Smart Water Management Boosts Food Security

From space, the Earth is a blue sphere brimming with water. But only about 3% is freshwater and usable for humankind. Of that potable water, 70% is used for agriculture. As climate change and expanding populations put more stress on local water supplies, smart water management will be crucial to optimize agricultural and food production, according to the latest interview series on Sustainable Water from IFT’s FutureFood 2050 publishing initiative. FutureFood 2050 explores how increasingly sophisticated science and technology will help feed the world’s projected 9 billion-plus population in 2050.

“I think we are in a very early stage of the water scarcity debate. We still really need to do something because the water footprint is increasing,” says Water Footprint Network founder Arjen Hoekstra, who coined the term “water footprint” in 2002 as a way of describing and comparing how much water consumers use. “The fact that [food and beverage] companies are talking about it is positive. [But] in the end, you have to recognize that talking doesn’t change the world,” he adds.

As the world’s population grows and more people in developing countries eat meat and dairy products that require more water to produce, water shortages could be just around the corner, contends Hoekstra. Total annual global water requirements are expected to jump from 4,500 billion cubic meters to 6,900 billion cubic meters by 2030, according to a 2009 report from the 2030 Water Resources Group. If this forecast proves true, global demand for freshwater would outstrip supply by 40%.

Despite the looming threat—the World Economic Forum this year cited water as the greatest worldwide risk—global beverage and food companies have been slow in curbing their water consumption, according to Hoekstra. While many are exploring the issue, none have taken significant water reduction measures yet, he says, acknowledging that it takes time for large companies to make decisions and enact change.

Some major food companies, such as Nestle, PepsiCo, Kellogg and Coca-Cola, have already introduced measures to use water more effectively within their global operations. But these operations represent just a small fraction of a company’s overall water consumption, says Hoekstra. The real drain on water resources lies within the food and beverage industry supply chain—in the farms where they source raw materials for their products.

Hoekstra advocates for large food and beverage companies to set targets for water usage levels with their suppliers and agricultural producers, since effective solutions are already available to reduce water consumption in agriculture.

Although Africa has a wealth of water resources, they haven’t been exploited productively on the continent as a whole. By the year 2025, predicts the World Wildlife Fund, nearly half of the projected 1.45 billion population in Africa will experience water stress or scarcity if nothing changes.

The impacts of climate change, too, will be increasingly compounded by more people and fewer natural resources—and a more extreme hydrological cycle, says water resources engineer Janos Bogardi, who is senior advisor at the Global Water System Project. “Even though we have the same amount of water on an annual basis, we may have worse distribution, more droughts and more floods. More mouths to be fed, and more variable occurrences of water,” he says.

Currently, only 5% of the arable land in Africa is irrigated, the lowest percentage in the developing world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), compared with 41% for Asia and 20% for the world. Transitioning from rain-fed agriculture to irrigated agriculture can mean a boost in efficiency and production, says Bogardi. But the transition is not a simple task.

Although irrigation is an ancient practice in some parts of the world, imposing it on cultures can have serious backlash, especially in areas where land ownership and farming practices passed down from one generation to the next are deeply valued. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, a number of such development projects in Africa did not bring the anticipated results, says Bogardi, partly due to lack of buy-in by people not ready for such a major cultural shift.

In addition, all irrigation is not equal, and the amount of needed investment varies depending on the scale of the farm (such as individuals vs. corporations), as well as the profitability of crops. For cheap staple foods, imprecise flooding is common, for example, while on South Africa’s high-value wine farms, elaborate drip irrigation systems pipe water directly to each individual stem via computer-based distribution.

“It takes a lot of time to build this infrastructure, to fund this infrastructure,” says Bogardi, so other activities need to go hand in hand, such as focusing on drought-resistant crops, or diversifying agricultural production for small-scale farmers to provide income.

But Bogardi says he’s optimistic about making this transition in African agricultural practices as long as there’s deep discussion about irrigation with traditional farmers. The people have to see the potential benefits, he says, and be willing to learn how to work with new infrastructure and means of production, such as bringing water to the fields. “It can be done, and I believe it will be done,” he says.

To read these and other stories in the Sustainable Water series, please visit www.futurefood2050.com.