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The Solution to the Water Problem—Agriculture Minus Irrigation?

January 08, 2010

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As water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of the population increase, agriculture is affected.

By Raegan Johnson, Produce More Conserve More Staff

Water continues to be a global issue. In the future, we may not be able to keep it on the shelves, neighbors may fight over it and countries may not have enough to meet basic needs.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in the past century, water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of the population increase. Although there is currently no global water scarcity, an increasing number of regions are chronically short of water. FAO estimates that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under water stress conditions.

Water shortages are a growing problem. Water is essential to feeding and heating the world, however the FAO believes the planet is showing signs that we are using too much.

Many point fingers at agriculture—a big user of the world’s fresh water. The United Nations estimates that 2.5 percent of the world’s water is fresh water—with almost 70 percent of the fresh water frozen in ice caps and glaciers. Agriculture uses about 70 percent of the unfrozen fresh water.

Recently, the efficiency of farming practices as a whole has been criticized, but irrigation has received a significant amount of attention. A panel at the 2009 World Congress World Agriculture Forum suggested 60 percent of the fresh water agriculture uses is wasted because of inefficient irrigation systems, particularly in developing countries.

However, irrigation can be critical in areas where rainfall does not meet farming needs, especially as extreme weather and droughts are becoming more frequent in certain regions.

The FAO reports that irrigated land is more than twice as productive as rain-fed cropland, and although only 16 percent of the world’s croplands are irrigated, those lands yield some 36 percent of the global harvest. In developing countries, irrigation increases yields for most crops by 100-400 percent.

But how can agriculture continue to reap the benefits of irrigation, while addressing the issue of wasted water?

Studies by FAO’s Water Resources Development and Management Service (AGLW) and The International Program for Technology and Research in Irrigation and Drainage (IPTRID) point toward global efforts to modernize irrigation systems to make them more efficient.

Flood (furrow) irrigation is currently the most commonly used and most unsustainable irrigation technique. According to USGS, flood irrigation is widely used by societies in less developed parts of the world, as well as in the U.S. The problem is about half of the water used ends up not reaching the crops. Many farmers choose flood irrigation over more efficient techniques like drip and center-pivot irrigation, because the technique is cheap and simple.

Irrigation techniques become important when you consider the amount of water required to produce crops, especially crops like rice, which requires 3,000 liters of water to make just one kilogram.

Berhard Kiep, vice president and general manager of international irrigation at Valmont Industries, said if just 30 percent of the rice growers in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, switched from flood to mechanized irrigation, 810 billion gallons of water could be saved annually.

That’s nine times the amount of water Rio Grand do Sul needs annually for human consumption.

And with an expected 2 billion extra mouths to feed by 2030, there doesn’t seem to be any room for waste. FAO suggests that without changes in efficiency, the world will need as much as 60 percent more water.

Some suggest the bottom line is we need to increase efficiency, and we need to do it quickly. And although agricultural practices aren’t completely to blame for the water epidemic, perhaps that’s a great place to start.

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