Lunchtime

So I have again noticed that I am reading too many work related texts, and forgetting who the Prime Minister of Australia is (yes... I have actually done that... Kev, who?... very embarrassing...)... so at lunch I decided to peruse a favourite journal - Foreign Affairs, and found this very interesting article: Hydraulic Pressures - http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66578/james-e-nickum/hydraulic-pressures?page=show.

The whole article I thought was interesting, well written, and especially at the end, some very interesting comments:

As water experts say, water flows uphill to money. The rich and powerful, frequently the urban and industrial, have the biggest pumps. And there often is an inverse relationship between economic rationality and political rationality: the economic laws of scarcity push prices up even as the political laws of scarcity give officials a reason to keep prices down. Another complication is that water problems are irremediably connected, sometimes as a symptom and sometimes as a cause, to many other issues: globalization, demographics, governance, energy, health, the role of women and children, the environment. The world's water problems reflect all the world's problems.

But finally, what made me reflect a little (off topic of the water crises), is the next to last sentence on the issues, and namely the particular mention of 'women'. It didn't say: people, children, the environment, women were singled out. I guess the reason this struck a chord was that as far as we have come in equality in Western countries, there are still so many many places where women are less than people.