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Description of  The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos

0816695423 azw3 There's Money in Thirst, reads a headline in the New York Times. The CEO of Nestl, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so we're all aware that it has a price. But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirstone where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations. In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a revolution of the thirsty in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. Read more