Water - more crop per drop.

The missing factor!

Ask economics students how many elements go into making any product (what economists call the 'factors of production') and they will tell you – three:  land, labour and capital.

They are wrong.

They should think again.

If you ask farmers instead – whether working in the prairies of North America,  the Mekong Delta paddy fields of Vietnam, the huge Chinese wheat fields along the Yellow River or out in the Punjab, the big breadbasket of Pakistan - how many factors goes into producing food, they will tell you – four! The missing one: the factor that any farmer looks at to decide if a farm is any good (what we Devonshire folk call ‘a proper job’) is of course water.

This simple truth is lost on all the economics doctorates who line the corridors of power at the World Bank and the UN Development Programme.  For years they have developed new agriculture blueprints without thinking about how much water will be needed. (I could give examples from my own experience).  Most of their projects will involve trapping large amounts of water at huge expense. Some of the projects entail costs of $10,000 per hectare. That is far more than any peasant farmer can afford. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is more savvy.  It warns that, on at least a third of the world’s fields, water rather than land, labour or capital, is the limiting factor.

We still have not really taken the costs of supplying this water into account when it comes to developments in agriculture. 

Green Revolution:

The ‘Green Revolution’, increasing food output drastically over a generation, achieved new strains of wheat, rice, cotton.  But some are heavy drinkers. Rice takes more water to produce than any other food crop.  A kilo of rice will take anything from 2000 to 5,000 litres of water to produce. (In China, in the dry provinces of <?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />Gansu or Ninxia, it will take even four times more). That is twice as much as it takes to produce a kilo of wheat and four times a kilo of potatoes.  If you want to eat a quarter-pound hamburger, then that will cost someone about 11,000 litres of water.  A litre of milk could cost anything from 2,000 to 4,000 litres of water.

Three times more!

When we start to calculate our output of food compared to the water input (that is usually how economists calculate productivity, say product output per hour worked by someone or amount of capital involved), it makes us realise how precious this ‘production factor’ is.

Sadly the whole ‘Green Revolution’ was achieved through the discoveries of botany experts who developed new ‘high-yielding’ plant varieties which just happened to be huge water guzzlers.  Today, although the world is growing twice as much food as it did on one generation ago, it now requires three times more water. We are only now beginning to realise that our use of the world’s water resources is out of control.  In particular, we are using up too much of our underground aquifers which are not being replenished fast enough. We have also built hundreds of dams over our rivers which the UN Commission on Dams Report points out, are hugely wasteful of the water, especially in the evaporation they create, and they don’t deliver anything like the water gains they promised.  Many of them destroy fish and eventually silt up , with rich silt that farmers usually make use of in the delta regions.

Huge expense:

Few experts bother to take the costs of water into account when making their calculations.  Some countries have erected costly projects that can only be described as indulgent waste.  Saudi Arabia, for instance, spent $40 billion during the 1980s, sinking pumps into its aquifers to water a million hectares of hot, dry desert to produce wheat crops.  China plans to spend $60 billion to divert the flow of the Yangtze in order to replenish the dried up Yellow River and the millions in its mega-cities who rely on it.  And Colonel Gaddaffi spent $14 billion to create 3,500 kilometres of pipes to bring water up from hundreds of boreholes sunk into the sand in the middle of the Sahara Desert (see www.npr.org – Sept 11, 2007), hoping to encourage farmers to move into the Sahara (he failed miserably!)

Wasting it:

Seventy percent of the world’s water goes towards the production of food and we have never really thought about how efficient this use of water is.  We know of course that there are huge wastages of water, through corruption (see the 2008 Report by Transparency International), through inefficient distribution systems, and through leaking water like crazy, as well as through the over-use of fast drying-up aquifers. But farmers have little idea how to get water to their plants efficiently. Down through the centuries, most farmers have irrigated their crops by pouring on water indiscriminately.  Most of it misses the plants entirely! Very little of it actually reaches the roots of their crops.  The rest just seeps away.  In some places, the soil ends up getting water-logged. In other places the rich top-soil gets washed away through too much watering, or the irrigation may build up too much salts in the fields.  Wasting so much water in agriculture often leads to national water shortages and even conflicts between the different users.  Fred Pearce (in When The Rivers Run Dry) calculates that two-thirds of the water sent down irrigation canals in fact never reaches the plants for which it was intended.  Even water sprinklers spread water around indiscriminately and lose a lot through evaporation.

