 460 million people living in these countries, and that number is going to jump up to about three billion over the next 30 years. It raises tons of issues about water and agriculture, growing enough food, providing for all the material needs that people demand as incomes increase, and providing drinking water. A billion people don't have clean water, and two billion don't have adequate sanitation. This is still the cause of 80 percent of the diseases in developing countries.
Drinking water is really quite a small share.
In water-scarce regions, you do find agriculture and cities now beginning to compete for the same limited supplies. And where that is occurring, generally it's the farmers who tend to lose water. When you look at Beijing, China for example, you find that farmers on the outskirts of the city who had been relying on the reservoirs for their irrigation water have been cut off. And that's going to occur in more and more places. There's an old adage that water flows uphill towards money.