Mobilizing Science and Technology for Sustainable Development of Water and Land Resources
Frank Rijsberman, Director General, International Water Management Institute

Darcy Kelley: All right, we're coming into the home stretch here.

Our final talk of the morning is by Frank Rijsberman, and he is going to talk about what is probably the most precious resource on our planet, as we've learned, water. In fact, it's all about water going forward. He's been Director General of the International Water Management Institute, which is an international research center, supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. He's a Professor at the UNESCO Institute for Water Education in Delft, and his degrees come here in the United States from Colorado State University, and we're very pleased to have him here at this conference.

Frank Rijsberman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Last talk standing between you and lunch, and very well introduced earlier this morning by my colleague Ismail Serageldin who spoke to you about the need for more crop per drop, but also by a very good article in the Scientific American that I think you've all received in your package, and on page 84 there there is Paul Polak speaking about the potential of the small farmer, and I'd like to speak more about this in this talk. It's actually a very optimistic talk.

After you've heard from the previous speaker that we are not likely to run out of fossil fuel anytime soon, I'd like to first talk a bit about what is often indicated as the world water crisis. In fact Ismail Serageldin has also made a famous quote when he said some years back that future wars - I see him nod already, he knows what's coming - would be over water. That was a very alarming quote and is probably the most often repeated water quote, and it's probably one of the few areas where I would disagree with him. Most of the evidence that we see are that there will not be wars over water.

Is water scarce? Let's have a look at that. There are many maps that show scarcity of water, but they paint very different pictures. This is a water stress indicator computed by the water gap model of the University of Castle that shows how much water we draw as a share of the so-called renewable water resources. And the renewable water resources are what is available to us in rivers and in ground water. But this is only one picture. Of course it is quite an alarming picture. You see particularly around the Middle East that there would be very high water stress. It doesn't show much water stress in Africa, that might surprise you. Well if we realize what the water is for, that's what already Dr. Serageldin said, it is really to grow food. It's not the amount of water we drink, even though for one in six people in the world not having access to safe and affordable drinking water is a key problem. It's not really water scarcity that's the issue there. We need a lot more water to grow food. And if we think about the area that is water scarce in economic terms, then we see in Africa in all this red area that we might have water, but it's not available to people. So the lack is not so much there in terms of water as a natural resource but in terms of infrastructure that makes that water available to people.

You might wonder why the United States doesn't show up as a water scarce country in this particular map, and that is because in these normal pictures of water scarcity the water for the environment is not taken into account. If we start doing that, if we start seeing how much water is required for the environment, that's shown in the top map, just to maintain ecosystem services, and then we compare that with how much water we already use today, then you suddenly see that indeed in the western US we are from this perspective in very water scarce situations. This also introduced the fact that we normally only talk about the so-called renewable water resources, water in rivers and ground water, which is only something like 40% of the total rainfall. Renewable water resources are only that part of rainfall that flows off into rivers and in the groundwater. Some people call that blue water. Well the other 60%, more than half, of the rainfall goes directly into the soil, replenish your soil moisture there, think of it as a sponge, if you like, and it goes straight back into the atmosphere, it's either evaporated or evapotransportated by plants. So for the water that you drink that 60% is not so important, but for a plant it's crucial. I won't go into this very much, but you'll another talk that's almost the second half of my talk, Johan Rockström, he's in the audience here today, he'll speak to you tomorrow, and he'll say a whole lot more about green and blue water.

For right now let me just make this simple. If you're a woman and you have to bring water to your home on your head very obviously water is scarce, regardless of the maps, and it takes that for millions of people, this type of effort to bring a little bit of water in the house, then definitely that is water scarcity. We'd call that physical water scarcity. But for other people, like in India, the water is there, but we've been using it so rapidly, for instance in that finger that sticks out of India over here, this is Gujarat, and it's an area that we sometimes call the basket case of groundwater management, there while it is a wonderful area, Dr. Kurien got the World Food Price to develop a wonderful dairy industry there called Amul, ice cream produced from milk that is produced here in Gujarat available all over India and exported elsewhere. But that whole industry is based on groundwater, and I've spoken to farmers there who in their youth, some thirty years ago, drew the groundwater with an ox from some ten meters depth. At the moment they have a fifty-five horsepower big diesel engine, a big diesel engine like that, and the groundwater is pumped up from 600 foot below the surface. And when that pump breaks, which it will in the next year, two years, three years, that's the end. So yes, there has been a wonderful industry and indeed a lot of farmers through cooperative movements and so on have indeed made enough money to send their kids to school, send them to universities, but it's also completely destroyed the resource base. That's a very different type of water scarcity, and it's quite prevalent throughout Asia.

In Africa, however, we see a very different type of scarcity very often. There is water here, but if you need to get it to the plants, and these children are not playing, they're using a bucket to try and throw the water from the water onto the plants. Now there's water there, but it's pretty scarce for them in the sense that if they had an irrigation system that brought this to the land naturally then that would save them an awful lot of, let's just say, energy.

