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New Study Pushes GM Crops to Conserve WaterRuth David, OneWorld South Asia NEW DELHI, Apr 21 2004 (OneWorld) - A new report released at a UN development summit in New York Tuesday warns that food production and agriculture are causing the rapid depletion of water resources across the world, advocating the cultivation of drought resistant and genetically modified crops to combat the crisis. "Food and agriculture are by far the largest consumers of water. They require 1,000 times more than we use to drink and 100 times more than we use to meet basic personal needs," cautions the report titled "Water - More Nutrition Per Drop," initiated by the Swedish government. Focusing on the estimated 840 million undernourished people across the world, the report warns that if measures are not taken to increase food production while subsequently using less water, the international community will face great difficulties in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015. Agriculture accounts for an alarming 70 to 90 percent of available freshwater supplies in developing countries, according to senior scientist Malin Falkenmark of the Stockholm International Water Institute, which collaborated on the report. Falkenmark adds that astonishingly huge volumes of water are transformed into vapor during food production. The report explains that with globalization and an increase in purchasing power, consumers are becoming more selective about their food, driving an increasing demand for meat and dairy products that involve water-intensive production procedures. Stressing that the conservation of water should be a combined global effort, the report advocates the cultivation and export of crops in regions where they can give the best yield with the least amount of water. It promotes free trade, stressing that unsustainable agricultural subsidies and trade barriers that could hamper such initiatives should be removed. But Indian activists question the motivation behind advocating free trade and region-intensive cultivation. Water expert Dr Sudhirendar Sharma cautions, "The report implies that the food trade dynamics has to change in favor of the West. It credits Europe and the US with being the most water production efficient regions, implying that they should produce a bulk of the world's agricultural needs, and that areas without efficient irrigation systems, like India and other developing countries, should not produce food for their own consumption or exports. This seems a drastically biased view." Concurs leading environmental expert Vandana Shiva, head of the nongovernmental organization Research Foundation For Science, Technology And Ecology. "By increasing the volume of trade, India is likely to export more virtual water (through food products). Also, making agriculture export-driven denies locals their basic food and livelihood rights," she holds. The report also tacitly advocates the increasing cultivation of drought resistant and genetically modified crops. It explains that through GM varieties it might be possible to grow crops in degraded areas, for instance, on lands affected by salinisation. In India, genes from mangroves have been inoculated into rice plants in an effort to boost yields in areas with high levels of salinity. It is estimated that six million hectares of good agricultural land are subject to increasing salinity with the result that yield has been severely reduced and now rarely exceeds 3.7 tons per hectare. With the new GM seeds of paddy, experimental plots show that a yield level of about 11.1 tons per hectare can be restored. The new technology may thus give a boost to production of about 18 million tons and improve the livelihoods of a large number of farmers in the salt affected areas, according to the report. But Shiva, who is spearheading a campaign against GM crops, disagrees. Slamming the findings as "a scientific falsehood," she explains that GM crops are introduced into hybrids, which are by nature irrigation intensive. Planting these would "waste" water rather than "conserve" it, she maintains, adding that such crops are also dangerous because they are herbicide resistant. Another problem with the report, according to Sharma, is that it fails to mention community water conservation efforts across South Asia. "These initiatives play a key role in conserving the resource and can be easily replicated. But they have been conspicuously omitted from the report. And, it does not emphasize on conserving rainwater, which is the main source of water in several developing countries. The report even seems to be pushing vested interests," he speculates. Vested interests or not, the study paints an alarming global scenario concerning water. Predicts the director general of the International Water Management Institute Frank Rijsberman, "Between the late 1990s and 2020, world cereal demand will have increased by 40 percent but the world has a finite supply of water." He stresses that current production patterns are unsustainable as they involve large scale groundwater overexploitation and widespread river depletion, which poses a major threat to biodiversity and aquatic ecosystems. Water depletion isn't the only problem. Says Rijsberman, "We are seeing ever increasing levels of environmental degradation and loss of production potential caused by water pollution from agricultural chemicals, water logging and salinisation." For now, it seems like millions more liters of water will evaporate into thin air before the global community joins hands to tackle the crisis. |
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