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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Water-food-energy nexus in Asia by Arjun Thapan

In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest is drawn by energy, industry, and domestic use.

Energy costs typically average 50 percent of the cost of delivering urban water supplies, and the amount of water consumed is significant both in terms of hydropower and cooling requirements for thermal power. Water for bio-fuels is also now beginning to compete with water for agriculture. The triangle is now beginning to shrink and the relationship getting even tighter. If policymakers and those in power do not consider this relationship when planning and budgeting, the relationship will become impossible to manage.

Is this relationship new? No, it started when we put in that first food crop, and long before energy became a factor of production. Let’s take sugarcane. One ton of cane needs 250 tons of water. To produce one kilogram of meat, you require anywhere from 30,000 to 70,000 liters of water. Asia’s growth has led to rising incomes and a change in dietary preferences.

The demand for meat has gone up by more than 700 percent in the last 40 years and in China alone, meat consumption doubled in the last two decades, and is forecast to double again by 2030. The correlation, therefore, between food and water, and energy to convey and apply the water, is apparent, real, and increasingly complex to manage. How will we meet rising food demand without the ability to manage this relationship assiduously? And this trend is not restricted only to Asia. It is a global dilemma.

Energy production accounts for about 30 percent respectively of all water withdrawals in Europe and 40 percent in the United States. In Asia, energy demand is projected to rise by 40 percent and industrial demand by 65 percent. So what are the implications?

It is a no-brainer actually with a simple conclusion. At these levels, the agricultural sector will be crowded out and crop production will decline. A world with fewer crops, less water, and vulnerable to climate change in ever changing ways will be a frightening place to be in 20 years from now!
 
The world’s geo-political landscape is rapidly changing as a consequence of the water-energy-food interdependence and the shrinking endowments of accessible freshwater in the developing countries.

Water is the new factor in food and energy security debates and has become a central element in international relations.

Given that 40 percent of the world’s accessible freshwater resources are in shared rivers and water bodies, the stoking of tensions in the Mekong, Indus, Brahmaputra, Syr Darya, and Amur Darya river basins is clear evidence of water’s fractious and dangerous future.

What does this mean for Asia? Will we be perennially water-short? Will economic growth and environmental sustainability be seriously compromised by the scales of forecast water scarcity? The short answer is: potentially, yes, under a business-as-usual outlook. China and India alone are forecast to have a combined supply shortfall of 1 trillion cubic meters in 2030. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam are the other countries at or near water stress conditions.

Endowments in yet others are also falling rapidly.

A conservative would tell you that Asia’s urban centers lose 29 billion cubic meters of treated water annually valued at US$9 billion due to suboptimal system performance. Food and energy-related impacts are already being felt.

A recent paper has said that water scarcity in India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam has become a risk factor in the power sector both for investors and the economy at large. Over half of the 74,000 megawatts of existing and planned capacities of major power plants in these countries is located in water scarce, or water stressed areas.

The environment, too, is at stake. Ecological balances are being rapidly altered. In China and India, groundwater depletion is at dangerously high levels. In China’s Hai River basin, the share of surface water classified as non-usable exceeds 50 percent.  The Philippines has 412 rivers; of these, 50 are classified as dead.

The waters of both the Ganges River in India, and the Yellow River in China, are unusable for agriculture for more than 50 percent of their stretches. In short, food sufficiency is at risk; the socioeconomic landscape will change as cities and industries lose the momentum of growth because of inadequate water; and social inequities will see an alarming rise.

Is there a silver lining in this dark cloud? It seems there is. Efficiency gains in water use will be the new paradigm — early evidence of reducing water footprints is emerging in a few countries. But Asia needs to aggressively adopt policies that dramatically improve water use efficiencies across the range of users.

If Australia’s continued growth is sustained with only 30 percent of the water it had ten years ago, and where irrigation efficiencies are 85-90 percent, and if Phnom Penh can reduce non-revenue water to less than 6 percent, there is good reason for others to strike out on similar paths of efficiency.

There are costs but they are likely to be much higher under do-nothing scenarios. Water will need to be priced more universally and explicitly as an economic good, and its physical use will need to be governed by water markets and regulators who will ensure the right balance between competing uses.

The water-food-energy triangle does not necessitate theorems, nor does it harbor any myths. Among other things, it is also an early warning system asking us to act now for sustaining Asia’s water future.

The writer is the Special Senior Advisor (Infrastructure and Water) for the Asian Development Bank.