World Water Day in 2012

It is impossible to deny the symbiotic relationship between water and food security.  “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” and water is one of the fundamental input factor to the food production. However, it is imperative that we not forget that water is vital to communities. It is more important than food production for the sake of producing more food. That last sentence makes little sense without an example...so if you have the option of producing more food by diverting a river...is it worth diverting the river when hunger is a rising concern in the developing world? Personally, I think it isn't worth it. A lot of local communities rely on that water to survive. Ecosystems function around that water and they use that water to plant the basics they need to survive...diverting a river is a short term solution that causes much greater problems.

Unsurprisingly, Food security has been raising the international political agenda following the peak prices of 2008 and the financial crisis of 2009. If you couple this with logical concerns (or public planning) then  future population growth, urbanization, changing diets, development pressure on land and water (including resources  allocated to  biofuel production) and energy cost increase are all contributing to a progressive and severe water scarcity that will in turn undermine the food security. If you look at drought as an example of this...water scarcity definitely is coupled with food security. And Israel has a lot of lessons that we should be using. They have used innovative irrigation methods to turn a land that was hostile desert and turned it into a food producing nation. Water is the crisis of our future and the developed world needs to look at the example offered by Singapore where they create new water from waste water (and end up only using 30% of it for their needs). There are solutions. It is time to implement them.