RAWALPINDI, Oct 20: While the demand for water is increasing, water scarcity is becoming acute in much of the developing world, limiting the future expansion of irrigation, says a new World Bank (WB) report.
The ‘World Development 2007’ report released on Friday notes the amount of water available for irrigated agriculture in developing countries is not expected to increase due to competition from rapidly growing industrial sectors and urban populations.
“New sources of water are expensive to develop, limiting the potential for expansion and building new dams often imposes high environmental and human settlement costs,” warns the report released ahead of the annual meetings of the WB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The report says that the rice-wheat system covers 12 million hectares in the Indo-Gangetic Plain of India and Pakistan, providing a significant share of marketed food grains in India and Pakistan. But intensive and continuous monoculture of rice (summer season) and wheat (winter season) has led to serious soil and water degradation that has negated many of the productivity gains from the green revolution, reveals the report.
Soil salinisation, soil-nutrient mining, and declining organic matter are compounded by depletion of groundwater aquifers and build-up of pest and weed populations and resistance to pesticides, it says.
Results from long-term experiments across districts of Punjab reveal that soil and water-quality degradation may have negated many gains from adoption of improved varieties and other technologies, the report says.
Agriculture uses 85 per cent of fresh water withdrawals in developing countries and irrigated agriculture accounts for about 40 per cent of the value of agricultural production in the developing world.
Quoting the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, the World Bank report says approximately 1.2 billion people live in river basins with absolute water scarcity; 478 million live in basins where scarcity is fast approaching; and a further 1.5 billion suffer from inadequate access to water because of a lack of infrastructure or the human and financial capital to tap the available resources.
Asia together with Middle East and North Africa face the greatest water shortages, although there are pockets of severe water scarcity in all other regions as well. Large areas of South Asia are now maintaining irrigated food production through unsustainable extractions of water from rivers of the ground.
On the supply side, much of today’s agricultural production is fairly energy intensive, more so in the developed world than in the developing. Sharply higher fertilizer prices could have far-reaching effects on developing-country agriculture — pushing down fertilizer application rates and crop yields and raising food prices —unless rapid advances are made in tapping nutrient sources that do not depend on fossil fuels.
On a positive note, the report says the world is poised for another technological revolution in agriculture using the new tools of biotechnology to deliver significant yield gains. Already 100 million hectares of crops, or about 8 per cent of the cropped area, are sown with transgenic seeds (often known as GMOs).
