traditionally, water use has been approached from the production side, by quantifying the following three columns of water use: water withdrawals in the agricultural, industrial, and domestic sector. while this does provide valuable data, it is a limited way of looking at water use in a globalised world, in which products are not always consumed in their country of origin. international trade of agricultural and industrial products in effect creates a global flow of virtual water, or "embodied water" (akin to the concept of embodied energy).