High-tech Agriculture to Prevent Global Water Wars

Forget about oil or gas – you should be worrying about the less discussed but far more concerning fact that the world is running out of clean, drinkable water.

Credit: xuanhuongho / shutterstock

I wrote this article while in Kathmandu. Nepal's capital and largest city has a severe water shortage. Even though all homeowners pay a fee to the government to get water on tap, supplies run only once a week for a few hours. Desperate residents are then forced to purchase water from private suppliers. While this is affordable for richer people, it's a big problem for the lower and middle classes. For many in the developing world, water is really the difference between prosperity and poverty.

More than a billion people around the world have no reasonable access to fresh water. Most of the diseases in developing countries are associated with water, causing millions of deaths each year (a child is estimated to die from diarrhoea every 17 seconds).

Given all this, we have to come up with a solution to global water use fast, before water scarcity becomes a major cause of international conflict.

The vast majority of our water is found in the oceans. Only 3% is fresh and can be used for farming and drinking, and in any case most of this is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. That means just 0.5% of the Earth's water is accessible and, of this, more than two thirds is used in agriculture.

If we're going to cut back on our water usage, we have to focus on making our farms more sustainable and efficient. With the global population still growing, we'll need to produce ever more crops using less water, in less agricultural land.

Worldwide, just over a third (37%) of the land that could be used to grow crops is currently used. Potential farmland is available, but it's not developed due a lack of infrastructure, forest cover or conservation. A lack of land isn't really a big problem as of now – but water is.

Upland rice growing on a hillside in Bolivia, far from any paddy fields. Credit: CAIT, CC BY-SA

Explore further:  Switchgrass may be a good option for farmers who have lost fertile topsoil

Provided by:  The Conversation  

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Taxonomy

• Agriculture
• Food Security
• Water Security
• Water Footprint
• Water Security
• Water-Energy-Food-Security