Can new agricultural products from biopesticide developers address the challenges of water scarcity?

Global warming, deforestation, and other issues are changing the climate, threatening water shortages in some places and too much water in others.

This has huge implications for some populations who are forced to run out of places to live, but also for agriculture, as population growth means little new land is available for agricultural development.

According to Holly Williams, writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper on May 11, 2010, the movement of water varies around the world. The Pacific Ocean has a fairly self-contained cycle, with little movement of water onto land, while the Atlantic and Indian Oceans see more water cycling onto land. Most of the water in Europe, America and Africa comes from the Atlantic in the form of rain and returns to the ocean through rivers.

The movement of water is dictated by changes in temperature and in November 2009, a satellite launched by the Center for the Study of the Biosphere from Space has been helping to map changes in the world’s water patterns. It measures natural microwave emissions from the Earth’s surface to track changes in soil moisture and increases in salinity at the surface of the seas.

It is expected to strengthen the evidence for the effects of global warming by showing how rising temperatures could lead to a more extreme rainfall distribution, where wet areas will become wetter and dry areas drier, increasing risks. of floods and droughts.

If climate change is not taken seriously, both low- to middle-income developing regions and highly developed countries will face water stress in the future.

Unless they adopt proper and sustainable water management initiatives, India, China, and selected countries in Europe and Africa are projected to face water scarcity by 2025.

Developed countries traditionally have high per capita water consumption and need to focus on reducing it through better water management practices.

Although low- and middle-income developing countries currently have low per capita water consumption, they also have rapid population growth and inefficient water use across all sectors.

India is a case in point: expanding industry, the purchasing power of a rapidly growing middle class able to buy equipment like washing machines, and farmers scrambling to increase production and meet changing food demands are driving demand for Water. The demand for agricultural products with a high water footprint is expected to increase with increasing disposable income and urbanization, and the proportion of cereals, sugarcane, fruits, vegetables and non-food animal products in the daily diet is expected to increase. of people will increase from 35% in 2000 to 50% by 2050.

The website Circle of blue.org reports that cross-border private land investments have been occurring since the early 2000s and that a report by the World Economic Forum’s Water Initiative has found that if forecasts for future water demand are accurate and no trade reforms, Rapidly industrializing economies in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, supporting an estimated 2.5 billion people, will look elsewhere for water-rich land to feed themselves .

Countries therefore need to be serious about conserving water and minimizing wastewater, and there are signs that some are introducing such measures.

India, one of the world’s leading crop producers, recently recognized the need to manage existing water reserves to prevent future water stress; however, it is alleged that the initiatives taken so far are very few and widely scattered. It needs to do much more to clean its rivers, promote water conservation, and curb industrial and human pollution of its waters.

China is implementing large-scale, multi-sector projects using innovative water management techniques to reduce the impact of water stress. They include links between river basins, plans to build three massive north-south aqueducts to pump water from the Yangtze River to Beijing by 2010, community-based rainwater harvesting (using rainwater tanks that serve nearly 2 million people and supplement irrigation for 236,400 hectares of land) and by introducing water treatment technologies in six cities in China.

The United States has also used inter-basin river schemes, such as the Colorado River canal system, which supplies water to more than 25 million people and helps irrigate 1.42 million hectares of land. Most of the southwestern US receives water supplied by this canal system. In 2005, EPA launched a pretreatment program in the Mid-Atlantic Region, where publicly owned treatment works collect wastewater from domestic, commercial, and industrial facilities and transport it to treatment plants before it is discharged and 1,900 industries. in 6 states are regulated under this program

New generation agricultural biotechnology products being investigated by biopesticide developers are also contributing. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that biotechnology has a valuable role to play in addressing the challenge of water scarcity in developing countries.

Such tools could include biopesticides and biological yield enhancers that target drought resistance in plants without further depleting the soil they grow in, but also new-generation agricultural products will reduce chemical residues on land, sources of water and food.

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers