Abstract
Farmers in the U.S. state of California, the country’s leading food-producing state, were troubled in 2014 as the state’s worst drought in 109 years began to bite. Three years of poor rains had reduced supplies of surface water for agriculture by 36 percent, leading farmers to step up pumping of groundwater. But the additional pumping could not cover the entire shortfall of surface water, and some 173,000 hectares of irrigated land, nearly 5 percent of the state’s irrigated farm acreage, had to be fallowed. The economic toll is estimated at $2.2 billion, including 17,000 lost jobs.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Howitt et al., Economic Analysis of the 2014 Drought for California Agriculture (Davis, CA: Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis, July 2014); 5 percent is a Worldwatch calculation based on total irrigated farmland in California, from the following sources: about 10 million acres in 2000 from Susan S. Hutson et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000 (Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, updated February 2005), Table 7; about 9 million acres from American Farmland Trust, “California Drought Increases Need to Conserve Farmland,” www.farmland.org/programs/states/ca/CA-Drought-NeedtoConserveFarmland.asp, viewed December 10, 2014.
- 2.
Susanne Moser et al., Our Changing Climate 2012: Vulnerability & Adaptation to the Increasing Risks from Climate Change in California (Sacramento, CA: California Climate Change Center, July 2012); Dan Cayan et al., Scenarios of Climate Change in California: An Overview (Sacramento, CA: California Climate Change Center, February 2006).
- 3.
Hectares and San Franciscos based on acreage conversion data from California Department of Conservation, California Farmland Conversion Report 2008–2010 (Sacramento, CA: April 2014), and from U.S. Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts,” http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html, viewed October 8, 2014.
- 4.
Nikos Alexandratos and Jelle Bruinsma, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050: The 2012 Revision (Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), June 2012), 61, 95; United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), “UNEP’s Emerging Issues” (Nairobi: 2011), www.unep.org/pdf/RIO20/UNEP-%20Emerging-Issues.pdf.
- 5.
FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and World Food Programme, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014. Strengthening the Enabling Environment for Food Security and Nutrition (Rome, FAO, 2014).
- 6.
Biofuel shares from FAO, “The State of Food and Agriculture,” conference document (Rome: June 2013).
- 7.
Alexandratos and Bruinsma, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050; FAO, “Global Capture Production” and “Global Aquaculture Production,” Fishery Statistical Collections, electronic databases, www.fao.org/fishery/statistics/en, viewed November 2014.
- 8.
Alexandratos and Bruinsma, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050; FAO, “Coping with Water Scarcity in the Near East and North Africa,” fact sheet prepared for Regional Conference for the Near East, Rome, February 24–28, 2014, www.fao.org/docrep/019/as215e/as215e.pdf.
- 9.
Malin Falkenmark, “Growing Water Scarcity in Agriculture: Future Challenge to Global Water Security,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 371, no. 2002 (November 13, 2013).
- 10.
Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Global Monthly Water Scarcity: Blue Water Footprints versus Blue Water Availability,” PLOS ONE 7, no. 2 (2012); “Egypt to ‘Escalate’ Ethiopian Dam Dispute,” Al Jazeera, April 21, 2014.
- 11.
Stephen Foster and Tushaar Shah, Groundwater Resources and Irrigated Agriculture: Making a Beneficial Relation More Sustainable (Stockholm: Global Water Partnership, 2012); UNEP, “A Glass Half Empty: Regions at Risk Due to Groundwater Depletion,” January 2012, www.unep.org/pdf/UNEP-GEAS_JAN_2012.pdf; Falkenmark, “Growing Water Scarcity in Agriculture”; Katalyn A. Voss et al., “Groundwater Depletion in the Middle East from GRACE with Implications for Transboundary Water Management in the Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran Region,” Water Resources Research 49, no. 2 (February 2013): 904–14; Cynthia Barnett, “Groundwater Wake-up,” Ensia (University of Minnesota), August 19, 2013.
- 12.
Table 5–1 based on World Bank, “Renewable Internal Freshwater Resources per Capita (cubic meters),” electronic database, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.INTR.PC; Jacob Schewe et al., “Multimodel Assessment of Water Scarcity Under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 9 (December 16, 2013): 3245–50.
- 13.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Decade for Action “Water for Life” 2005–2015, “Water Scarcity,” www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml.
- 14.
Water scarcity from World Bank, “Renewable Internal Freshwater Resources per Capita (cubic meters),” electronic database, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.INTR.PC; import dependence a Worldwatch calculation based on data from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), “Production, Supply, and Distribution,” electronic database, https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/psdQuery.aspx, viewed September 15, 2014.
- 15.
Arjen Y. Hoekstra and Mesfin M. Mekonnen, “The Water Footprint of Humanity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 9 (February 28, 2012).
- 16.
Ibid.; Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Water Security of Nations: How International Trade Affects National Water Scarcity and Dependency,” Threats to Global Water Security, NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security (2009): 27–36.
- 17.
FAO, The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture; Alexandratos and Bruinsma, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050, 105.
- 18.
