Thursday, 08 April 2010 14:42

WATER: We know that our blue planet is composed mostly of water so it is hard to believe that the most precious natural resource has become scarce to the point of jeopardizing future food production and planetary health. AnimaNaturalis

We know that our blue planet is composed mostly of water so it is hard to believe that the most precious natural resource has become scarce to the point of jeopardizing future food production and global health. Only 2.53% of the world's water is fresh and mostly inaccessible to us (2 / 3 are trapped in glaciers and permafrost).


The rest is mostly found in groundwater.


According to Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, the world counts down 200 km3 of its "water bank" each year. This over-exploitation has serious implications for future food production and global health.


In fact, the World Observatory Institute classifies the depletion of water as a global problem as serious as HIV or global overpopulation, three devastating problems for our species.


Pollution and water pollution worsen the problem, with an overall rate of contaminated water estimated at 1,500 km3. The UN maintains that 1 liter of dirty contaminated water 8 liters of fresh water, so pure water contamination borders worldwide each year 12,000 km3.

In its report "Policy on Water Supply and Sanitation" in 2000, UNICEF and WHO estimate that up to 1.1 billion people today have no access to any water, while 2.4 billion people lack access to safe water or sanitized: "As a result, 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die each year from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene." - Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General WHO and Carol Bellamy, UNICEF Executive Director.


The situation is displayed worse with global population growth and the growth of per capita water consumption associated with the western lifestyle. So to ensure our basic needs, we all need 20-50 liters of clean drinking water and every day.


The report "Water Development" 2003 UN predicts that "half of the century, in the worst case scenario about 7 billion people in 60 countries will face water scarcity, at best, 2 billion people 48 countries. "In fact, the problem is so serious that many environmental and political advisers say that future water scarcity will compete in the fuel.

What about livestock?


Globally, agriculture uses 70% of the sources of freshwater. This figure is so high for the amount of land to be irrigated for agriculture viable for more and better crops. But, agricultural activities pollute large amounts of water. The industrial production of livestock directly contaminated groundwater, surface waters and rivers through the management of livestock waste, and indirectly through the use of pesticides and food aggregates (hormones, antibiotics, etc..) For livestock. Moreover, as we have seen, much of this land is wasted growing feed for livestock rather than food for people. The water used in these lands, consumed directly by livestock, represents another source of wasteful use of resources.

There is considerable discrepancy in the exact figures of water required for meat production purposes. Professor David Pimentel, Department of Ecology, U. Cornell has calculated that to produce a potato kg.de lt.de need 500 water, 900 lt.para a kg.de wheat, 3,500 kg.de lt.para a chicken meat (edible) and 100,000 lt.para 1 kg.de beef. Make a more conservative estimate of Dpto.de Oltjen Beckett and Animal Science of the U. California: to produce a wheat kg.de 120 lt.de require water, and a beef kg.de, 3700 lt.de water. It is interesting to look a little closer look at these figures: the estimate is more radical as the most conservative, beef production is an outrageous cost of water compared with the production of vegetables or cereals.

Produce a kg.de meat requires 2,800 kcal and 174 g. protein. Produce a kg.de wheat requires 3300 kcal and 110 g. protein (of which 100 are for setting digestibility for humans). According to Beckett and Oltjen, a beef kg.de lt.de 3700 requires water and a kg.de wheat requires 120 lt. Looking at these figures in perspective, we see that while the production of wheat gives us an average 27.5 kcal for each liter of water used, beef provides only 0.76 kcal per liter. This means that, based on data more conservatively-producing beef requires 36 times more water per calorie as wheat. When we do the same calculation for digestible protein, wheat is 18 times more efficient in using water than beef.

From these calculations, to produce a kilo of beef uses as much water as:

* 40 toilets
* 300 Downloads wc
* 100 times the amount of drinking water per person calculated by UNESCO

Since a large percentage of crops fed to animals in developing countries, this water loss does not come from our reserves, but the share of countries where water is scarce. A problem of social justice and inequity.

Overexploitation and pollution of the seas

Besides water pollution, which is responsible for agriculture and meat production, industrial fisheries systematically depletes the seas, fishing quotas that exceed the levels of sustainability, which has disastrous consequences for ocean health. The lower growth rates and the sea will become increasingly difficult to recover the normal state of the species.

Industrial fishing is also highly polluting and manipulates natural species to generate more resistant fish, large, or having properties particularly beneficial for humans. The factory farms salmon, for example, have lowered the population level of wild salmon. Each year, thousands of salmon escape factories sea cages, competing with wild salmon for food, transmitting their parasites and diseases.

In many areas of salmon farms, wild salmon almost nonexistent. The rate between farmed salmon and wild salmon is 7:1.

Even with these problems, aquaculture is not a sustainable way of producing food. The salmon are fed with wild fish or foods made from wild fish. It takes more than three tons of fish to produce 1 tonne of farmed salmon.

But this is not the only problem with salmon farms: diseases and water pollution are also part of their production. Nitrogen and phosphorus from salmon farms, faeces and urine cause eutrophication. Many wastes from salmon farms are treated with chemicals that poison the local aquatic life.