UN World Water Day 2012, celebrated annually on March 22, promotes the theme of “Water and Food Security,” and echoes the UN International Women’s Day 2012 (March 8) theme of “Empower Rural Women — End Hunger and Poverty.” To produce food and reduce hunger, world food supply depends on increasing an adequate quantity of water of sufficient quality, and on the world’s women who sustain agriculture.
Ending hunger and the lack of food security is crucial to the world, the USA and to New Jersey.
In 2010, 17.2 million U.S. households, or 14.5 percent (approximately one in seven) were “food insecure” — the highest numbers ever recorded in the USA, according to Coleman Jensen 2011.
United Nations suggests “food security” exists when people have physical and financial means to access safe and nutritious food, at all times, that is sufficient to support an active, healthy life.
In New Jersey, 768,463 individuals (nearly half children) received SNAP/food stamp benefits in October 2011, a 26.9 percent caseload increase, the largest in the nation. Yet, this hunger program benefits less than 60 percent of those eligible, and only 34 percent of eligible seniors, estimates the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition. New Jersey food banks strain to reduce hunger.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified the basic right of all people to adequate food. This, in part, depends on access to natural resources supporting agriculture, particularly water. The UN General Assembly, on July 28, 2010, affirmed access to clean drinking water and sanitation is a basic human right.
Millennium Development Goals, better known as MDGs, are eight international development goals developed from eight chapters of the Millennium Declaration, signed and supported by all 193 United Nations member states. These goals identify 21 targets for the 21st century, to be achieved by 2015.
MDG number one seeks to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people suffering from hunger, while goal seven, environmental sustainability, seeks to halve those lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, both goals intimately intertwined.
Water is essential to produce food and remedy hunger.
Children die from malnutrition, particularly from contaminated water causing lifethreatening diarrhea. The proportion of underweight children under age 5 in developing regions declined from 30 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 2009, but progress may not meet MDG goals by 2015.
Drought, floods and erratic rainfall ruin crop production and cause food shortages and famine. Increasingly, water-related climate changes adversely affect forests and aquaculture, rain-fed and irrigated agriculture, as well as feed and fodder for livestock. Water scarcity affecting most continents and nearly half of the world’s population could force, by 2025, two-thirds to live under water stress.
The primary reason for this insufficiency is over-consumption of water for food production.
Water required for different types of food is vastly disproportionate. Production of a kilogram of wheat requires about 1,500 liters of water, whereas a kilogram of beef requires 10 times this amount.
Hunger-related issues of water quantity and quality impede successful farming.
More efficient methods are needed to produce more food using less water. Reducing food waste and loss, and moving toward more sustainable diet choices of less waterintensive foods can also help.
Reducing overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will reduce water pollution and increase water available for farming and human consumption while inhibiting the loss of farmable land. Capturing rainwater and surface runoff can prevent flooding, reduce erosion, impede loss of soil nutrients and valuable topsoil. Recycling water and reducing industrial usage will reduce the threat to water sustainability, particularly from continuing “drawdown” on groundwater supplies in our state and the world.
Reducing hunger requires attention to gender gaps. Women comprise nearly half of the farmers in developing countries, and their unequal access to resources, including water, limits agricultural performance. These gender gaps limit yields which, if corrected, could increase food supplies by 20 to 30 percent and eliminate hunger for an estimated 150 million people.
Development of alternative sources of energy will reduce the competition for water caused by current energy generation. Changes in personal habits of water and energy usage can reduce hunger by significantly increasing water availability
Support World Water Day 2012 efforts by considering the relationship between world hunger and water. Commitment to personal and national change can reduce hunger on our shared planet.
Access the UN Water World Water Day 2012 website and tools, at http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/
Jeannine Phillips East Brunswick