If every country ate the same way that the United States of America eats, the world would have been drained of its freshwater resources more than 15 years ago.  And developing countries like China and India are getting an appetite of America-style food, putting the planet on a "potentially catastrophic" course.

Executives with one of the world's largest food companies Nestle met secretly with US officials, according to a secret US report titled "Tour D'Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water."  It says Nestle is extremely worried about increasing meat consumption rates in China, where people now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians. and Europeans.  But the rate continues to rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

The report says that "a calorie of meat requires ten times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops.  As the world's growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth's water resources will be dangerously squeezed."  As more water is diverted to produce meat, "Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050."  And, "Problems will be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States."

WikiLeaks released these secret documents a few years ago, but new reporting by Reveal News is bringing the full impact into focus because of current events.  Before the civil war in Yemen attracted the attention of the world's news agencies, 14 of the country's 16 aquifers had run dry, which set the stage for conflict by causing widespread instability.  Likewise in Syria, where global warming led to drought, which prompted thousands of idle farmers to abandon their crops and flock to cities, creating a supply of disaffected young men ready to fight.

Assuming the world's freshwater were fairly distributed, Nestle estimates there is enough to provide the current population of 6.7 Billion with a daily diet of 2,500 calories.  But, "there is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century."  And it's not fairly distributed the American diet is more like 3,600 calories with substantial meat consumption.