Water for Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice

Lyla Mehta, Theib Oweis, Claudia Ringler, Barbara Schreiner, Shiney Varghese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351747615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation for human well-being, it proposes alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing uncertainties.

The authors challenge mainstream supply-oriented and neo-Malthusian visions that argue for the need to increase the land area under irrigation in order to feed the world's growing population. Instead, they argue for a reframing of the debate concerning production processes, waste, food consumption and dietary patterns whilst proposing alternative strategies to improve water and land productivity, putting the interests of marginalized and disenfranchized groups upfront.

The book highlights how accessing water for FSN can be challenging for small-holders, vulnerable and marginalized women and men, and how water allocation systems and reform processes can negatively affect local people's informal rights. The book argues for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and is original in making a case for strengthening the relationship between the human rights to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men. It will be of great interest to practitioners, students and researchers working on water and food issues.

1

INTRODUCTION

In Tanzania’s Uluguru mountains villagers operate complex networks of locally managed springs, canals and wells for productive irrigated horticulture, cropping and domestic use. Yes, most of these small-scale users remain invisible to the government which often vests permits to use land and water to male-dominated user groups that risk alienating the vast majority of informal users of land and water, especially women.¹

In many slums and informal settlements in the global South, the quality of water accessed by poor people is so bad that it adversely affects health and nutrition, especially of children and babies. Moreover, many of these settlements lack adequate sanitation, which contributes to disease, such as diarrhoea, which further contributes to poor nutritional outcomes. Nutrition, ill-health and cognitive and other important human development outcomes are mutually reinforcing. But these populations tend to be ignored by both the state and large-scale private operators.

The 2009 Bolivian constitution recognizes both the human rights to water and food; and potable water, sanitation, irrigation and small-scale agriculture are all deemed important. In reality, tensions between water for agriculture, urban use, mining and industry abound and often get in the way of ensuring the water and food security of indigenous and poorer populations.

Since rainfed farming is a risky business in sub-Saharan Africa, it is important to establish and scale up practices that can enhance the effective management and use of water for smallholder agriculture. This includes improving storage and capturing run off, using groundwater sustainably, applying supplementary irrigation and improving soil water retention.

As these vignettes show, there are compelling linkages between water, food security and nutrition.² As stated in the Koran 21: 3, ‘By means of water, we give life to everything’. Indeed, water is a fundamental element on which human beings depend for their lives and livelihoods. Water is also an essential input to agricultural production and is required for the preparation and processing of food (CA, 2007; FAO, 2012; Rosegrant et al., 2002). According to WWAP (2014), 70% of human water withdrawals are for agriculture, 20% for industrial uses and 10% for domestic uses. However, even this 70% of water only produces 40% of agricultural crops, the rest comes from rain or ‘green’ water (Ringler, 2017). As water applied for irrigation evaporates, it is largely removed from further direct human use, as compared to other sectors where most of the water tends to return to water bodies for reuse. The importance of the agriculture sector as the world’s largest water user and the associated responsibilities to use water sustainably was affirmed during the 2017 Global Forum for Food and Agriculture³ and the G-20 meeting of ministers of agriculture.⁴ Despite rapid increases in non-irrigation uses of water, water for food production will remain the largest user of human freshwater withdrawals, making farmers in many ways the main stewards of the world’s water resources.

Water is also the lifeblood of many ecosystems, such as forests, lakes or wetlands that are essential for people and the environment. These ecosystems are particularly important for poor people, providing them with nutrition and livelihoods. Water is also fundamental for all other productive sectors, including energy, manufacturing. Finally, water has important cultural and aesthetic values.

Safe drinking water and sanitation are fundamental to the nutrition, health and dignity of all (UNDP, 2006). Despite the progress made in achieving global targets around water and sanitation in the past decades, about 3 in 10 people, or 2.1 billion lack access to safe, readily available water at home, and 6 in 10, or 4.5 billion, lack safely managed sanitation (WHO and UNICEF, 2017). Accessing water can be particularly challenging for smallholders, vulnerable and marginalized populations and women. Even though the human right to drinking safe water and sanitation was globally endorsed by the UN in 2010, it is violated every day across the globe. This situation undermines health, nutrition, human well-being and dignity and is a global and moral outrage.

