Water, Food and Poverty in River Basins

Defining the Limits

Myles Fisher, Simon Cook, Myles J. Fisher, Simon E. Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415538916
• eBook ISBN: 9781135724276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Conventional wisdom says that the world is heading for a major water crisis. By 2050, global population will increase from 7 billion to a staggering 9.5 billion and the demands this will place on food and water systems will inevitably push river basins over the edge.

The findings from this book present a different picture. While it is convenient to visualize an inevitable global water and food crisis in which increasing demands result in increasing poverty, food insecurity and conflict, the reality is far more nuanced and revolves around the politics of equitable and sustainable development of resources.

The first part of this book provides detailed insight into conditions of water flows within nine river basins. In the second part, authors summarize and re-analyze the outcome of the nine basins, providing a coherent global picture of water, water productivity and development. They assess the impacts of variations of these attributes on development and approaches for poverty alleviation, and explore the institutional factors that support or obstruct change.

How people will manage river systems while protecting vital ecosystem functions will make the difference between catastrophe and survival. As Prof Asit Biswas points out, "... the world is facing a water crisis not because of physical scarcity of water but because of poor management practices in nearly all countries of the world."

The book is based on the four years (2006-2010) of extensive research into the state of ten of the world's major river basins carried out under the CGIAR Challenge Program for Water and Food's Basin Focal Project.

This book was published as a special issue of Water International.

Introduction: water, food and poverty in river basins

Myles Fisher and Simon Cook

The world faces emerging crises of water and food. Its population already nears 7 billion and is forecast to be at least 9 billion by 2050. The increased population will need 70 percent more food than it does today (Bruinsma 2009), which has major implications for the global environment that supports the food system. That goal will be a lot harder to achieve than the green revolution last century.

Where will the water come from to produce 70% more food when agriculture already uses 70% of the world's freshwater resources? In the case of the Indus, the Yellow, and the Nile, the basins are essentially closed, that is, all the water is used. In some cases, the environmental flows essential to maintain ecosystem function towards the river mouths have ceased or are threatened. The only solution in closed basins is to increase water productivity (WP) of crops by using the water more efficiently, what former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called, “More crop per drop” (Annan 2000).

The CGIAR took up this challenge in its Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF). One of the CPWF's approaches was to examine in detail the issues of development, poverty, and water productivity in ten river basins worldwide in the Basin Focal Projects. The first part of this book, which was published as a Special Issue of Water International in late 2009, has papers from nine of these basins: the Andes system of basins in South America; the Limpopo, the Niger, the Nile, and the Volta in Africa; the Karkheh in Iran; and the Ganges, the Indus, the Mekong, and the Yellow in Asia. The nine basin papers are followed by analyses of processes across basins, which were published as a second Special Issue of Water International in early 2011.

The fascinating outcome is that all the basins are different. Many of them have high levels of poverty and there are some similarities, but each of them presents different underlying problems, which must be addressed if the goals of increasing food production and overcoming poverty are to be met.

Water scarcity

Population growth has reduced available water in some basins below 1700m3/capita/yr, the level considered secure (Falkenmark 1989). Absolute water scarcity worsens when the growing population depends on unsustainable irrigation as in the Yellow, Indus, Karkheh, and upstream Limpopo basins.

Water productivity

Apart from the need to increase WP in closed basins, populations in the sub-Sahel are doubling every 30 years, with every indication that they will continue to do so. Food production has kept pace with the increase over the last 20 years, largely by increasing the cropped area, which can continue in the short term. For the longer term, however, it is necessary to address the cause of low WP of rainfed agriculture in the sub-Sahel (the Volta and the Niger Basins), which Cai et al. identify as “lack of inputs, and poor water and crop management”. WP could be increased with appropriate agronomy (high-yielding varieties and fertilizer) as demonstrated by the Millennium Villages project (Sachs 2007). As pressure on the available land increases, however, higher WP is the only solution to providing the food that will be needed with the water that is available.

