Enough water to double food production

There is enough water in the major basins of the world to double their food production in the next decades, scientists have found. Mark Mulligan at King’s College London says it is not the scarcity of water that is the greatest challenge for feeding nine billion people by 2050, but the inefficient use and unfair distribution of the huge volumes of water that flow through key river basins of the world.

Over five years, in the most comprehensive survey of its kind, researchers assessed how, over vast regions, human societies are coping with the growing need for water to cultivate more crops, to generate electricity and to support city dwellers as well as the ecosystems that underpin it all. They studied river basins of some of the world’s largest rivers, across three continents and their findings suggest that lack of water is ultimately a geographical and political challenge and not an issue of limited resource.

Mulligan and other scientists led by Simon Cook of the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) studied ten river basins around the world, including the Andes and Sao Francisco in South America, the Niger, Nile and Volta basins in Africa and the Indus-Ganges, Mekong and Yellow in Asia. They concluded that while there are water-related conflicts and shortages in Africa, Asia and Latin America, there is sufficient water to sustain food, energy production and the industrial and environmental needs of the world’s population in the 21st century, if only appropriate access, fair distribution and efficiency of use can be developed and sustained.

Mulligan, Reader in Geography at King’s, led a team of scientists who studied water, food and poverty in the Andes ‘basin’ where equitably sharing the benefits of water and protecting ecosystems which provide clean, reliable water are the key challenges.

He said: ‘Given that poverty and famine are still with us, we tend to think that there is not enough water in the world to secure food production now and into the more populous future. In fact our research has revealed that, while there are some areas where water scarcity is a serious issue for productivity and poverty, there are huge volumes of rainwater never used - or used inefficiently - in these basins, particularly in the rain-fed regions of sub-Saharan Africa.’

With the huge humanitarian crises facing the African continent, the research points towards significant potential to increase food production through technological interventions and changes in practice, capacity building of institutions and more equitable and efficient sharing of the benefits derived from water.

Mulligan said: ‘Ineffective river basin management sustains water poverty despite the potential of the resource to meet needs. Our findings demonstrate the increasingly political role of river basin management in dealing with the competing needs for water from agriculture, industry, urbanised populations, hydropower and the natural ecosystems that sustain it all.

‘Only through more integrated and more effective management at the basin scale (even for those basins crossing national boundaries) can we hope to double food production for the nine billion people we will need to sustain by 2050.’

The report authors indicate that there are relatively straight forward opportunities to satisfy our development needs and alleviate poverty for millions of people without exhausting our most precious natural resource, water. Mulligan explained: ‘If more emphasis is put into supporting rain-fed (as opposed to irrigated) agriculture, food production can increase substantially and rapidly. With a concerted effort to do this, we could feed the world without increasing the strain on river basins systems.’

Researchers stress that interventions targeted at river basin management need to focus on important geographical variability over time and space in resources; consider the implications of climate variability and change rather than designing just for the present and look at the full range of services provided by water (agriculture, hydropower, industry and domestic use as well as sustaining ecosystems).

Simon Cook of CPWF said: ‘According to the Challenge Programme on Water and Food research, some low-level improvements could yield two to three times more food than we are producing today.’

However, the team cautions that while there is enough water in the world to sustain human development and environmental needs, water-related conflicts will continue if particular issues like food security and energy production are considered in isolation from one another: an integrated and spatially coherent approach is required for progress.

The basins the teams studied cover 13.5 million square kilometres and are home to some 1.5 billion people, 470 million of whom are among the world’s poorest.

Further
Mulligan is available for , please Anna Mitchell on anna.i.mitchell [a] kcl.ac (p) uk or 0207 848 3092.