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Feeding a Growing Earth:The Challenge of Food Supply and Water Sustainability

Climate scientists have been warning for a number of years about the consequences that climate change will have on the global food supply and food security. Additionally, the Guardian recently reported that within a decade, 2.9 billion people in 48 nations will experience chronic water scarcity. The challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population on a hotter, drier earth must be met if we are to sustain an estimated population of 10 billion people by the year 2050. This was the topic of discussion as APCOs International Advisory Council met in April 2015.

Dan Glickman, former U.S. secretary of agriculture, opened the discussion stating that we have a huge need for additional food supplies over the next 30 years as the population grows from about 7 billion people to about 9.5 billion people, particularly in the developing world where there will be a huge growth in food needs. At that pace, we need to increase production between 70 to 100 percent from what we currently produce, unless we are able to develop ways to significantly increase yields. This urgency has placed the issue of food supply and food security on the agendas of the G7 and the G20, whereas 15 years ago these issues were not a priority among high-level government leaders.

As weve seen in California, the issue of water is also a growing concern among policy-makers and the business community. About 70 percent of the water in the world is used for irrigation of crops, so only 30 percent is used for everything else, which includes human consumption, industrial consumption and the like. So as the world becomes more urbanized, and the growing population necessitates doubling the amount of food production, there is a conflict between urban and rural interests as we try to allocate a more scarce water supply.

The water issue is particularly acute. It involves how we generate less thirsty varieties of crops and animals in the future versus the water intensive crops we currently grow. This will involve a great deal of discussion of new technologies, research and development, as well as financing. How do we finance better use of water, water conservation techniques and new types of crops that we are going to need to grow in the future?

To illustrate the concern, water tables are falling dramatically all over the world. Even in the United States, where we feed large

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amounts of animals necessitating massive amounts of water, the water tables are dropping. The day of reckoning is coming. Water is a little different than oil, because it recharges and falls from the sky, and some places get too much water but many places get too little water and climate change is certainly going to have an impact. But soon we are going to have to feed another 2.5 billion people with probably no more land and no more water, so notwithstanding the fact that we havent had the crisis in water that weve had in energy, its going to come.

Energy is price sensitive. Water is not price-sensitive. Most governments dont charge for water, because that would be a very politically opportunistic thing to do. The pricing of water is generally totally unrelated to market forces, as opposed to energy, for the obvious political reasons. A few places, like California, have tried their best to address this, but the fact remains that if we priced water according to market forces, we wouldnt need these new engineering solutions. Its just very difficult to do politically in the world. So the question is how we deal with the issue of feeding the world and giving industry and people opportunities to have water, yet do it in a way where its totally unrelated to the economics of water. Thats a real challenge for us.

These present enormous challenges. How are we going to produce 50 percent to 100 percent more food? How are we going to do it sustainably? How are we going to do it without enormous use of inputs like pesticides and fertilizer? And how are we going to do it with less water?

No industry is impacted by climate as much as agriculture, because no industry other than perhaps the resort or recreation industries are outdoors. So agriculture is the most dependent and the most vulnerable industry to climate change, and you can see that happening already worldwide with the production of crops in the northern hemisphere.

Agriculture and food issues are huge factors and present large hurdles for potential trade agreements, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Promotion (T-TIP). In Asia-Pacific they are a big stumbling block. U.S. Congress reluctance to grant the president authority to negotiate trade agreements is related as much to agriculture as anything else.

Discussing the water issue, Nic Labuschagne, senior director of strategy in APCOs Dubai office, remarked that the biggest challenge with irrigation is not just the adequacy of water, but the residue it leaves behind in the fields. As we drain more of the aquifers and the river water gets reused repeatedly, often as a result of drainage or fields that have already been fertilized, the fields become salted to the extent that they basically become barren. So thats a major challenge for a lot of agricultural land at the moment right now.

Another issue is the concept of virtual water. Its not really something thats in familiar usage yet, but most products that we consume require huge amounts of water at the various

stages of their production. For example, it requires 2,500 liters of water to ultimately produce one hamburger when you consider the amount of water required for the grain to feed the animals, the grain to produce the bread, and so forth. That has a very direct impact on what many countries are doing by purchasing or renting farmland in foreign parts of the world and then exporting the produce back to their home countries. They are in effect taking water from those countries and importing it to themselves.

So there already exists a massive trade globally in terms of water, its just encapsulated in the product. Its necessary to understand the enormity of the challenge; its not simply a challenge of there not being enough water.

Karen Hulebak, former chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Commission and a chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, noted that people have been saying for two decades that water is going to be the next oil, yet it hasnt happened. So it might be useful to consider the factors that have caused water not to rise to the level of importance that we all seem to think it does really have. What is different about our current situation that is going to make water take on that really critical importance? Are things now really different? Whats going to make it really be taken seriously by governments and companies?

Climate change may be an instructive connection to consider. Its easy to deny climate change and its easy to deny water shortage when water is in overabundance of so many parts of the world. As we think about how to capitalize on the factors that make it so important and raise the consciousness of people, it would be instructive to think about the factors that have made it not be taken so seriously in the past, even though water tables have been falling for a long time.

Derek Yach, former senior vice president of global health and agriculture policy at PepsiCo, remarked that the political reality of water is playing out across the Middle East and resulted in major agricultural policy changes in Saudi Arabia, for example, banning wheat growing because of the changes in the water table. Potatoes are going to come next, leading to the land grab and the land needs across Africa. So this is having significant political effects, which are not being spoken about enough.

In sum, three takeaways from the discussion are:

1. There needs to be a serious discussion on how the global community can meet the demand of feeding a growing population with a finite amount of arable land.

2. Increased food production will put enormous strain on the global water supply, exacerbated by the declining level of water tables around the world.

3. Climate change will be a significant factor in the balance between the production of food and the world water supply, and the issue needs to be a high priority for both government and the business community.