INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND FOOD SECURITY

Water and Food Security - Is there a Crisis?

Frank Rijsberman

Professor Rijsberman is Director General of the International Water Management Institute

What is water scarcity? When an individual does not have access to safe and affordable water to satisfy her or his needs for drinking, washing or their livelihoods we call that person water insecure. There is much talk of a global water crisis, of which the most obvious manifestation is that 1.2 billion people lack access to safe and affordable water for their domestic use. Less well documented is that a large part of the 900 million people in rural areas that have an income below the one-dollar-per-day poverty line lack access to water for their livelihoods.

Such lack of access has major impacts on people’s well-being and causes massive health problems. The poorest of the poor are also most affected by lack of access to water for productive purposes, resulting in a vicious cycle of malnutrition, poverty and ill health. But it turns out to be difficult to assess whether water is truly scarce in the physical sense (a supply problem) or whether it is available but should be used better (a demand problem). Water is a very complex resource, occurring in a very dynamic cycle of rain, runoff and evaporation, with enormous temporal and spatial variations as well as variations in quality that completely govern its value to people and ecosystems.

• That water can be a nuisance (in floods) as well as a lifesaving resource (in droughts) is obvious, but both conditions can occur in one location within a single year. Annual average water availability in such a situation means little in measuring water scarcity.
• Large parts of monsoon Asia suffer from severe water scarcity while the average annual resource availability appears to be plentiful. Is there not enough or too much?
• Water quality is a major variable in assessing water scarcity. Fresh water may become polluted as it flows downstream and become de facto unusable. Should polluted water be considered part of the resource available to satisfy needs (after treatment), or should it be left out, leading to the conclusion that that there is scarcity?
• The most widely used measure of water stress is the Falkenmark indicator or ‘water stress index’, which uses 1700 m3 of renewable water resources per capita per year as the threshold. When supply falls below 1000 m3 a country experiences water scarcity, and below 500 m3, absolute scarcity. Thresh17 July, 2006uly, 2006c purposes, but rate it as becoming scarce for food production.
• At IWMI, analysis of water scarcity for agriculture can no longer concentrate on renewable water resources only, but must look carefully at the use of all water, and the interaction among the various sources. It has also brought into sharper focus the role of the soil.
• Over the last several decades a backlash against water infrastructure investments, particularly dams, has led to calls for shifts from supply to demand management. An expression of this shift in thinking is the ‘integrated water resources management’ movement that has given birth to organisations such as the World Water Council and the Global Water Partnership.
• A ‘soft path for water’ (a term that hails from the energy sector and that in essence focuses on the improvement of the overall productivity of water rather than endlessly seeking new supplies) is now emerging as the appropriate response to water scarcity.

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