Investing in Water for Food, Ecosystems and Livelihoods

The role of water in food and livelihood security is a major issue of concern in the context of continued environmental degradation and persistent poverty throughout the developing world. Using more water for agriculture threatens important food production systems and ecosystem services such as fisheries. On the other, hand less water for agriculture could lead to increased malnutrition and food insecurity. The stakes are high, the problems are complex, and there is contention about the best ways of managing and investing in water for agriculture. Assessments are a way to bridge science and policy, and to address complex questions. The Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture has been a major multi-institute initiative— filling gaps in the existing knowledge base to develop consensus on appropriate investment and management strategies to meet food and environmental security objectives in the near future and over the next 25 years.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) launched the System Wide Initiative on Water Management (SWIM) in 1995 as a major program dealing with broader water management and agriculture issues. In 2000 the initiative, convened by IWMI, was remodeled to bring CGIAR centers, together with a range of partners, to focus entirely on building the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (CA). The CA or SWIM-2 expanded the scope of SWIM by focusing on issues of global concern like hunger, poverty, and environment.

The CA critically evaluates the benefits, costs, and impacts of The past 50 years of water development and challenges to water management currently facing communities. It assesses innovative responses and explores the consequences of potential investment and management decisions. The results of the assessment will enable farming communities, governments, and donors to make better investment and management decisions. Ninety institutes worldwide are currently working on the Assessment research through over 40 different projects.

The first phase of the CA concentrated on knowledge gap filling research and assessment tool development. The CA research agenda closely complements that of IWMI, with many IWMI projects contributing to and receiving support from the CA in the areas of water productivity, integrated water resources management, rainfed agriculture, land and water degradation, groundwater governance, irrigation impacts, and sustainable wetland management. The research agenda is further augmented by the wealth of expertise and projects carried out by CA's partner organizations.

Assessing the Options

SWIM 2 researchers have been assessing several options put forward to change the "more food=more water" equation through options such as:

• Encouraging water savings and preventing the polluting of rivers and groundwater, reducing water logging and salinization and saving water.

• Increasing water productivity to gain more food or more value from the same amount of water.

• Upgrading rainfed systems by growing more on rainfed land, sometimes with the addition of supplemental irrigation, has the potential to increase water productivity and fight rural poverty.

• Reducing agricultural water consumption by influencing diets. Meat-based diets from grain-fed cattle deplete as much as 5,000 liters per capita per day, while vegetarian diets deplete less than half that amount of water.

• Encouraging trade in virtual water by allowing countries lacking water resources to import staple food from water abundant countries, thereby saving their scarce water resources for higher value uses. Of these options, research suggests that increasing water productivity in irrigated and rainfed systems, through innovative techniques and system upgrades offers the greatest potential for immediate, widespread application.

Research on Irrigation and Poverty

The CA has already generated a set of refereed research reports and nearly 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. CA research on irrigation and poverty in Asia has demonstrated that while poverty remains an issue in canal systems due to inequitable benefit sharing and poor irrigation performance, irrigated areas tend to have higher productivity and wage rates than rainfed areas (Hussain et al., 2003). Further, research suggests a range of direct and indirect socio-economic costs and benefits accompanying irrigated agriculture not previously documented (Matsuno et al., 2002; Boisvert et al., 2003).

Environmental Impacts of Irrigated Agriculture

The CA has also made important contributions to understanding the environmental consequences of irrigated agriculture through the development of a global framework for assessing environmental flow requirements (Smakhtin et al., 2004) and analyzing the negative and positive externalities associated with an irrigated landscape (Galbraith et al., 2003). According to a recent CA global study of environmental water requirements, over 1.4 billion people live in river basins where high water-use levels threaten freshwater ecosystems (Smakhtin et al., 2004).This first view of environmental water scarcity shows that many countries already have to make serious environmental tradeoffs to grow food, and that many more will be facing the same dilemma in the next 25 years.

Workshops and Conferences

The CA has played an important role in delivering key water, food, livelihood and environment messages at important workshops and meetings. It played a major role at the Stockholm Water Symposium in 2004, where the Blue Paper on Investing in Water for Food, Ecosystems and Livelihoods was presented. It reviewed several policies and water investment options-along with their livelihood and environmental implications. These preliminary findings were shared to raise awareness that water in agriculture is a pressing issue, that business as usual is not an option, and that there are potential solutions, but they are not necessarily the ones that have received the most attention (Blue Paper, 2004).

http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/Assessment/Index.asp