Water quality

In some basins, water quality for the rural poor is a more important than quantity. Indeed water quality is a universal issue for the rural poor as reported in the Nile, the Indus-Ganges, and the Volta papers, but also in the relatively developed basins of the Andes, where mining and other uses threaten water quality. Moreover, it is difficult to provide safe water to the invariably dispersed populations of the rural poor. The success of “Thai jars” (small, artisanal, ferro-concrete water tanks) in Nepal, however, suggests that there are feasible solutions, which could be applied more widely. Rainwater harvesting for domestic water receives little attention, but it is viable even in semi-arid countries. Rainfall collected from dwelling and other roofs was the source of domestic water for much of rural Australia during its pioneering phase, and still is in many places.

Water-related hazards

Water-related hazards of drought, flood and water-borne diseases have major impacts on development. The hazards cause more hardship where countries have little capacity to manage them, such as in the Niger, the Volta, or the Nile Basins, or where the events can be extreme as in the Limpopo, and the 2011 floods in the Indus and the Niger.

Fish and the commons

Fish in general are a common resource and at least in the case of maritime fisheries have been plundered to the point of collapse as fishing became industrialized last century. Will the Mekong suffer a similar fate? There is evidence that the total catch has remained static for the last ten years (see Kirby et al.'s Mekong paper), so that per capita consumption has fallen as the population has increased. The productivity of the Tonle Sap fishery in Cambodia, which provides livelihoods for over one million people, depends on the seasonal ebb and flow of the Mekong. Will hydropower dams reduce this ebb and flow, reduce the fish catch, and cause wrenching social change? Will economic development based on hydropower provide compensation for the population that now depends on fishing? If there is a parallel between possible loss of the commons of the fish in the Mekong and the misery and migration caused by the enclosure of the commons in the UK 250 years ago, the effects may be severe and long lasting.

Legal duality

Legal duality of institutions leads to the inability of herders, migrants and fishers to get access to land and water resources in West Africa (see the Niger and the Volta papers). Central governments have been unable to insist that rights to land and water should be by means of formal land title. The breakdown of traditional cattle herders' access to forage and water is having a profound effect on their livelihoods in West Africa. Fisher et al. show that a more comprehensive, integrated approach to institutions and organizations could make them more relevant to basin-wide needs. The mismatch between the needs of development and providing ecosystem services is a key issue in many basins and impacts food, poverty, livelihoods, and sustainable ecosystems.

Some thoughts on poverty

It is easy to say that water quality is an indicator of poverty. Yes, the poor often have bad water. But is this a cause or an effect? Certainly, poor-quality water brings with it problems like water-borne diseases and infant mortality. But if they had good water would they still be poor? Probably, but their quality of life would be improved. Moreover, Sachs (2007) argues that lower infant mortality will cause an immediate, voluntary reduction in fertility rates and thus reduce the rate of population increase. Access to water is influenced by interactions between local, regional and national institutions and organizations (see Kemp-Benedict et al.'s paper). Their influence on livelihood strategies decreases at higher levels of economic development.

With education too, are people poor because they are illiterate? Almost certainly, yes they are. And are they illiterate because they are poor? Again it is plausible that they are, but the remarkable success of the Bolsa Familia component of the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programme in Brazil, in which the subsidy to the poor is contingent upon the household children remaining in school, suggests that there are effective solutions

Transboundary issues

Transboundary organizational weakness is a common theme, identified in all but the Yellow and the Karkheh, which are entirely within one country. Boundaries do not have to be international to be problematic; provinces in China and states in federal systems such as India are quite proprietary over the waters within their borders.

One reviewer of the Limpopo paper commented that the river is notable by not having any large dam that would encourage transnational cooperation. There is no large dam on the lower Limpopo because there is no suitable dam site. But it begs the question of whether large dams do indeed encourage transnational cooperation. Giordano et al. (2005) show that despite tensions, transboundary rivers are more a subject of agreement than conflict. The papers in this book support that conclusion.

Salman (2010) describes how upstream riparian countries can be “harmed by downstream [riparian countries] through foreclosure of their future uses [of water]”. He concludes that cooperation amongst riparian countries is the cardinal principle of the law of international waters, and that the interests and concerns of both upstream and downstream riparian countries need to be considered by all parties. It is hard to argue against that conclusion, but implementing it requires good will on all sides, which is difficult to achieve if all parties continue to pursue their own narrow interests, as they often seem to do.

