A blue revolution: The key to future food security

Colombo, Sri Lanka 6th November 2009. "We will need nothing less than a 'Blue Revolution', if we are to achieve food security and avert a serious water crisis in the future said Dr. Colin Chartres, Director General of the Sri Lanka - based International Water Management Institute. Chartres was speaking to the Economic and Finance Committee of the UN General Assembly, at a special event on "Enhancing Water Governance", convened by the UN today. He stressed that only strategic investments in water can address the massive pressure that population growth, changing diets, urbanization and climate change are having on the world's water resources. Investments in water can also reduce poverty by increasing farmer incomes, providing employment for the landless, reducing staple food prices and contributing to overall economic growth.

Scientific evidence and underpinning research and development are the basis for such investment. There is compelling evidence that the decline in ODA expenditure on the agriculture sector has led to declining rates of productivity increase. If this continues we will not be able to feed the world in another 30-40 years. The cost of preventing a global food crisis and its social consequences is small compared to that of the financial crisis bail out.

Within the next 40 years, the world will have an additional 2.5 billion mouths to feed, most of them in developing countries across Africa, Asia and South America. Global crop production will have to double to feed this growing population unless we learn to reduce waste and use water more efficiently. Given that one liter of water is needed to produce one calorie of food, it will take up to 6,000 cubic kilometers of additional water annually to feed another 2.5 billion people. This is almost twice what is used today and is not sustainable.

About one third of the world's population already live in areas where water is physically scarce, or economically scarce due to limited investment in necessary water delivery infrastructure. This figure will rise significantly by 2050. Chartres says there is a way out of this predicament for water-scarce countries, but it will require major policy reforms and new investments.

There is huge potential to reduce poverty in Africa through irrigation development. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, water infrastructure needs to be developed as a range of agricultural water management interventions, from full to supplemental, on-farm and basin wide options. Such interventions could potentially benefit 65 million rural poor in

Sub Saharan Africa and 70 million rural poor in India, living outside formal irrigation districts, with respective increases in agricultural production estimated at 30 to 50 percent.

The central challenge for governments is to make agricultural use of water more productive and efficient. Two ways of doing this are to refurbish irrigation systems and improve rainfed agriculture through better soil management and expanded use of water harvesting and supplemental irrigation. New crop varieties that tolerate extreme conditions, like drought and flooding, can also help.