Agro-food systems have evolved in the last two centuries from mostly local, extensive production and habits to intensive crop and livestock cultivation in large farms, with processing, trade, technology and finance in the hands of large global corporations. This made it possible to feed the ever growing human population, but with significant drawbacks: overexploitation of soils, widespread emission of pollutants, animal suffering, decay of local communities and mixed impacts on dependencies and resilience. These advances coincide with continuing hunger and undernourishment on a large scale; at the same time, obesity is rising as unhealthy food gets commercialized worldwide. The road towards sustainable agro-food systems demands regulating the corporations and their innovative and marketing powers, protecting and restoring local and regional food diets and practices, a new look at the merits of trade and, last but not least, renewed ethical reflections on land ownership and on the relation between humans and other living beings.

The claim that there exists a complex ‘nexus’ linking water and other global challenges has become a commonplace of discourse on resource governance. But how should the relations between water and cognate areas be understood? This final main chapter of the book takes up this question by examining the four main relations underpinning water security and insecurity today: with trade, agricultural production, energy and capital. The chapter considers these four relations in turn, in each case providing an overall mapping of the 'transformations and circulations' that define them and an assessment of how they shape water-related (in)securities, especially in the book's five divided environments. The chapter argues that water is much more a dependent than an independent variable in nexus relations and that patterns of water (in)security are determined neither by natural availability nor market efficiencies, but instead by countries’ positionings within a structurally unequal and hierarchical capitalist world order. Against neo-liberal arguments, the chapter thus argues that contemporary capitalist nexus relations are a central part of the problem of water – and climate – security.