This book is probably the first comprehensive effort to bring together water, food security and nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture.⁵ Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation in human well-being, it proposes alternative and locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from local to global against a backdrop of growing uncertainties. It argues for the need to improve policy coherence across the water and food domains and is original in making a case for strengthening the relationship between the rights to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men. The volume is thus in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which call for progress on all dimensions of human development while ensuring that our planet supports both humans and nature.

Our starting point is that global inequality in access to water and sanitation is unacceptable and one of the largest inequities of the 21st century. According to the 2006 Human Development Report (UNDP, 2006), no act of terrorism generates devastation on a daily basis on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation. However, this crisis occurs largely in silence. Unlike wars and natural disasters, it remains invisible and has been quasi naturalized – that is, accepted as part of life – by both those who enjoy access to safe water and the millions who do not. The water crisis is largely caused and legitimized by different forms of unequal gender and social relations, as well as structural violence vis-à-vis poor and marginalized people, that prevent universal access (Mehta, 2016). In the case of millions of women and girls who spend hours collecting water, this naturalized gendered nature of water collection has undermined their health, education and chances in life. Poor water quality affects human health and the functioning of ecosystems, with adverse impacts for poor and vulnerable groups that directly depend on this resource base for their livelihoods. Climate change, including growing climate variability, affects everyone on the globe and adds irregularity and uncertainty to the availability of and demand for water with known effects on the vulnerability of the poorest and their food security (see Bates et al., 2008). Complex governance challenges shape the access to and allocation and distribution of water for FSN and the land, water and food domains are disconnected in policies and programmes. Poor people’s rights to water, sanitation and food are not realized effectively and there are few efforts to interlink these rights effectively.

The complex challenges of water and FSN

There are at least five distinct dimensions of the challenge of water and FSN:

• Changing demographics, lifestyles and diets, and increasing demands from water-using sectors including agriculture, energy generation, mining, and manufacturing, are putting stress on limited freshwater resources.
• Increasing pollution in many parts of the world from both agriculture and industry is rendering water unfit for use and impacting on human and ecosystem health.
• Unsustainable resource management is reducing the ecosystem functions and services of land, fisheries, forests and wetlands, including their ability to provide food and nutrition to rural and urban poor communities in particular.
• Inadequate or lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities and hygiene practices is reducing the nutritional status of people through water-borne diseases and chronic intestinal infections.
• Complex governance challenges shape the access to and allocation and distribution of water for FSN as well as increasing commodification of land, water and food resources. There is also a marked lack of policy coherence across land, water and food domains from national to global. This also includes a lack of political will to realize the human rights to water, sanitation and food of poor and marginalized people and to join them up effectively (see also HLPE, 2015).

In general, these core problems, exacerbated by climate change, tend to disproportionately affect poor and marginalized women, men and small children across the globe due to existing power imbalances and unequal gender relations. How to solve these problems is not obvious, partly due to the nature of water itself. Water, more than most resources, is highly variable across time and space (Mehta, 2014). Its availability is characterized by the complex interactions of a number of elements which include rainfall, temperature, wind, runoff, evapotranspiration, storage, distribution systems and water quality. Unlike energy, or food, freshwater is a limited resource, and creating additional water supplies through, for example, increased storage or desalination, has limited opportunities. It is thus necessary to manage within the natural limitations of available freshwater.

While accessible water resources are adequate at global levels to meet the water needs of the world, these resources are unevenly distributed across the globe with per capita resources particularly low in the Middle East, North African and Southern Asia regions (see Chapter 2). Within regions and countries there are significant variations in water availability. Availability also varies considerably over time, with significant intra- and inter-annual water variations, concentrated in poorer regions (Grey and Sadoff, 2007). Inequality within and between countries, communities and households means that many people continue to have inadequate access to water embedded in food, as reflected in unacceptably high under-nutrition rates (see, for example, FAO, 2013), as well as limited or no access to clean drinking water and sanitation, with significant adverse food and nutrition outcomes. In parts of the globe, historical rainfall patterns are changing, adding significant uncertainty to the reliable availability of water in many regions in the future.

