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Which way should the water flow?
Saturday, 2018/01/27 | 06:21:56
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Rice Today, IRRI Jan 18 2018 Alaric Francis Santiaguel Today’s challenges facing scientists are greater than they were 50 years ago. Fortunately, available scientific tools and on-farm technologies are far more powerful than ever.
Figure: Drought is the most widespread and damaging of all environmental stresses, affecting 23 million hectares of rainfed rice in South and Southeast Asia. In some states in India, severe drought can cause as much as 40% yield loss, amounting to $800 million. (Photo: IRRI)
The impossible balancing act in the face of water scarcity
The amount of freshwater on Earth has remained fairly constant since before the time of the dinosaurs. But, the global population has experienced continuous growth since the end of the Great Famine and the Black Death in 1350. Freshwater—which is less than 1% of the total water on the planet—withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and dams, once used mainly for agriculture, is now being diverted to generate power for industry and cities, sparking a debate on who gets the water and how much of it.
Unfortunately, this tug-of-war will have no winners. Chronic or even sporadic water shortages could derail Asia’s impressive economic growth of the past few decades. But, taking too much water away from rice farms could trigger widespread food shortages. Achieving a balance between water for society and water for rice production will be a key to how Asia’s future unfolds.
Expansion of irrigated agriculture over the past 50 years and the recent urbanization and rapid economic growth of Southeast Asia have dramatically affected water use in the region. Cities demand increasing shares of available water for domestic consumption, industry, and even recreation, at the expense of irrigated agriculture. Asia’s iconic rivers such as the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia, the Yellow River, and the Mekong are increasingly subject to major hydroelectric dam projects as countries scramble to meet their energy needs.
The diversion of river waters is potentially depriving downstream neighbors of water over the years. In some areas—with the flow of even major rivers dwindling to a trickle during drought years—surface water sources are bound to dry up eventually at current rates of use.
Although agriculture, and especially rice, remains the primary water user over much of Asia, competition is driving societies to confront a stark choice: shall existing water be used in the cities to power them or to feed them? This difficult choice of diverting water away from irrigation schemes into urban water systems is looming across Asia’s most populated cities: Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia, Bangkok in Thailand, and Hanoi in Vietnam.
Since the largest amount of irrigation water goes to rice cultivation in Asia, controlling how much water is used for growing rice is the way to ease the tensions between agricultural and urban/industrial water use. But, rice has tremendous political clout. Even though rice cannot express its sentiments through the ballot box, the huge rural populations that depend on rice cultivation for their livelihood (and those who “simply cannot live without it”) can.
Rice cultivation occupies such an important part of a sense of social well-being within most Asian societies that any attempts to dramatically reduce it would be politically unwise, like removing the pin yourself from a grenade that’s glued to your other hand. The political backlash could be swift and loud—and crippling.
For most rice-importing countries, the international rice market is simply not reliable enough to depend on for national food security. The jury is in: farmers need to grow more rice using less water.
See more: http://ricetoday.irri.org/which-way-should-the-water-flow/ |
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