United Nation’s World Water Day falls on 22 Mar 2012.
This year’s theme for UN World Water Day is “Water and Food security”. UN is educating the public on the link between water usage and food production. “The world is thirsty because we are hungry”
World Water Day 2012 – The World Is Thirsty Because we are Hungry: (Eng)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ_pB28uVMI
From the clip, UN informs that “A person needs to drink 2 to 4 litres of water a day. BUT we virtually eat 2000 to 5000 litres of water (embedded in our daily food) !
Producing 1 kg of wheat requires 1,500 litres of water, but producing 1kg of beef requires 15,000 litres of water (10 times as much!)
UNFAO states that “Agriculture accounts for 70% of total water usage”.
& “90% of our total water consumption goes to produce today’s Food.
It takes 1000 times more water to feed the human population then it does to satisfy it’s thirst.”
……..
The UN website also has some materials about water footprint of products.
http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/campaign.html
Under the “Education Material” there is a “Water for Food Wall Chart” which shows how much water is needed to produce various food that we eat.
UN recommends the following:
“ When a billion people in the world already live in chronic hunger and water resources are under pressure we cannot pretend the problem is ‘elsewhere’. Coping with population growth and ensuring access to nutritious food to everyone call for a series of actions we can all help with:
- follow a healthier, sustainable diet; (i.e. Eat more vegetables, eat less meat)
- consume less water-intensive products;
- Reduce food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost!
- produce more food, of better quality, with less water
.………………
Another Website that research on Global water usage is the Water Footprint website: http://www.waterfootprint.org/
Professor Arjen Y. Hoekstra from University of Twente, Neitherlands, set up the website to inform the world about the water foot print of products.
Prof Arjen Y.Hoekstra is also a United Nation scientist who specialise on Water issues. During international conferences, Professor Hoekstra presented on global water usage. ( Prof Hoekstra presentation slides is available for download at: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Presentations )
In his presentations, Professor Hoekstra showed that:
*The water that a UK consumer uses at home accounts for only 3% of his water usage.
*97% of his water usage is embedded in the products he buy from the supermarket !!! [ A person would “use” 3400 litre (of water)/ day for agricultural products & 1100 litre/ day for industrial products. ]
Professor Hoekstra has the following recommendation:
The indirect water footprint of a consumer is generally much larger than the direct one. A consumer has basically two options to reduce his or her indirect water footprint. One option is to change the consumption pattern by substituting a specific consumer product that has a large water footprint by another type of product that has a smaller water footprint. Examples include: eating less meat or becoming vegetarian, drinking plain water instead of coffee, or wearing less cotton and more artificial fibre clothes. This approach has limitations, because many people do not easily shift from eating meat to being vegetarian and people like their coffee and cotton.
A second option is to select the cotton, beef or coffee that has a relatively low water footprint or that has its footprint in an area that does not have high water scarcity. This requires, however, that consumers have the proper information to make that choice. Since this information is generally not easily available, an important thing consumers can do now is ask product transparency from businesses and regulation from governments. When information is available on the impacts of a certain article on the water system, consumers can make conscious choices about what they buy.
[ Slide 86: comments section in power point slide]
The Waterfootprint website has a products footprint section (updated in 2012):
http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery
| Producing 1kg of | Water usage [litres] |
| Tomato | 214 lt |
| Lettuce | 240 lt |
| Orange | 560 lt |
| Apple | 822 lt |
| Corn | 1220 lt |
| Rice | 2500 lt |
| Chicken | 4330 lt |
| Pork | 5990 lt |
| Mutton (sheep) | 10,400 lt |
| Beef | 15,400 lt |
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Source：www.waterfootprint.org
From the table, we can see that producing 1kg of green leafy vegetables such as lettuce needs only 250 litres of water. Producing corn and rice needs 1200 to 2500 litres of water, but producing 1kg of meat requires 4,300 to 15,400 litres of water. Thus, producing meat requires 5 to 60 times more water than producing vegetables !!!
Thus, reducing meat consumption and eating more vegetables (as recommended by Prof Hoekstra) is an effective way a consumer can choose to reduce his water footprint.
In addition, the following facts are shown in the Water foot print website:
*The global water footprint in the period 1996-2005 was 9087 Gm3/yr (74% green, 11% blue, 15% grey). Agricultural production contributes 92% to this total footprint.
*Water scarcity affects over 2.7 billion people for at least one month each year
………
Currently, 1 billion people in the world are short of water.
From the above 2 websites, we can see that 70% to 90% of the world’s water is used to produce food. (& 97% of the water we used is embedded in the products we buy from the supermarket)
Thus, the current practice of saving water at home (i.e. taking shorter baths, switching off the tap when soaping our hands), are NOT sufficient to help to conserve the water of the planet. [We still have to save water at home as it is a good practice and water usage contributes to our utility bills.]
To effectively conserve the world’s water resource, we would need reduce intake of food that are heavily water-intensive (i.e. meat) & choose to eat food that is less water-intensive (i.e. grains, fruits and vegetables).
One way to start is to support meatless days. [www.veggiethursday.sg ]
Meatless Mondays in Belgium:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=mMtT7IH4AV4
Alternatively, one can choose to adopt a “3/4 rice/veggies/fruits + 1/4 protein diet” that US 1st lady Michelle Obama promotes in US. [http://www.choosemyplate.gov/ ]
Let’s do our part to help to conserve the water resources in the world. :>
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