In cases of high water levels, dikes get saturated with water, weakening the strength of the dike and thus leading to collapse. Collapses due to droughts are rare, but in the extremely dry European summer of 2003, a dike collapsed in Wilnis, the Netherlands, as a consequence of the drought. The recent tragedy in New Orleans was largely caused by the collapse of water-logged dikes after the height of the storm had passed over the region.

Kent, England, is used as one example of an early specialist in grain. Kent is located near London and became the granary for the capital city.

Mwangi (2003 Mwangi , E. 2003 . Institutional changepolitics The transformation of property rights in Kenya's Maasailand . PhD dissertation , Indiana University , Bloomington . [Google Scholar]) documents a similar problem of governments accusing pastoralists of free-riding when ecologists have documented that the Masaai pastoralist system was well-adapted to the dry, spotty ecology in which it evolved.

Douglass Vermillion (2001 Vermillion , D. L. 2001 . Property rightscollective action in the devolution of irrigation system management . In Collective action, property rights,devolution of natural resource management , eds. R. Meinzen-Dick , A. Knox , M. DiGregorio , 183 – 220 . Feldafing , Germany Deutsche Stiftung für internationale Entwicklung . [Google Scholar], 188) recounts a similar event that occurred in the Philippines in the early 1990s, where candidates running for the Philippine senate announced that they would abolish the national irrigation service fee since they felt that the “farmers were too poor and shouldn't have to pay the fee.” In the Philippines, farmers actually protested this possibility as they argued that the “payment of the fee was their only basis for demanding an acceptable irrigation service from the government.” That was not the end of the story, however, and fees were substantially reduced at a later juncture.