L. R. Oldeman, R. T. A. Hakkeling, and W. G. Sombroek, World Map of the Status of Human-Induced Soil Degradation: An Explanatory Note (Wageningen: International Soil Reference and Information Centre and Nairobi: UNEP, October 1990); Z. G. Bai et al., “Proxy Global Assessment of Land Degradation,” Soil Use and Management 24, no. 3 (September 2008): 223–34; FAO, The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.
- 19.
Fred Pearce, “Splash and Grab: The Global Scramble for Water,” New Scientist, March 2, 2013, 28–29; Japan area of 377,915 square kilometers from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “Country Comparison: Area,” in The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2147rank.html, viewed August 13, 2014; shares based on Land Matrix, “Intention of Investment,” http://landmatrix.org/en/get-the-idea/dynamics-overview/, viewed September 24, 2014; Table 5–2 from Land Matrix, “Web of Transnational Deals,” http://landmatrix.org/en/get-the-idea/web-transnational-deals/, viewed November 13, 2014.
- 20.
Lorenzo Cotulo, Land Deals in Africa: What Is in the Contracts? (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2011); Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News, “Corporations Grabbing Land and Water Overseas,” Scientific American, February 12, 2013; Table 5–3 from Land Matrix, “Web of Transnational Deals.”
- 21.
Bienkowski and Environmental Health News, “Corporations Grabbing Land and Water Overseas”; Ward Anseeuw et al., Land Rights and the Rush for Land: Findings of the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project (Rome: International Land Coalition, 2012).
- 22.
John R. Porter and Liyong Xie, “Chapter 7. Food Security and Food Production Systems,” in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 2014); Gerald C. Nelson et al., Climate Change: Impact on Agriculture and Costs of Adaptation (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, October 2009); Cynthia Rosenzweig et al., “Assessing Agricultural Risks of Climate Change in the 21st Century in a Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 9 (March 4, 2014): 3268–73.
- 23.
Christopher B. Field et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; Porter and Xie, “Chapter 7. Food Security and Food Production Systems.”
- 24.
Joshua Elliott et al., “Constraints and Potentials of Future Irrigation Water Availability on Agricultural Production Under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 9 (March 4, 2014): 3239–44
- 25.
Porter and Xie, “Chapter 7. Food Security and Food Production Systems.”
- 26.
Table 5–4 based on USDA, FAS, “Production, Supply, and Distribution.”
- 27.
Figure 5–1 and Central America, Middle East and North Africa, and Japan are Worldwatch calculations based on data from USDA, FAS, “Production, Supply, and Distribution”; other regions from Stacey Rosen, USDA, Economic Research Service, personal communication with author, December 9, 2014.
- 28.
Hoekstra and Mekonnen, “The Water Footprint of Humanity.”
- 29.
Jenny Gustavsson et al., Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes, and Prevention (Rome: FAO, 2011); UNEP, “Food Waste Facts” (Nairobi: 2013), www.unep.org/wed/2013/quickfacts/.
- 30.
CGIAR, “Postharvest Loss Reduction – A Significant Focus of CGIAR Research,” November 20, 2013, www.cgiar.org/consortium-news/postharvest-loss-reduction-a-significant-focus-of-cgiar-research/; Gustavsson et al., “Global Food Losses and Food Waste”; Aramark Higher Education, The Business and Cultural Case for Trayless Dining (Philadelphia, PA: July 2008).
- 31.
UNEP, “Food Waste Facts.”
- 32.
Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Water Footprint Benchmarks for Crop Production: A First Global Assessment,” Ecological Indicators 46 (November 2014): 214–23.
- 33.
Table 5–5 from Ibid.
- 34.
USDA, “Production, Supply, and Distribution”; Table 5–6 from Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “The Water Footprint of Animal Products,” in J. D’Silva and J. Webster, eds., The Meat Crisis: Developing More Sustainable Production and Consumption (London: Earthscan, 2010); J. Liu and H. H. G. Savenije, “Food Consumption Patterns and Their Effect on Water Requirement in China,” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 12 (2008): 887–98.
- 35.
Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Water for Animal Products: A Blind Spot in Water Policy,” Environmental Research Letters 9 (2014); Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “The Hidden Water Resource Use Behind Meat and Dairy,” Animal Frontiers 2, no. 2 (April 2012): 3–8.
- 36.
Estimates of 30 and 40 percent from USDA, USDA Agricultural Projections to 2022 (Washington, DC: February 2013); Rosamond Naylor, “Biofuels, Rural Development, and the Changing Nature of Agricultural Demand,” paper presented at the Symposium Series on Global Food Policy and Food Security, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, April 11, 2012; FAO, “The State of Food and Agriculture.”
- 37.
Marianela Fader, “Spatial Decoupling of Agricultural Production and Consumption: Quantifying Dependences of Countries on Food Imports Due to Domestic Land and Water Constraints,” Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 1 (2013). See also Appendix A of the article, which cites additional studies that offer other perspectives, and Miina Porkka et al., “From Food Insufficiency Towards Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 12 (December 18, 2013); FAO, The Right to Food: Past Commitment, Current Obligation, Further Action for the Future: A Ten-Year Retrospective on the Right to Food Guidelines (Rome: 2014).
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Gardner, G. (2015). Mounting Losses of Agricultural Resources. In: State of the World 2015. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-611-0_5
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