New realism:

Now that experts are beginning to add in the cost of water to their calculations of farmer efficiency, things are changing (hopefully, but don't hold your breath!).  Thanks to experiments in India and the Philippines, we can now produce rice with far less water.  The trick to doing that is to stop growing the seedlings in nurseries and then transplanting them into paddy that needs to be kept flooded.  Instead, if a farmer plants the newly developed varieties of seed directly into muddy soil, that will take far less water.  If more farmers did this then they can reduce the use of water by a fifth.  We could also bring this water use down further if we thought more carefully about how to supply this valuable resource directly to the plants.

A simple question - how?

It is said that a person called Syncha Blass, an Israeli engineer who retired to the Negev Desert in the 1960s was the first person to discover drip irrigation.  There are different versions of this story but Wikipedia tells it like this. In the early 1930s, a local Negev farmer showed Blass a big tree, growing in his backyard “without water”.  So, Blass dug down below the apparently dry surface of the soil to discover why.  He found water from a leaking coupling caused a small wet area on the surface and an expanding onion shaped area of underground water reached just the roots of the tree. These tiny drops penetrating the soil to reach the giant tree impressed Blass. He developed a narrow tube to deliver water under pressure and drip it close to the roots of plants more efficiently. But it was not till much later in 1969, once plastics had been invented, that Blass decided to patent his invention in Tel Aviv in 1969.

Drip irrigation:

Drops of water leaking into the soil like this are now widely used  as drip irrigation.

Sadly again, the clever graduate boffins in places like the World Bank have produced high tech  water drip irrigation systems that cost about $2,000 a hectare.  Most small farmers cannot possibly afford such systems.  Also, farmers in places like India get their water supplied at ridiculously subsidised prices (a tenth of the true cost in India, Mexico, or even Pakistan and California).  And the many farmers who merely pump the water in the aquifers below their farms get this for merely the cost of the pumps and fuel.  My friend Thong, in the north east of Thailand has never heard of drip feed water systems.  He does not pay for his water supply but merely uses a huge piece of tubing to get his water from the aquifer below, with a cheap pump like all his neighbours. These pumps are also sold in India really cheaply.  Such farmers have little incentive to save such a precious resource.

Water savers:

Water saving techniques have, of course, been around for centuries.  Chinese farmers used to bury earthenware pitchers in the soil, each with little holes in to leak out the water slowly into the soil.  All they had to do then was to refill the pitchers now and then, and the roots of their plants got watered efficiently and cheaply. Indian farmers, too, used to take bamboo tubes pierced with holes and lay them in fields. 

Fred Pearce describes what is called Pepsees, little tubes made of disposable plastic, designed to mould iced lollipos. The polythene tubes come in long rolls, with little perforations every few centimetres to break off each lolly.  Farmers soon caught on to this, realising the tubing was ideal as a cheap drip feed system.  It was so successful that the supplier produced a new Pepsee designed especially for farmers, in black plastic (to kill off the algae that developed on the clear Pepsee lollypop plastic).  A kilogram roll of this costs just 50 rupees.  More recently agricultural researchers around the world are trying to get farmers to think of this fourth ‘production factor’ more carefully, using the slogan: ‘more crop per drop’. 

The cost of water:

Or, as Raj Gupta from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Delhi says, ‘For the first time, we are starting to measure crop yields in terms of the tonnage produced for a given amount of water’.  He reckons that drip feed water systems could bring down the costs of water in farming by around a fifth.  Let us hope that the World Bank boffin-boys and all the other Western Experts who delight in modern, costly large-scale solutions to small farmer problems, get the message that there are really useful solutions out there that are cheap to make. 

This is what the 350 million small farmers across the world really need from them.

 

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