Post-UN Water Conference, When You Think About Your Next Meal, Think About Water

More remarkable was the minimal attention paid to agriculture and the overall food system, which are so bound up in water as the largest user and polluter.

It’s not as if conference sessions and speakers omitted the relationship between water and agriculture entirely, but water’s elemental role in food security was underemphasized. The fact is that agriculture makes up 72 percent of total water withdrawals worldwide, and 92 percent of the world’s total water footprint. Therefore, feeding the world depends on maintaining adequate supplies of clean freshwater.

This event’s underplaying of agriculture’s dependence on water reflects how leaders working on systemic global crises, like food and climate, continue to overlook how central water resilience is to their issue’s problems and ultimate resolution. This message is key to the landmark Turning the Tide report, recently released by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which called for collective action to restore the broken water cycle of too much, too little or too polluted water. In a Guardian interview about the report, co-chair and lead author, Johan Rockstrom, noted that, “There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water. Behind all these challenges we are facing, there’s always water, and we never talk about water.”

Water scarcity is a major issue for the growing concern of producing enough food for the world’s burgeoning population. The Turning the Tide report finds that freshwater demand is projected to outpace supply by 40 percent by 2030. Meanwhile, this year’s UN water development report cites that about 25 percent of global croplands experience economic water scarcity, where irrigation is lacking because of constrained economic governmental capacity (connected to things like infrastructure and pollution) and not just not limited physical water supplies.

To paraphrase Rockstrom, we must talk about water.

Water is No Afterthought

Natural variability for rain and local water resources have always made agriculture precarious. Torrential rains or interminable droughts can wipe out a farmer’s crops or livestock, and with it, their livelihood.

As population, prosperity and demand grow, and as climate change makes precipitation more erratic and extreme with heavier rains and deeper droughts, the connection between water and food only becomes stronger. The context-based nature of water means climate, geography, hydrology, ecology, industrial water use patterns and more all interact to make water unique to its place, a “locally sourced” original, albeit one in constant flux.

Although rivers or groundwater of a specific location are diverted to grow wheat to produce bread, for example, or cool data centers that produce digital technology, water is increasingly used to produce goods and services that are moved far from its watershed. Recognizing this, the Declaration for Fair Water Footprints presented research at the conference showing how high-income countries like the UK, Netherlands, Japan and the U.S. rely heavily on imports – largely food – produced by lower-income countries under water stress.

Through this “virtual water trade,” production in often economically deprived areas can engender unsustainable water use that depletes resources and damages ecosystems. The local nature of water is commoditized through import and export of goods like food products. In this way, consumers are implicated in both aiding a distant country’s economy and adding to their water stress.