We watched The Grab last night. The general point is that countries like China and the UAE don't have enough water to produce food to feed their populations so they're grabbing water rich land in other countries and farming on it. Effectively, they're exporting water in the form of food from water rich countries like America and Africa.
spoiler alertOne of the bigger revealed scandals is that Erik Prince, former Blackwater founder/CEO, went onto form Frontier Services Group which repurposes Prince's mercenary logistic expertise to buy deed-less, generational land in Africa and farm on it for clients like China and the UAE.1 My wife called this "corporate colonialism."
Another interesting story from the documentary that might interest ~libertarians is that rural Arizona does not effectively protect a land owner's groundwater rights, so these water investor-exporters are sucking aquifers dry.
I generally don't pay a lot of attention to geopolitics (there's so much double, triple, n-tuple speak I can't stand it) but I enjoyed the documentary a lot. It optimistically asserts energy is a solved problem, or at least its distribution is already decided, so now nation-states are securing the next scarcest thing - water.
Footnotes
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Erik Prince eventually stepped down as CEO of FSG and more recently went on Tucker Carlson promoting a privacy phone company he now leads, which reflexively reminds me of the backdoored ANOM privacy phone for criminals. ↩