Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog looking into the relationship between water and food in Africa. I thought to begin with it would be useful to introduce this topic and why I have chosen to blog about it. One particular statistic peaked my interest in the relationship water and food, the statistic being that in 2000, around 70% of freshwater extracted was used for agriculture. To me this seemed high considering most of the water use that an individual can observe is used domestically in the form of showers, washing machines and water used in cooking. It isn’t obvious in day to day life how important water is to the food we eat.

As the majority of the water use is for agriculture, I thought it beneficial to investigate further the link between the two. The focus of this blog is Africa, an area of the world that has the biggest issues with water, food production and the effects of climate change.

Introducing this topic a little more, it is necessary to look at some key background data that show some interesting trends. The graph below (Figure 1) shows global blue water withdrawal up to the present and predicted into the future. Blue water just refers to surface water (e.g. rivers and lakes) and groundwater (water stored underground, I will look into this in more detail in future blog posts). This graph illustrates the significant proportion of water consumption taken up by irrigation which is predicted to increase into the future. Interestingly, household consumption is of relatively small importance but this is projected to increase into the future, likely as a result of global population increase.

Figure 1: Estimated and predicted water consumption, abstraction and withdrawal.

This is all very interesting but tells us little about the specific area this blog is looking at, Africa. So why is water for food so important in Africa? Firstly, the very warm climate means that a large proportion of rainfall is lost as evapotranspiration (evaporation and transpiration). This is problematic as it means much larger quantities of water are required to irrigate cropland. In addition to this, Africa contains many of the poorest countries in the world. The map below, produced by the World Bank, makes it obvious to see that the greatest proportions of people living in poverty are found in many sub-Saharan African countries. In some countries in Africa, more than half of people are living on less than $1.90 a day. This illustrates the struggle in Africa, both environmentally and economically and this has an influence on water usage and food production across the continent.

Figure 2: Map of share of the population living on less than $1.90 a day.

I hope this blog will be interesting and informative. I feel this first blog post has highlighted what I aim to achieve and has given a clear introduction to the importance of water to food production and the possible problems faced by people living in Africa. I plan to look into a number of different aspects of water and food, most importantly, the effect of climate change, the idea of water scarcity, groundwater extraction, virtual water and much more…