This article by Shiney Varghese was published on June 27, 2012 in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Growing conflicts over who owns water and how to manage it are emerging all over the world. The report "Global Water Security", led by the Defense Intelligence Agency ((DIA), attempts to answer the question, "How will water problems (shortages, poor quality or floods) impact U.S. national security interests over the next 30 years." It identified some of the most important water-related concerns of this century.

But U.S. policy still lags behind by narrowly focusing on efficiency and favoring corporate control rather than actually looking at the causal relationship between human rights violations and social disruptions that the intelligence community warns about. A case in point is the role that water plays in food security, which the Defense Intelligence Agency has identified as one of the biggest challenges.