Presenter: Dr. Dinesh Kumar MANHACHERY, Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy
Co-author(s): Prof. Om Prakash Singh, Banaras Hindu University
Sub-theme
1. Water-Human-Economy(Agriculture, Industry, City...)-Ecology Nexus under a Changing Environment
Topic
1-5. Water security assessment and risk management
Body
Global water scarcity assessments are generally made by estimating the water demands for all the competitive and in-steam uses in different regions and comparing those estimates with the renewable water supplies in those regions. Such assessments are used to derive inferences about the nature and degree of water scarcity. Assessing the food security challenges of a country purely from a renewable water resource perspective provides a distorted view of the food security scenario of that country. This is because it brings complacency for water-rich nations that they could be food-secure, and unwanted pessimism for water-scarce nations that they can’t produce sufficient food. Like water, access to arable land is equally important for food security and therefore should be integrated with other considerations in national food and water policy making. In the same manner, assessing water management challenges purely from the point of view of renewable water availability and aggregate demands will be dangerous. Access to water in the soil profile is an important determinant of effective water availability for food production, and a major portion of the aggregate water demand in most regions comes from food production. Such methodological flaws lead to erroneous conclusions about the magnitude of water scarcity and food insecurity problems in different countries and regions. The paper analyses the food security and water management challenges of individual nations. It does so by delinking the food security challenges from that of supplying water to meet various other sectoral needs. For this, three indices were developed, viz., water adequacy index; water-land index and a composite water-land-pasture land index. Their values were computed for 172 countries. The analysis shows that the criteria for assessing food security and water management challenges have to factor in 'cultivated land'. When this is done, we will have four different categories of countries. They are as follows: 1] those having plenty of renewable water and cultivated land, with water and food self-sufficiencies; 2] those having large volume of renewable water resources, but disproportionately larger amount of cultivated land, resulting in low ‘water-adequacy’, but witnessing ‘food-surplus’ situation and occasional water scarcity; 3] those having sufficient amount of cultivated land, but with low water availability and facing different degrees of water and food shortages; and, 4] those having high 'water adequacy' due to large volumes of renewable water resources and limited arable land, but mostly dependent on food imports.