This is another type of water scarcity, of course, that is associated with Africa, and it's very prevalent in the horn of Africa today. Now that means water is really scarce if you live in the Middle East. There just isn't enough water to produce the food in the country where Dr. Serageldin comes from, in Egypt. So food self sufficiency, while it's still an official government goal, is simply not feasible because there isn't enough water around. In Asia there is enough water around, but there are plenty of places where we've been overusing it so much that that is the real issue. Whereas in Africa the water is there, but if farmers lack the infrastructure to make it available to them, they have what we would call economic water scarcity. That about water scarcity.

The key challenges on water, and the two that are most prominently in the news most of the time are that people don't have access to safe drinking water, more than a billion people, and don't have access to safe sanitation, even more, almost half the world, 2.4 billion people. What is a bit less known is that a very large percentage of the poorest people in the world lack water for productive purposes, for their livelihoods, for food production. And that's another challenge that is in a way very closely linked to many of the talks that we have been hearing today.

Now the first challenge, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, the most obvious impact of that is on health. Close to half the population in developing countries suffers at any one time from some water-related disease or another. And the total estimates of the cost of that ill health or people is something like 2.2 million deaths and 82 million DALYs or disability adjust life years. Now it depends on how you translate DALYs into money. Here if you say it costs a life at $100,000, that's of course an arbitrary number, but if you want to know what the economic value is you have to pick one of them, then you come to astounding costs of the ill health of water and sanitation, and I can assure you the money required to do something about this is a lot less than the cost in terms of ill health alone.

Africa, the place where there is least progress in terms of water, knows water as a key killer. You might be surprised that the simple diarrhea, and this is the disease that requires, as Jeff Sachs said this morning, just so little money to do something about, is still a key killer, particularly of young children. If you see this graph I find it astounding to see that the cost of diarrhea in terms of disability adjusted life years per person in Africa is a massive twenty years of everybody's life in that continent.

Meeting the Millennium Development Goals, this is the part where the story is a little bit similar to energy, requires drastic action that is not about to be taken as far as we can see on the horizon. Meeting the Millennium Development Goals for water would require tripling the speed at which people are connected to safe water supplies, and quadrupling that for sanitation. These are the sad numbers. The good news that in Asia, thanks mostly to economic growth in India and China, there is good progress, particularly for the water supply targets, but in Africa that progress is absent.

So for water for the environment, what are the challenges? The challenges are that poor access to water for food production, for livelihoods, is what we would call a poverty trap for an astounding 70% of poor people in Africa. Some 800 million poor people live in situations where they don't have enough water and - Pedro Sanchez is in the audience - fertile soils, which are the two chief constraints to increasing the crop production of small holder farmers in Africa.

Now plants use something between 500 liters to produce a kilo of cereal and 4,000 liters. That's an extremely high number, but strangely enough there's also the message of hope. While in many of these low productivity rain-fed systems it takes 4,000 liters, it is possible to produce the same kilo of rice or wheat with only 500 liters. So actually moving a lot of farmers from the 4,000 liters to the 500 liters, that is the opportunity, increasing the productivity of water is the option that we think science and technology should focus on. In a situation where in many, particularly the arid and semi-arid rivers in the world, are already no longer reaching the sea. Those are what we call closed systems, and any project to develop more water resources there is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yes, you can put up a system somewhere, but it just takes away the water that somebody else is already using at the moment.

The interesting fact is that in Asia and in Latin America over the last few decades we've managed to intensity agriculture. That means the increases in production have come not from an expansion of the acreage but from increasing the amount of food produced per hectare or per unit of land. In Africa there has been the opposite, sadly there the expansion, the increase in productivity, has come from increasing the area of land. That is the same message we heard this morning before, that in fact the destruction of ecosystems are because we are trying to produce more food. So the challenge will be can we in Africa produce more food per unit of land and more food per unit of water that goes in, rather than expanding evermore the agricultural area?

Now in Africa particularly we have a very high variability. Now as we're hearing here in this conference, climate change is likely to increase this variability, but we're actually pretty bad at dealing with the current variability. We know what to do, I mean we can overcome this kind of variability by building storage. We can see how important it is. This is a graph that shows that strangely enough economic growth in countries like Zambia, and the World Bank has put up similar graphs for Ethiopia and a number of other countries, is very closely related with rainfall. In India people know this. When there is a bad monsoon there is low economic growth. If there is good rainfall it translates almost immediately into good economic growth.

Now what can we do to overcome this kind of variability in the economy? The answer is relatively simple. You build dams. Now dams aren't exactly universally popular but, as you can see in this graph, we have built an enormous number of them, something like 5,000 cubic meters of storage for every American sitting here in the audience has been built by the US government. And then you can wonder maybe we have built too many, and maybe we should decommission some of these dams. That's the debate you have here. But if you realize that in Ethiopia in similar conditions than in Australia we have less than 50 cubic meters per capita, less than a percent of that same storage, then you realize that we don't know exactly how many dams we need, but we need a whole lot more than there are out there today.

