ENVIRONMENT: Grim Water Forecast Could End Green Revolution Run

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, May 5 1999 (IPS) - Nearly 1.4 billion people or a quarter of the world’s population lives in regions that would face severe water shortages in the first quarter of the new millennium, an international research study shows.

“These regions do not have sufficient water resources to maintain 1990 levels of per capita food production from irrigated agriculture … and also meet reasonable water needs for domestic, industrial and environmental purposes by 2025,” the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) said in a study completed by end-1998.

The study, by the Colombo-based agency on water supply and demand of 118 countries in the period 1990 to 2025, said that of particular concern was the overlooked problem of declining water tables in the semi-arid regions of Asia and the Middle East. These regions contained some of the major breadbaskets of the world such as Punjab in India and North China.

“There is an urgent need to focus the attention of both professionals and policy makers on the problems of groundwater depletion which must be seen as the major threat to food security in the coming century,” the report noted.

Douglas J. Merrey, IWMI’s deputy director-general, said in an interview that the institute’s study was aimed at looking at the trends in the next 25 to 30 years, using existing global data, and make some projections and assumptions.

IWMI, established in 1984, has been conducting worldwide programmes to improve food security and the lives of poor people through fostering sustainable increases in the productivity of water used in agriculture through better management of irrigation and water basin systems.

Based in Colombo, the institute – formerly known as the International Irrigation Management Institute – has country programmes in Burkina Faso, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and project offices in Mexico and Turkey. IWMI is supported by over 20 governments and donor agencies including the Asian Development Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Merrey said that the IWMI study found that a lot of countries would have to make serious decisions regarding water management and supply.

“In some cases, this would mean making irrigated agriculture more efficient and more productive with limited water use. In some countries, where there isn’t enough water, agriculture may have to be curtailed, thus raising problems of food security and food production,” he added.

Food imports or transporting water from wet-zone regions, were some of the options.

The IWMI study said that 348 million people faced severe economic water scarcities in regions where the potential water resources were sufficient to meet reasonable water needs by 2025. “But these regions would have to embark on massive water development projects, at enormous cost and possibly severe environmental damage, to achieve this objective,” it said.

Irrigation consumes or depletes over 70 percent of the total developed water supply in the world. Most people, the study found, believed that existing irrigation systems were so inefficient that most future water needs could be met by increasing the efficiency of irrigation and transferring the saved water to domestic, industrial and environmental sectors.

But the report stressed that “it was exceptionally difficult even to know what irrigation efficiency means, much less to measure it.”

Water scarcity leads to declining water quality and pollution and has an adverse impact on poor people. Many of the poor in developing countries are forced to drink or use polluted water.

Poor people in Asia spend 60 percent of their income on cereals, the bulk of which are produced on irrigated land since the 1960s.

Real cereal prices have fallen, and the direct and indirect effects of the green revolution of irrigated land, the study said has been by far the greatest source of poverty reduction in Asia.

“But there are reasons to fear that water scarcity may halt or even reverse these trends, as in the case of China,” IWMI said.

Some other studies show that because of impending water shortages in China’s northern region, China would have to import as much as 210-370 million tonnes of grain per year to feed its population in 2025. This in turn would trigger steeply rising cereal prices and a disruption of the world market, the report

said.

With regard to groundwater, IWMI said that many of the populous countries in the world – China, India, Pakistan, Mexico and nearly all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa – have “literally being having a free ride over the past two or three decades by depleting their groundwater resources.”

It warned that “the penalty of mismanagement of this valuable resource is now coming due, and it is no exaggeration to say that the results could be catastrophic for these countries, and given their importance, for the world as a whole.”