The great mutation
In historical, biological and philosophical terms, life in all its forms—including that of human societies—is inextricably linked to water. It was there that the first cellular developments began nearly four billion years ago. Living organisms, including the human body, are primarily composed of water. The reproduction of life depends on its consumption. For billions of years, this process generally posed no risk. Water was not considered a scarce resource but a renewable one: the well-known hydrological cycle taught with enthusiasm in elementary education for decades. Its constant circulation between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere—the change in its physical state from liquid to vapor, only to return as rain or snow—enabled life to flourish on Earth. This cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff and infiltration into rivers, seas, and underground aquifers ensured, in turn, its infinite reproduction.
However, this process has undergone a profound and tragic transformation. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population now live in areas with insecure or critical access to water. Unless significant change occurs, the outlook will grow bleaker in the years ahead. Over the past five decades, an area of wetlands nearly the size of the European Union has been lost. A recent report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) has warned that we are entering an era of global water bankruptcy. This is no longer a crisis that can be resolved in some way by restoring the human-water system; rather, it is a persistent condition affecting both flows and stored reserves, with a virtually irreversible degradation that prevents a return to a given previous normality.
The collapse of this hydrological cycle, which has existed for billions of years, is the most revealing and dramatic expression of the fracturing process of the social metabolism that began in recent centuries with capitalism and intensified under its neoliberalization. Furthermore, the framing of this crisis process has served to underpin the neoliberal management of water resources. In these brief lines, we will attempt to account for this dual dimension and the current challenges it poses.
The commodification of scarcity
In bourgeois economic thought, the scarcity of a good is a prerequisite for its economic consideration and its transformation into a commodity. Neoliberal rationale adds that this condition arises solely from its subjective perception. In this regard, the epistemic construction of the water crisis has been a necessary step toward its commodification—driven, along with that of a wide range of social and natural goods, by capitalist neoliberalization. This is the market-driven technological solutionism that responds to climate and socio-environmental degradation by expanding the free market and promoting the technocorporate innovation that caused the breakdown in the first place.
In this way, the subjective construction of scarcity has fueled the commodification of water and the terrestrial water system over the past half-century. The first stage involved a global process of privatization of water utilities, which had been almost entirely public since the postwar period; between 1990 and 2005, 381 companies worldwide were privatized for a total value exceeding $45 billion. In the same vein, in 1992, the first International Conference on Water and the Environment deemed water a finite and vulnerable resource; to prevent its waste and promote its conservation and protection, it proposed recognizing it as an economic good. Decades later, in 2020, water itself—specifically, the water usage rights in California—began to be traded through futures contracts on the New York Stock Exchange, enabling stock market speculation on its scarcity or abundance.
A cynical rationale that exploits the crisis to reinforce the very policies and processes that caused it. And so, in a self-perpetuating cycle, the advance of neoliberal transformations laid the material foundations for the water stress and scarcity resulting from a production model—particularly the imposition of ruthless extractivism in the Global South—that overuses, squanders and pollutes water resources. Compounded by the effects of the climate crisis, this model has caused the collapse of freshwater supplies in a growing number of major cities (Montevideo, São Paulo and Lima, among the most significant in Our America) as well as entire regions (more than 1.8 billion people worldwide suffered from droughts between 2022 and 2023).
The normalization of the catastrophe
The intensification of these periods of drought and wildfires amid the climate crisis is compounded by extremely intense cyclonic storms that bring flooding. The water that is missing returns with a demonic and destructive fury. The power of life is not only in short supply but, under fossil capitalism, is transformed into a deathly threat. In the face of these climate collapses, the far right and neo-fascist movements have promoted their naturalization, denying their social causes and reducing them to inevitable natural phenomena or cycles. Furthermore, another more general process of naturalization is also unfolding, attributing the socio-environmental and water crisis to a supposed human nature. From this perspective—for example, under neo-Malthusian arguments regarding demographic or economic growth—identifying the causes of the water crisis avoids questioning the societal framework.