Transboundary organizations

Most of the transnational rivers do have a statutory organization, nominally with a coordinating role, but the participating countries in general have not ceded any useful authority to the institutions they have created. They remain bodies that support dis-semination of research, and convene conferences and meetings, but they do little to influence political outcomes, which can only be arrived at by consensus of the constituent countries. The River Nile Commission is dominated by the downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan, who insist on adherence to the arrangements made in colonial times, which did not consider upstream countries. Indeed, Egypt threatens to go to war with any country that presumes to reduce downstream flows of the Nile.

The Volta River Commission does achieve some useful collaboration between Ghana and Burkina Faso, which together occupy 84% of the Basin. In contrast, each of the members of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), Cambodia, the Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam insist on their right to do whatever is in their own best interests. China's participation in the MRC is limited to observer status, and although it appears to be increasingly willing to cooperate, there is little reason to expect that it will be any less protective of its interests than other Mekong basin states. Even though the number of nations involved is fewer, conflict in the Ganges is more intense. The Farakka Barrage in India, 10 km upstream from the border with Bangladesh, controls the Ganges by diverting it to the Hooghly River from its course through Bangladesh. India closes it during the dry season, but opens it when the Ganges floods so that Bangladesh gets no Ganges water in the dry season, but is inundated when the river floods. Repeated efforts to resolve the issue have not been successful.

Climate change

The threat of climate change hangs over all. Climate change will have both positive and negative impacts, both between and within basins (see Mulligan et al.'s paper). The common feature is that the poor are almost always the most vulnerable. The global circulation models forecast that temperatures will rise by 2–3°C by 2050, which will increase water losses to evaporation. The effect of the higher temperatures per se on crop yield is harder to predict, but there are some indications with maize and rice that higher temperatures reduce yields.

Precipitation is not so clear-cut, but most basins are likely to decrease somewhat, which coupled with higher temperatures, will cause more water stress in crops. Moreover, with less snow and ice to spread river flows, timing of flow peaks will change and there will be more floods. In some places, there will be plant breeding solutions, such as crops that flower earlier in the day to avoid the heat, but these are possibilities rather than off-the-shelf solutions. There are also agronomic solutions, such as later planting to avoid high rates of evaporation during the very hot weather that precedes the monsoon to reduce the demand on groundwater in the Indian Punjab (see the Indus-Ganges paper).

Basin summaries

We summarize briefly our opinion of the outstanding features of each basin:

Andes

The Andes are a complex system of independent basins in which biophysical and developmental diversity are confronting change. The economies of the Andean countries are developing, although there are still large populations who do not share the benefits. The pressing issue the countries confront is how to share the benefits of development more equitably.

Ganges

The basin is under extreme population pressure. Low WP downstream contrasts with high WP upstream but unsustainable groundwater use. There were great benefits from the green revolution in the western states, but much less in the eastern states. The Far-akka Barrage is a transnational issue, which forced Bangladeshi farmers to adapt to less water by changing from flooded, dry-season rice to other crops and irrigation by groundwater.

In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: water, food and poverty in river basins
• 2. The Andes basins: biophysical and developmental diversity in a climate of change
• 3. The Indus and the Ganges: river basins under extreme pressure
• 4. The Karkheh River basin: the food basket of Iran under pressure
• 5. Vulnerable populations, unreliable water and low water productivity: a role for institutions in the Limpopo Basin
• 6. The Mekong: a diverse basin facing the tensions of development
• 7. Water, agriculture and poverty in the Niger River basin
• 8. The Nile Basin: tapping the unmet agricultural potential of Nile waters
• 9. Farming systems and food production in the Volta Basin
• 10. Yellow River basin: living with scarcity
• 11. Water, food and poverty: global- and basin-scale analysis
• 12. Water availability and use across the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) basins
• 13. Producing more food with less water in a changing world: assessment of water productivity in 10 major river basins
• 14. The resilience of big river basins
• 15. The nature and impact of climate change in the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) basins
• 16. Connections between poverty, water and agriculture: evidence from 10 river basins
• 17. Institutions and organizations: the key to sustainable management of resources in river basins
• Index