Water Resource Depletion Threatens Global Food Supply
Food Supply Security, Human Health, Quipu Economic Forum, Water Scarcity :: Comments (0)
8 October 2009 :: by admin
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.
As Lester Brown notes, in his report “Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion“:
Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.
Best-practice water productivity measures, in activities ranging from farming and industry to infrastructure and personal home and garden use, are central to fostering a climate of cooperation and political security in the emerging culture of global food politics. The vanishing of Saudi Arabia’s grain supply, along with China and India’s massive grain import demand, are part of an established trend that is destabilizing food supplies around the world and driving prices up, even in the most productive regions of the US, Brazil and Europe.