In either case, the management of scarcity focuses its strategies on promoting a shift in attitudes and behaviors that prioritizes social adaptation to the ‘new normal.’ By invoking resilience and resignation, a change in habits is proposed to impose and legitimize increasing public rationing of water use. Under this narrative, deprivation is here to stay and one simply needs to get used to it. As official documents point out, the aim is thus to promote acceptance of living under permanently constrained conditions, a deliberate effort to rebalance demand within a context of reduced carrying capacity, and to support adaptation to a reality presented as unchangeable.
The technocorporate governance of scarcity
The material and subjective construction of scarcity became the foundation of its commodification; but likewise, as with capitalist neoliberalization, this promotion of the free market required strong governments and, at the international level, a network of international organizations, business corporations, investment funds, scientific institutions, and a vast network of NGOs that, for at least four decades, have promoted pro-market water paradigms on a global scale.
The growing material reality of the water crisis has, in turn, reinforced and reoriented the need for this public-private and techno-corporate governance. It is no longer merely a matter of commodification but of capitalist governance of scarcity, which seeks to identify, monitor and control available and potential water reserves, even resorting to technological solutions such as wastewater treatment or seawater desalination. Far from proposing the regulation or transformation of the productive matrix responsible for the crisis, this global governance advances the institutional-corporate appropriation of the scarce resource. It aims to guarantee its access and availability for productive activities considered strategic for capital, prioritizing the imperatives of large private companies at the expense of the consumption needs of the majority of the population.
The Israeli state-owned company Mekorot, accused of restricting access to water for the Palestinian population while favoring illegal settlements, has been advancing since the 2000s in the construction of this technocorporate management of scarcity in Latin America and the Caribbean. With agreements signed in Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Argentina (with agreements covering more than half of its provinces), it recently had to withdraw from the Bío Bío Region in Chile due to protests and social pressure.
The new digital-military extractivist offensive
While the export-oriented extractivist model imposed on Our America since the 1990s found its primary expressions in agribusiness, mega-mining, forest monocultures, and conventional/unconventional hydrocarbons—with their impacts on water and territories— in recent years, in tandem with the intensification of geopolitical disputes over hegemonic transition and the interventionism of U.S. imperialism, the extractivist wave has placed central emphasis on controlling the natural resources required by the military industry and digitalization. A new offensive characterized by: a) the securitization of these resources, now placed under the purview of national security and militarization; b) a counter-reform of the socio-environmental institutions won or built in past decades; and c) a network of bilateral and multilateral agreements that restricts sovereignty by granting industrialized centers access to and control over these resources.
Their deployment poses a major threat to populations, ecosystems and water resources. On the one hand, the relocation to the region of the data centers required for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has and will have an enormous impact on water and energy. Consider that processing, depending on its complexity, between 5 and 50 queries oposes a major threat to populations, ecosystems and water resources.r prompts by AI consumes approximately half a liter of water and that these data centers require enormous amounts for cooling. On the other hand, the central role that the digital-military complex assigns to the control of so-called critical minerals—for example, the 60 minerals identified by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2025, which include among others copper, lithium, uranium and the so-called rare earth elements—promises to dramatically intensify their exploitation, which, in the mega-mining model, uses (and pollutes) immense amounts of water for processing and transport, reaching 1,300 liters per second of activity.
The value of societal alternatives
The critical nature of these minerals does not refer to any intrinsic property or essence they possess, but rather to the vulnerability or dependence they represent for the economic and geopolitical strategies of the companies and governments that label them as such. In response to these arguments, communities and peoples have been proclaiming that water is worth more than those commodities; that it is worth more than gold, copper, lithium, uranium and rare earths. This is not simply a matter of different languages of valuation, but of the difference between a community organization founded on social utility and one dominated by the interests and profits of corporations and their states. The defense of water—and, consequently, of life—is not only a programmatic stance of resistance adopted by the affected populations across the conflicts of Our America, but also the foundation of a possible, desirable, and more necessary than ever societal alternative.