What if what comes out of your tap is too polluted to drink?

One hallmark of life in a “developed” country is a secure supply of clean water. But American landscapes are marred with dry patches. Activists went to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) last month to shame the U.S. for forcing on its people a kind of thirst that smacks of festering poverty in the world’s richest society.

At an IACHR hearing on water rights, activists from different regions denounced the U.S. government’s failure to provide clean, affordable water.

While they cited crumbling sanitation systems and agricultural pollution, the fundamental crisis wasn’t simply scarcity, but institutionalized deprivation and massive social inequality.

The government, they declared, “systematically denies our human right to life by: allowing our communities to live with contaminated drinking water for decades; engaging in mass water shutoffs… and leaving us without adequate water and sanitation infrastructure.”

Horacio Amezquita, an activist with the San Jerardo Community/ Environmental Justice Coalition on Water, recalled industrialized agriculture overtaking his Salinas Valley farming cooperative, housing 64 families. It was founded in the 1970s by Mexican farmworkers seeking to “escape the violent racism of the urban slums.”

“Government permits the ag industry to shift the burden for pollution.”

Since the 1990s, however, their rural sanctuary has been assaulted by pollution from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides contaminating local groundwater aquifers. Though the community has upgraded infrastructure to protect the water supply, there’s been a spike in water costs – up to 15 percent of household income. Now the community is trying to stave off corporate privatization of its water system. “Government permits the agricultural industry to shift the burden to pay for its pollution to the people least able to afford it,” Amezquita argued.

He noted California has not fulfilled the mandates of its 2012 landmark law on the human right to water, which states, “all humans have a right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible water for human consumption and sanitation.” Today, he says, in the community that once provided refuge from a toxic urban environment, “intensive, year-round agriculture has left a legacy of groundwater pollution.”

Rebecca Landy of the U.S. Human Rights Network says the group is campaigning for “concrete actions the U.S. government can take to stop the crisis” including a moratorium on mass water shutoffs, remediating pollution, and punishing polluters instead of affected communities.

The IACHR’s word will likely go ignored by most U.S. policymakers, but the the U.S. shouldn’t need to be shamed by an international body into providing essentials.

While there may not be a guaranteed right to water in the Constitution, perhaps that’s simply because we take the dignity water endows us with for granted – until the well runs dry.

MICHELLE CHEN is a contributing writer for The Nation.