Managing Water for Food and
Environmental Security
by: Frank Rijsberman
As populations rise,
incomes rise, and countries industrialise—the demand for water
in urban areas in developing countries will rise very strongly in the
coming decades. At the same time increased environmental awareness will
place more and more emphasis on maintaining a healthy environment for
people as well as nature. Large-scale development of river and groundwater
resources is less acceptable now than it was in the period 1960-1990,
when the large majority of the world's 45 thousand large dams were built.
Moreover, water infrastructure built in recent decades is getting obsolete—e.g.
through silting up of reservoirs, and crumbling of irrigation networks—and
there appears to be a decreasing willingness to fund rehabilitation
and replacement of infrastructure. Groundwater levels are falling in
key aquifers that have contributed substantially to food security in
recent years through provision of water-on-demand to millions of farmers
that tapped them directly through tubewells. In all these developments,
as resources get scarcer, the poor and vulnerable are impacted first
and suffer most.
Water for agriculture
is getting squeezed as water is moved out of agriculture to be diverted
to urban areas, groundwater sources dry up, and the willingness to develop
new resources has declined for financial as well as environmental reasons.
The consequences are visible in, for instance, Pakistan, home to the
world's largest irrigation system and increasingly serious droughts.
Agriculture has grown used to cheap and plentiful water in irrigated
areas. As the human population tripled in the twentieth century, water
use multiplied sixfold, mostly for agriculture. Agricultural productivity
has risen sharply in recent decades due to higher yielding varieties
and increased fertilizer use - but also due to major investments in
water resources infrastructure and massive subsidies on energy for pumping
groundwater that are less likely to be repeated in coming decades.
The question appears
to be: How will we find sufficient water to provide food security, health,
and livelihoods to a growing world population—in harmony with other
water users and the environment? This is truly a global challenge, that
perhaps should be re-formulated as follows:
How can we grow
the food we need with the water available?
To grow enough food
and provide sustainable livelihoods to poor people with the available
water will require a considerable overhaul of the way agriculture is
practiced. The dominant agricultural philosophy that views land as the
scarce resource and aims to maximize yields per unit of land through
better varieties while removing nutrients and water as constraints needs
to be replaced. Replaced by a philosophy that views land, water, nutrients
and genetic resources as an integrated set of scarce resources that
need to be managed by the stakeholders . For water and land resources
management there are three priorities:
- Implement better
water and land resources management practices in agriculture, forestry
and fisheries;
- Increase understanding
between agriculture and other water users, particularly environmental
uses; and
- Reduce agriculture's
water use and dependence.
We are proposing
major initiatives involving the CGIAR in a central role that address
these priorities, as briefly outlined hereafter.
There are many ways
in which water can be managed better, ranging from better technology
such as laser-land levelling or drip irrigation to better involvement
of users in planning and management of resources. Collectively these
are known as "integrated water resources management" and most
of IWMI's work deals with specific aspects of this. Particularly in
upper catchment areas and on hillsides, but not limited to these areas,
better water management ought to be closely intertwined with better
land management, e.g. through integrated watershed or catchment management
approaches.
While it is clear
that water and land resources management in currently cultivated systems
can be improved, it is not clear how much irrigated areas should be
expanded in the coming decades. Irrigated agriculture—"old
style", understood as large-scale publicly funded irrigation systems—has
gained an ambiguous reputation with parts of society. Willingness to
invest in new systems has declined. Others, particularly in the irrigation
and drainage community, hold it self-evident that considerable expansion
of irrigated areas is necessary and unavoidable to achieve food-security
and reduce hunger and poverty in rural areas.
Dialogue on Water,
Food and Environment
Bridging the gaps
in perception on the desirable directions in water management for agriculture
will reduce conflicts among users and increase the resources available
for broadly supported investments. To this end a broad consortium is
being established that will catalyse a process of cross-sectoral dialogue
on water for food and environmental security. IWMI has taken the initiative
for this exercise and will host its Secretariat. A sponsor group chaired
by the Netherlands government has been established to support the exercise.
Significant resources from outside the CGIAR are expected to be available
for the programme and its components such as the Comprehensive Assessment.
The Dialogue will be formally launched in August 2001 at the Stockholm
Water Symposium.
The Global Challenge
for Water and Agriculture
There is a challenge,
however, that goes considerably beyond the implementation of improved
water and land management practices in agriculture forestry and fisheries,
however. That is the challenge of addressing water and land resources
management practices in conjunction with (1) breeding plants that are
more drought resistant and have a higher yield per unit of water and
(2) the management of soil fertility.
It will require
a considerable paradigm shift to think in terms of yield per unit of
water as a major complement to yield per unit of land. Key areas can
be grouped as follows:
- Iincreasing the
drought stress tolerance of key irrigated and rainfed food and cash
crops through breeding and biotechnology, thereby also adapting agriculture
to increased climatic variability due to anthropogenic climate change;
- Similarly increasing
the water productivity of key food and cash crops through breeding
and biotechnology;
- Improving soil
water and soil fertility management to sustainably increase yields
in, particularly, rainfed agriculture;
- Improving integrated
water resources management at the basin level to increase water productivity
and (re-)allocate water resources to a sustainable mix of high value
uses, from crops to forestry, to fisheries, the environment and domestic
and industrial use and reduce conflicts among users; and
- Integrated natural
resources management with full involvement of all stakeholders and
explicit sustainability and poverty alleviation objectives.
The overall objective
of the global challenge program on water and agriculture could be to
sustainably increase global food production by 40% while reducing the
renewable water resources used in agriculture by 10-20% in the next
25 years. This would imply a reduced use of water for agriculture over
current projections by about 600-700 cubic kilometres—of the same
order, as the additional water required for domestic and industrial
purposes.
Integrated Water Resources
Management Concepts and Practice
by: Peter Rogers
This
presentation reviews Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as
it applies to urban and industrial water management. Another presentation
at this Workshop (by Frank Rijsberman) will address the water for food
and ecosystem maintenance aspects of IWRM.
There is an increasing
shortage of freshwater in many countries around the world. One third
of the world's population live in countries experiencing medium water
stress. World wide there are currently 1.4 billion people without clean
drinking water, 2.3 billion lacking adequate sanitation, and 7 million
die each year from water related diseases. In addition one half of the
world's rivers and lakes are seriously polluted.
During the next
century more than one half of the world's population will live in cities,
and most of this growth will take place in the developing world. The
world's urban populations have increased two and one-half times during
the past thirty years, and by the year 2000, twenty-one cities are expected
to have populations of over ten million inhabitants; seventeen of these
megacities will be in developing countries; and the number of cities
larger than five million inhabitants will rise to sixty. Over the next
two decades, population growth and migration would add an estimated
1.9 billion new urban residents to the 1.7 billion inhabitants already
poorly supplied with water and sanitation services. Of these new inhabitants,
fully 25 percent will be living in megacities with populations of over
ten million. The World Commission on Water for the 21st Century claims
that addressing the problems of water scarcity for urban and industrial
users would require an investment of US$150 billion per year by the
year 2025 compared with the estimated US$40-45 billion expended in the
year 2000.
One fervent hope
is that by applying the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management
(IWRM) water agencies in countries, regions, and river basins will be
able to find coping solutions to these massive problems. Currently IWRM
is a set of concepts and approaches to water management which have had
fragmented application in many settings, but no one case stands out
as a perfect example of fully integrated water management between sectors
and users. The paper outlines the ideal IWRM and then shows the current
limitations and applications.
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