The human population is expected to grow to 9.8 billion people by 2050 (UN DESA, 2017), with the result that per capita water availability will continue to decline over the next few decades, particularly in the global South where almost all the additional population will be added. Per capita water availability is also declining due to growing water pollution, which makes water unusable for many human purposes (Palaniappan et al., 2010), and variability of supply is growing to different degrees as a result of climate change (Bates et al., 2008). While future water demand estimates vary, there is agreement that domestic, municipal and industrial demands are growing faster than irrigation demands; that municipal and domestic demand increases are closely aligned with urbanization trends; that there is particularly high uncertainty regarding industrial water demand trends; and that irrigation demands will continue to account for the largest share of total water demands. Taken together, these various trends point to a serious dilemma of dramatically increasing, competing demands on what is after all a limited natural resource, and one that is crucial to all life and particularly the food security and nutrition of all humanity.

Growing water scarcity and variability will increase the competition for water resources across sectors, with water often being taken away from the agricultural sector to drive greater economic value per unit of water in other sectors. Increasing competition also often results in smaller, and poorer, water users losing their access to water. Conflicts are likely to grow between urban and rural users, upstream and downstream users, between in-stream (aquatic resources) and off-stream (mostly human) users (CA, 2007) and between countries dependent on shared or transboundary water resources. All this makes questions of water governance and decision making with regard to water an urgent imperative. The underlying issue is: who should get what access to which waters when, for how long and for what purposes? Answering this question is complicated and often controversial enough within a single country. Yet this is clearly not enough. While it is often observed that ‘water flows uphill to money and power’, it is also clear that water is a resource that ‘ignores’ national boundaries, thus complicating the challenge of governing our limited water resources even further.

In general, water scarcity, flooding and pollution are most acutely experienced locally, and generally affect those with least resources and those depending on water as an input to their livelihoods the most. Still, the fluidity of the resource ensures linkages within hydrological basins, which are often different from national boundaries. Most countries in the world have at least some of their water resources coming from a transboundary basin where water must be shared between riparian states. In addition to the transboundary nature of much of the world’s water, several processes link water with global processes, through, for example, trade in agricultural (and other) commodities; global climate policy, as reflected in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); national and global energy policies, which are, in part, driven by global climate policies as well as by financial policies; foreign direct investment levels and surrounding policies; global water reports such as the World Commission on Dams (WCD, 2000) and other international processes, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (Ringler et al., 2010; WWAP, 2012).

Conflicting pathways and perspectives

There are competing pathways and discourses regarding water and food security. According to the European Commission (2012), pressures on water availability will continue to grow – not only through the need to feed and hydrate a growing global population, but also from changes in consumption patterns. In the context of the OECD’s 2050 projections, global water demand is projected to increase by 55%, due to increases in manufacturing, electricity and domestic use, leaving little scope for increasing water use for irrigation (OECD, 2012). A report by the Global Harvest Initiative (2014) argued that with growing population, the world may not be able to feed itself by 2050 unless food production increases drastically. This supply side vision is based in part on neo-Malthusian visions of scarcity and crises. We follow the UNDP (2006) in rejecting this ‘gloomy arithmetic’ vision and acknowledge the massive water injustices that poor women and men around the world encounter daily in accessing water for food security. Our starting point is that there is enough food and water to go around, now and in the future.

Another perspective put forward by some members of the CGIAR system argues that world food demand can be satisfied with available water and land resources by a) increasing water and land productivities through upgrading rain fed and irrigated systems, b) optimizing virtua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• List of tables
• List of acronyms
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Linking water and food security and nutrition (FSN)
• 3. Agricultural water management
• 4. Water governance for FSN
• 5. Water, FSN and social justice
• Index