Back to the Well by Marq de Villiers

Author:Marq de Villiers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions

Part Three

Complications

9

Minimizing Farming’s Water Needs

Growing food for humans to eat takes enormous amounts of water — amounts so enormous, in fact, that agriculture accounts for no less than 70 percent of all human uses of water, and even more in developing countries — up to 95 percent in some cases. The average person can get by on a little more than two litres a day for drinking, but it will take somewhere between two thousand and five thousand litres to grow the food that person must eat (the higher number is mostly for meat eaters). That’s about one litre of water per calorie consumed. David Molden, in a monograph for the International Water Management Institute, provides this striking image:

Imagine a canal 10 meters deep, 100 meters wide, and 7.1 million kilometers long — long enough to encircle the globe 180 times. That is the amount of water it takes each year to produce food for today’s 6.5 billion people. Add 2–3 billion people and accommodate their changing diets from cereals to more meat and vegetables and that could add another 5 million kilometers to the channel of water needed to feed the world’s people.1

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