Water shortage threatens Asia’s food supplies

Countries in Asia risk chronic food shortages and possible social unrest if they do not improve water management, scientists warn. Speaking at a United Nations conference in Sweden yesterday, water experts said countries in south and east Asia need to spend billions of dollars to update farming methods and cater for a massive rise in population. And that is without taking into account the possible affects global warming will have on water supplies, they said.

By 2050, an extra 1.5 billion people will live in Asia, piling even more pressure on already scarce food supplies, said a study by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). It also forecast that by 2050, developing countries in Asia look likely to need to import more than a quarter of the rice, wheat and maize needed to feed their populations. At the same time, cereal prices are expected to continue to rise. "Asia's food and feed demand is expected to double by 2050. Relying on trade to meet a large part of this demand will impose a huge and politically untenable burden on the economies of many developing countries," IWMI director general Colin Chartres told Agence France Presse news agency. "The best bet for Asia lies in revitalising its vast irrigation systems, which account for 70 percent of the world's total irrigated land," he said. "Relying on trade to meet a large part of this demand will impose a huge and politically untenable burden on the economies of many developing countries. “If we don’t invest we will see food crises like the one in 2007 repeated over and again. That was an early warning. If nothing is done, you are going to get an increase in social unrest, migration and a fertile ground for terrorism,” Mr Chartres warned.

Since the fall of communism, farmers have chosen more and more to do take care of watering their crop themselves, mainly using cheap Chinese-made pumps. This means they can extract as much water as they like from their land, draining a precious natural resource and the government can’t regulate how much they take – which is building big future water shortages. Water tables in parts of India and China have dropped catastrophically in the last few years. “It’s a trend that will become more common. The consequence will be more farmer suicides, hardship and collapsing enterprises,” said Mr Chartres.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children