Agriculture, Climate, Environment, Food, Food Riots, Food Shortages - Monday, June 9, 2008 21:17 - 0 Comments

Water Scarcity: The Real Food Crisis

After decades in the doldrums, food prices have been soaring this year, causing more misery for the world’s poor than any credit crunch. The geopolitical shockwaves have spread round the world, with food riots in Haiti, strikes over rice shortages in Bangladesh, tortilla wars in Mexico, and protests over bread prices in Egypt.”
“The immediate cause is declining grain stocks, which have encouraged speculators, hoarders, and panic-buyers. But what are the underlying trends that have sown the seeds for this perfect food storm?”
“Biofuels are part of it, clearly. A quarter of U.S. corn is now converted to ethanol, powering vehicles rather than filling stomachs or fattening livestock. And the rising oil prices that encourage the biofuels boom are also raising food prices by making fertilizer, pesticides, and transport more expensive.”
“But there is something else going on that has hardly been mentioned, and that some believe is the great slow-burning, and hopelessly underreported, resource crisis of the 21st century: water.”
“Climate change, overconsumption and the alarmingly inefficient use of this most basic raw material are all to blame.”
We are using [our] rivers to death. “And we are also pumping out underground water reserves almost everywhere in the world. With two-thirds of the water abstracted from nature going to irrigate crops – a figure that rises above 90 percent in many arid countries – water shortages equal food shortages.”
“Consider the two underlying causes of the current crisis over world food prices: falling supplies from some of the major agricultural regions that supply world markets, and rising demand in booming economies like China and India.”
“Why falling supplies? Farm yields per hectare have been stagnating in many countries for a while now.” “But the immediate trigger, according to most analysts, has been droughts, particularly in Australia, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, but also in some other major suppliers like Ukraine. Australia’s wheat exports were 60 percent down last year; its rice exports were 90 percent down.”
“More and more countries are up against the limits of food production because they are up against the limits of water supply. Most of the Middle East reached this point years ago. In Egypt, where bread riots occurred this spring, the Nile River no longer reaches the sea because all its water is taken for irrigation.”
“According to estimates by UNESCO’s hydrology institute, the world’s largest net supplier of virtual water until recently was Australia. It exported a staggering 70 cubic kilometers of water a year in the form of crops, mainly food. With the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s main farming zone, virtually dry for the past two years, that figure has been cut in half.”
“The largest gross exporter of virtual water is the United States, but its exports have also slumped as corn is diverted to domestic biofuels, and because of continuing drought in the American West.”
“The current water shortages should not mark an absolute limit to food production around the world. But it should do three things. It should encourage a rethinking of biofuels, which are themselves major water guzzlers. It should prompt an expanding trade in food exported from countries that remain in water surplus, such as Brazil. And it should trigger much greater efforts everywhere to use water more efficiently.”