The Hindu Business Line : Saving a million drops to feed a billion mouths

Enhancing water productivity will not only help the poor, who suffer the most during scarcity, it also makes economic sense in the global food market.

IT could not have come at a better (or worse) time. With the water scarcity looming large as ambient temperatures soar in most of the densely populated south, a recent report warns that if water productivity is not enhanced, the poor of the world will suffer the most.

Aptly titled Water: More Nutrition Per Drop, the report presented at the meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York warned that if present food production trends continue, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of undernourished people by year 2015 will remain a dream.

Expectedly, the report highlights statistics and data to present a gloomy scenario. Not without reason, as 840 million people across the world are currently undernourished and some 2 billion will join them in the next two decades.

Pleading their case, the report argues that enhancing water productivity alongside influencing consumption patterns, unsustainable subsidies and restrictive trade policies may ensure that the increasing and conflicting global food demand is met. But such reports often hide, rather than reveal, what is vital.

By suggesting that food imports may ensure food security in countries that are water-scarce, the report may eventually favour the structural reform process unleashed by the World Bank and the IMF that consistently determines what a developing country must grow.

The Central American debt crisis of the 1980s was conveniently used to shift cropping patterns in these countries in favour of the supermarket shelves in the US. Having replaced their staple crops with melons, berries and broccoli, the countries had to import food from the US by eventually spending the dollars they had earned through exports.

Though there might be justification in presenting the case of Egypt, which saved 11 cubic km of water by importing 8.6 million tonnes of grains in 1995, spreading the logic of virtual water to conserve national waters at the cost of protecting the food surplus of powerful countries may indeed make it contentious.

With global trade in food increasingly being on an uneven turf, countries of the south rightfully wonder if this will be yet another imposition on them. Else, why is the use of 550 litres of water to produce flour for one loaf of bread of critical concern and not 7000 litres for producing 100 grams of beef?

Increasing irrigation efficiency may indeed be paramount, given the fact that 70 per cent of developed water resources are diverted for irrigated agriculture. But if 40 per cent of the world cereal output of 2.6 to 2.8 million tonnes is likely to end up as animal feed in 2025, a sizeable human population that lives on $2 a day will continue to remain underfed and undernourished.

And if that is the justification to increase the area under genetically modified crops in the developing countries from 4.3 to 63 million hectares then the report is clearly serving some hidden interests.

Despite some of the contradictions, the authors painstakingly list the range of issues afflicting the food production sector as it relates to prevailing water scarcities with some telling recommendations.

Written by a team of well-known water experts, including Prof Malin Falkenmark and Prof Jan Lundqvist of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and Dr Frank Rijsberman of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), the report questions persistence of sectoral and supply-oriented approach and wonders at the continued inertia to implement integrated action.

The authors could not ignore the specific case of the billion-plus India that is increasingly becoming water-scarce despite no apparent change in its annual receipt of 4000 billion cubic metre of precipitation.

Currently, the country produces grains at an average of 2.7 tonnes per hectare, for which about 600 cubic kilometres of water is diverted for irrigation uses. But if the grain requirement of 2025 is to be met by sustaining the present production average, the country will need to double the current level of diversion for irrigation with the risks of environmental damage.

This seems to be the core argument in favour of the $120-billion proposal to interlink rivers that promises to bring additional 34 million hectares under irrigation.

However, the report presents an interesting alternative scenario that must merit the consideration of the proponents of this project, the President and the Prime Minister.

Says the report: "If grain yields increase 70 per cent, no more increases in water diverted for irrigation will be required." All that the country needs to do is to tone up its agricultural research system to match China's current production average of 4.6 tonnes/hectare.

Any savings at the farm will help meet the increasing urban and industrial demand; sustain the flow in rivers to maintain the minimum ecological services criteria; and help contain salinisation and water-logging of productive lands. Further, increasing water productivity makes economic sense at the global food market too.

While India exports grains at a productivity level of 0.34 kg per cubic metre of water, the US does the same at 1.26 kg per cubic metre. At equal cost prices, this means that India is incurring significant ecological losses by exporting more water per unit of grains.

Undoubtedly, increasing irrigation efficiency holds the key to managing food demand, controlling food grain prices and increasing access to food. Israel's 75 per cent and Iraq's 45 per cent irrigation water use efficiency are examples worth emulating. However, it may need a strong political commitment and a significant shift in the supply-side orientation of water managers.

Though the report acknowledges the inevitability of hydro-climatic realities, it underplays the value of peoples' wisdom in developing strategies under rainfed conditions.

Unless peoples' water wisdom is mainstreamed into policy thinking, the per capita per day yardstick will continue to present a gloomy scenario.

(The author, formerly with World Bank, is a development writer associated with the Delhi-based Ecological Foundation. He can be reached at sudhirendar@vsnl.net)