Water is the primary requirement for human existence, belonging to all. Yet from privatization in Britain to the displacement of millions by dam-building in the developing world, it has been appropriated as a commodity by the powerful. This wide-ranging text examines the unequal distribution of water on a global scale. Export crops are irrigated, subsistence crops wither, and yet all through history local communities have devised ways of ensuring fair shares of a vital and limited resource. This book reasserts the claim for local community control of access to water.