Virtual Water and agriculture in Africa

While doing my research about water management and agriculture, I found the TedTalk linked below about the “hidden costs” of our food consumption, increasing my interest about the virtual water (VW) thematic. This concept, first mentioned by J.A. Allan in 1996, aims to indicate the "conceptual volume of water needed to produce commodities traded to an importing country" (Hanasaki, 2009).

This term became very popular within the water management literature and was also mentioned by some medias quite early on, with for example the National Geographic publishing a supplement intitled "Hidden Water" in April 2010. In addition to this, different “kinds” of water can be differentiated when talking about the different elements contributing to the food chain production. For example, with livestock, blue water is used to directly water animals, green water to irrigate the plants then used to feed the betail, and finally grey water, used for the sanitation, cleaning and maintenance of the whole facility. As well as being considered as a very useful tool of sensibilization, VW also became a policy tool in a context of global environmental change, in order to prevent an aggravation of water scarcity, in order to encourage a more balanced use of water and overall resources linked to alimentation.

However, this unit remains openly abstract, virtual, whereas water remains a very substantial issue every day for around 1.2 billions people living in a severely water-constrained agricultural area (FAO, 2020), as underlined by a lot of critics of the virtual water.

The example of rice agriculture in Egypt is a textbook case when criticizing the use of VW to rationalize and control agriculture with technocratic indicators coming from the Global North. Indeed, from the sole lens of the virtual water, rice crops shouldn’t be considered as an effective way to manage water. Egyptian climate is mainly hot and desertic, and even though the Nile provides around 55 billion cubic meter of water every year, 96% of Egypt’s water supply (Barnes, 2013), around 71% of Egyptians farmers affirmed that they were regularly lacking water at some periods of the year (El-Zanati, 2001). 1kg of rice requires between 3 and 5, 000 litres of water to be grown (WWF, 2006), which can be considered as a waste from the lens of the virtual water, as importing this rice (from Thailand for example, where some part of the country have a tropical wet climate far more appropriate, and is exporting around 10 tons of rice every year), instead of exporting 12% of its national freshwater resources every year through alfalfa and paddy rice (Wahba, 2018).

Yet, this theoretical study of the situation excludes the practical work of farmers, and the local knowledge of the different actors of the food chain in Egypt. From the point of view of the government and the consumers, keeping the price of the rice low remains a priority, as well as maintaining some kind of alimentary autonomy of the country, obligating them to make sure that exportations remains lower than the national production. Farmer’s knowledge is also essential, as rice agriculture is also considered as a practice “washing” (ghasal) the land, because this plant helps to the desalinization of the soil. It is estimated that around 35% of the Egyptian agricultural lands are saline, and this number goes up to 60% in the northern part of the delta (Kotb, 2000). The presence of salt in such hight quantity in the crops have a huge impact over the yields, a could make a land infertile in a few years, making rice culture very usefull as this plant could decrease the salinity of a land around 25% in one growing season around the delta (El Guindy and Risseeuw, 1987) .

We can therefore see how using VW as a policy tool applied homogeneously over the globe, and especially Africa, could lead us to more issues regarding of food security in more precarious countries. If VW can help the Global Northern consumers realize the “hidden cost” of their consumption, it creates the illusion that every kind of water use, source and management is equivalent in every part of the world, through an apparently apolitical language from a solely economical lens. It excludes all of the different uses of water, and their consequences, reducing it to a number when it remains a vital resource for many persons. Furthermore, it could be considered as highly hypocritical to calculate the “hidden costs” of African water consumption, when Global Northern countries are the ones consuming the most in terms of food calories, footprint and water (virtual or material). Turning the world into a virtual marketplace only crossed by virtual transfers through these kind of policy practices could have dangerous effects on the material life of the more precarious persons, and especially the producers. As stated by Jessica Barnes in "Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink: Thefalse promise of virtual water": “theoretical work on virtualism needs to include both human acts of labour and those of resources as they pass through the world”.

I still find the VW very useful from a consumers perspective, especially for urbans dwellers in the Global North, but like many “fashion” terms used when talking about the environment, it remains way to homogeneous and simple to be used as such, without any more investigation and interest regarding of the local knowledges.