Sadly the discussion on how many dams we should build for irrigation but also for hydropower, you can see here that in a country like Ethiopia there is the big potential for hydropower, double that in France, for instance. Except the difference is in France all that hydropower potential has been exploited, the dams have been built, and in Ethiopia almost nothing has been built, and that translates into electricity available per capita, that has an enormous difference. So clearly you would say we have to do something about infrastructure in Africa. Sadly, partly because of some very highly publicized failures in dams, the World Bank for a number of years has not been building more dams, they have been building fewer dams. Particularly the myth was that irrigation in Africa is a failure and very much more expensive. Now a large study we've done in the last few years of 314 irrigation projects showed, that's the good news, that successful irrigation projects which have a better than 10% rate of return in Africa are not more expensive than in Asia. What we do know now is that there were some very expensive white elephants built in countries like Nigeria where there was sufficient income of oil, costing as much as $25,000 per hectare to build, and indeed they were massive failures. But if you build a modern irrigation system and you grow rice or you combined it with vegetables, and if you grow rice that is productive enough to have something like four tons per hectare, then those are successful projects. So luckily we see in the last few years that the World Bank is re-engaging, and if we take this as an indicator, we hope that more and more governments will do this as well. That's for dams.

But generally I believe with Paul Polak in the Scientific American that there is a role also for private sector investments. But then I don't think, with due respect for the companies like BP of large multinational companies, when I say private sector I mean farmers, individuals who put their own well in, individuals who come together in the community to build standpipes or latrines, very simple technology. This is not so much in…

…to organize this, to give communities a chance to build simple but effective systems, standpipes, latrines, and hand washing, together known to be very effective.

What is more of a challenge for science is how we can deal with waste water, how we can deal with waste water either through sustainable sanitation or actually through reuse in agriculture into something that is safe and is providing an option for poor people to make a living. Now this is not a theoretical discussion. In this country you might debate on whether you want to use reused waste water for golf courses, but in Africa some twenty million people are actually providing the vegetables that people eat, 90% of the perishable vegetables in African cities are grown with raw sewage. This is never a very popular message when I show this, but farmers are actually using water, now you can see here down here you see this nice foam, the water is black. I stood here when I made this photo and you can barely stand there because it stinks. These cows are into this water. And these are dairy cows and buffaloes, they produce the milk. And the water that actually in the background you can see this foam here, the same water is pumped out of the ?? here and is used straight into the water, the same black water, it gives the foam here and goes onto the land and this lady is producing vegetables. It's going into golf courses in Pakistan, the bulk of it goes straight onto vegetable production and into fodder that is fed to dairy cows. That is a challenge. It is happening. Can we make that better? Definitely a big challenge for science and technology.

Now the other one is what Paul Polak is describing in more detail than I have time to explain to you here in Scientific American. When you think in this country of irrigation you might think of these systems, or in Brazil you might have on vineyards very small sprinklers. But do you think of it as this, would this be irrigation for you? Most people say well this is not serious, this is not really irrigation. But if you realize how the scale of this is, then you realize it's probably a rather bigger deal than you might imagine. And in fact, in Ghana, a country where we work, we have estimated that the official area under irrigation is something like 8,000, 9,000 hectares, of which no more than 5,000 is actually used. But our survey shows that this type of irrigation I just showed you is much, much more important. Yes, it doesn't give the same total return per hectare as the formal irrigation, but because the investments are so slow, the cost benefits for farmers, because they have to invest almost nothing, are much better, and in fact it's also a much better way than the formal irrigation system for people to escape out of poverty.

I'll just end with a handful of pictures to show you what this is like. You see here the treadle pump that Paul Polak's IDE has introduced. A million and a half of those have been sold in Bangladesh. Something like a $50 investment that gives 100 to $200 a year in extra income. It also shows that the whole discussion on irrigated and non-irrigated are for us rather academic. Now is this an irrigation system? It certainly doesn't show up in FAO's statistics on irrigation. On the other hand, it's not rain-fed either. This lady is pumping up water and it's actually put into a sprinkler system.

Now this is what we call rainwater harvesting, or we call it watershed management. All of these are ways not so much of putting the water from the river onto the land, but rather to capture more of the rainwater into the soil profile. And Johan Rockström will tell you more about this tomorrow. Farm ponds, these are techniques that are very simple for small farmers to have a small pond on their farm, on 5% of their land, that can then give a lifesaving irrigation.

Just to give you ideas of the kind of technologies that are out there and that are used by farmers. This is the ingenuity of local farmers that helps to make a living. The chance for science and technology is not so much to develop these technologies, farmers are actually pretty good. They work in what we call bright spots, and bright spots are defined by us as communities that do quite well in managing the natural resources while all their environments surrounding them is degrading. We find there are quite a few bright spots like that. We did one study in which we found 286 bright spots, communities that do very well in situations that are only distinguished from their surroundings by the human capital that you heard Serageldin talk about before. And there are lots of them. These are not two or three, these were some twelve million farmers in fifty-seven countries, and they succeeded in managing their natural resources with, you can see the success rates here, increases in productivity compared to their neighbors that are like 100%.

The challenge for science and technology in water is not so much inventing new technology, but helping these farmers scale up from twelve million to two hundred million or eight hundred million farmers. I'll leave it at that.

Thank you very much.