World Water Crisis Underlying World Food Crisis

In essence, this article discusses various reasons and facts indicating that an impending water shortage will shortly be coupled with a global food shortage. This is due to the link between food and water, ie: water is required to grow food and a lot of it is needed to continue to feed the world's population.

Same main points from the article are below:

• "Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly worsen as climate change impacts intensify," Leape said. "Irrigation-fed agriculture provides 45 percent of the world's food supplies, and without it, we could not feed our planet's population of six billion people."
• Leape warns that many of the world's irrigation areas are highly stressed and drawing more water than rivers and groundwater reserves can sustain, especially in view of climate change. At the same time, he said, freshwater food reserves are declining in the face of the quickening pace of dam construction and unsustainable water extractions from rivers.
• In over 70 percent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with wastewater that is either raw or diluted in streams.
• Wastewater is most commonly used to produce vegetables and cereals, especially rice, according to this and other IWMI reports, raising concerns about health risks for consumers, particularly when they eat uncooked vegetables.
• Few developing countries have official, enforceable guidelines for the use of wastewater in agriculture. As a result, though the practice may be theoretically forbidden or controlled, it is in fact "unofficially tolerated," the IWMI found.

• Of the world's total water resources, 97.5 percent is salty and of the remaining but mainly frozen freshwater, only one percent is available for human use, said Leape, the WWF chief.

  "Even this tiny proportion, however, would be enough for humans to live on Earth if the water cycle was properly functioning and if we managed our water use wisely," he said.

Environment News Service , "World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis." August 18, 2008.http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-18-01.html (accessed November 9, 2010).

Monty de Luna
November 9, 2010