Today marks the 20th World Water Day, an annual day of advocacy and education on the importance of global freshwater resources. Sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, each year highlights a particular facet of the human relationship to water, with the focus for 2012 on “Water and Food Security.”
Attention to this theme is well deserved. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development notes that:
World agriculture faces an enormous challenge over the next 40 years: to produce almost 50% more food up to 2030 and double production by 2050. This will probably have to be achieved with less water, mainly because of pressure from growing urbanisation, industrialisation and climate change.
Hence, it will be important in the future that farmers receive the right signals to increase water use efficiency and improve agricultural water management, especially as agriculture is the major user of water in most countries.
- OECD Agriculture Ministerial Meeting, 2010
Although fundamentally a global issue, food security in a world with growing water scarcity has strong potential impacts on United States food systems.
Agriculture accounts for 80% of all national water consumption, with that proportion rising above 90% for many western states with particularly limited water supplies.
The strain of freshwater shortages in the United States is only predicted to increase in the coming decades. Though food growing areas like the American southwest have experienced tensions over water between farmers and urban development interests throughout the past century, long term drought and other environmental pressures are permanently changing regional landscapes for agriculture.
[T]here is a broad consensus among climate models that this region [southwestern North America] will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.
- Science Magazine, 2007
Working within the reality of shrinking freshwater availability has brought a stronger emphasis on water conservation tactics from a variety of agencies. The USDA and the Interior Department developed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2003 that
established water use reduction as the key to future national agricultural water security. Projects like the
Agricultural Water Conservation Clearinghouse (created in 2007) and the
Water SMART Clearinghouse (launched in 2010) have acted to collect and consolidate research, and to help in establishing best practices, on efficient water use in agriculture.
Regulatory changes have also begun to address growing water scarcity. Just last week, the state of Kansas reformed its longstanding appropriation water rights design to better account for agriculture’s stress on the vanishing Ogallala Aquifer.
On a national level, a 2012 Farm Bill would present an opportunity to comprehensively address agricultural water security, and some advocacy groups are including water conservation as an element of their suggestions to Congress.
Unfortunately, this may prove too great a challenge during the current Congressional session. On Tuesday, the US House Committee on Agriculture issued a press release in response to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, with Rep. Collin Peterson stating, “the process outlined by the House Republican budget all but guarantees there will be no farm bill this year.”
Whether congressional intransigence results in short-term extensions of the 2008 Farm Bill’s provisions, or in disastrous reversion to the fallback 1949 Farm Act, the political energy to tackle agricultural water issues remains muted for now.
However, as environmental and demographic transformations compel us to act soon, water issues and our food security will remain an imperative policy debate for our near future.