For Want of a Drink

A Special Report on water

22 May 2010

For want of a Drink

• It takes twice as much water to grow a kilo of peanuts as it does a kilo soya beans; Four times as much to produce kilo beef; Five times as much to produce a glass of OJ as a cit of tea.
• Of 2.5% of unsalty water, 70% is frozen in glaciers or permafrost.
• China and India, with over 1/3 or the world's population, have less than 10% of the water
• Water is local and since its heavy, it's expensive to move.
• Surface water, like rivers and lakes, will not flow from one basin to another without artificial diversion.
• Upstream water may be useful for irrigation, but as it nears the sea, the only real uses are to sustain deltas and wetlands.
• Mexico City, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Jakarta are all overdrawing from their aquifers.
• All humans need a minimum of two liters of water in food or drink each day--which is why some people see water as a basic right

Enough is not Enough

• The biggest cause of child death is diarrhoea.
• Without piped water, 800 million people with access to primitive plumbing, as well as open air defecators, are carriers of disease.
• Yamuna River in India - 95% of sewage that pours into this river is untreated.
• Peepco-personal single use biodegradable bag can also be sold as fertilizers.

Business begins to Stir

• Industry generates 70 times as much value from one liter of water as agriculture.
• Desalination involves boiling and distilling the water or reverse osmosis where water is forced through a membrane; both methods use a lot of energy and is expensive.
• The hope is that solar power makes desalination more affordable.

Making Farmers Matter

• Cut the use of irrigation water by 10%, and apparently you would save more than is lost in all the other evaporation.
• India draws more groundwater than anywhere else accounting for over 25% of the world's total.
• Some of this water is often salty with high natural occurrences of arsenic, fluorides, and uranium.
• Waterlogging - poorly drained soils is over irrigated which results in plants' roots being starved of oxygen, knocking some 20% of the field's productivity.
• Farmers are being brought together to calculate how much water to use, decide which crops to grow, etc.
• Bananas, rice, and cotton which need the most waters have yielded to peanuts and lentils.
• Chemical fertilizers are being replaced by compost.
• The upshot is that although incomes have not risen, most of the crops are eaten, not sold for cash, and are thus sustainable.

Trade and Conserve

• Countries with sustainable systems all use water rights that involve the allocation of supply by volume.
• Property rights can be traded to reallocate water from low-value to high-value use as they are used in the American West, Chile, and South Africa.
• Virtual water content will vary according to climate and agricultural practice.
• Virtual water is not to give precise figures, but to alert people that might be better off growing different crops or moving manufacturing to another country.

To the Last Drop

• International river basins extend across borders of 145 countries.
• Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are shared among 9-11 countries
• Cooperative approach to water sharing--Thailand helped Laos build a dam in return for power.

A Glass Half Empty

• Governments need to share their information about river flows and water tables.
• Non-water policies also help solve water problems where good roads let farmers become commercial since they can transport foods year round.
• Scarcity of water is not reflected in price other than transport--this won't last long.
• The difficult problem lies getting higher yields from food crops without a rise in water loss through evapotranspiration.
• Genetic modification can produce drought resistant crops.
• Until some break through in desalination comes through, the best hope is a happy marriage between supply and demand comes from much greater restraint among water users.