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High food prices, meet the global water crisis.
The world’s food supply is under threat because so much of what we eat is concentrated in so few countries, and many of those countries are increasingly facing a water shortage. That’s the conclusion of three independent studies published this week.
One study, published by World Resources Institute, found that one quarter of the world’s crops is grown in places where the water supply is stressed, unreliable or both.
A second, published by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, crunched the data slightly differently, concluding that half the world’s food production is in areas where water availability is projected to decline.
The third study, published by the European Union’s environmental agency, found that even some ordinarily wet parts of the continent face a drying trend.
All three recommend urgent course corrections. Those include plugging leaks, reducing food waste, restoring wetlands and setting corporate targets on sustainable water use.
The global commission also called on policymakers to “correctly price water,” writing in its report, “Water is often taken for granted as an abundant gift from nature, when in fact it is scarce and costly to provide to users.”
The risks are already revealing themselves.
In Brazil, a crippling drought has not only driven up local food prices, it also has increased the global prices of sugar and coffee. Brazil is the world’s largest sugar producer, and it commands more than a third of the global coffee supply.
In China’s agricultural heartland of Henan province, an exceptionally dry season, followed by exceptionally heavy rains, drove up the price of everyday vegetables. And in southern Africa, rising temperatures and a drought driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon earlier this year destroyed the region’s main cereal crop, maize, leading to what the United Nations this week called the region’s worst hunger crisis in decades.
Water stress affects 30 percent of the population every year in the 27 countries of the European Union, and that is expected to worsen as the world warms, the bloc’s environmental agency said in its study. Agriculture is the biggest water user in Europe, and among the sectors most vulnerable to water stress. Heat and drought is already endangering one of the most coveted crops of the Mediterranean: olives.
Staple crops are particularly affected.
The World Resources Institute data warned of the threats to maize, rice and wheat. Those three grains provide most of the calories that the world’s 8 billion people consume today.
Worldwide, one-third of these crops are grown in areas where the water supply is highly stressed or where rainfall patterns are highly erratic.
“While farmers have adapted to a certain level of variability in water supply, increased competition and climate change are stretching available supplies to the limit,” the institute wrote in an analysis accompanying the latest data. “Growing crops in these areas therefore puts food security in jeopardy.”
Concentration of food production in a handful of places around the world is also a risk.
Ten countries, including the United States and China, produce nearly three-fourths of the world’s most irrigated crops, including sugar, wheat and cotton. Two-thirds of these crops face what the World Resources Institute called “high to extremely high levels of water stress.”
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