Articles by Dr. Shiva

FOOD SECURITY AND WATER SECURITY ARE INTERCONNECTED

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

Water makes us.  It makes our food.   

While every plant and animal species needs water to survive, water has been wasted and polluted as industrial agriculture has replaced ecological farming.  

Good farming practices produce not just good food.  They also produce clean water.  Bad farming produces polluted food and polluted water.  

There are 3 ways in which industrial agriculture destroys precious water resources, and ecological agriculture can rebuild and rejuvenate both our food systems and our water systems.  

1. Industrial agriculture is more water intensive than ecological agriculture.  Intensive irrigation creates the need for large dams and ground water mining.  

2. Industrial agriculture generates pollution of soil water and air.  

3. Industrial agriculture promotes monocultures of water intensive crops.  

1.            Industrial agriculture, intensive irrigation and water waste  

Industrial agriculture was introduced in the Third World at the “Green Revolution”.  The Green Revolution has been projected as having increased agricultural productivityin an absolute sense.  At the level of resource utilisation, the new seed-fertilizer technology was clearly counter productive, both with respect to natural resource inuts like water, as well as industrial inputs such as fertilizer use. This is clear in the case of rice where some indigenous high yielding varieties compared with the yields of the Green Revolution varieties, but used substantially less water and fertilizer inputs.  Richaria reported yields of 4,000 kg and more in rice cultivation in Baster, and Yegna Iyengal recorded rice yield above 5,000 kg/ha in South India.  Even in the case of wheat, and particularly true in Punjab, increase in yields was achieved; the increase in cost of inputs did not affect the gain in yields.  Productivity with respect to water use and fertilizer use thus actually declined, as summarized in the Table below.  

Table:             Comparison of productivity of native varieties and

Borlaug varieties of wheat

The spread of large dams and ground water mining are closely related to the spread of the Green Revolution.  Non-sustainable water use linked to non-sustainable agriculture was both financed by the World Bank. Today, as a result of these policies, industrial agriculture accounts for 70% of the water use.

World Bank financed water projects (Power and Irrigation)

John Briscoe, Senior Water Advisor of the World Bank, ushers convincing arguments in favour of the World Bank's renewed interest in India's water sector.  Having suffered negative publicity for its investment in hydro-power sector during the past decade the World Bank in determined to stage a spirited come back.  Speaking at the recently conclude annual conference of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) at Anand in Gujarat, Briscoe did not allow reams of evidence get in the way of good narrative.  Carefully choosing “infrastructure” as the development mantra to justify a four-fold jump in its current annual water-sector lending over the next four years.  Briscoe has bundled the controversial hydropower and irrigation sector in its investment folder.

Over the next four years, Water sector lending will flow out of the folder in the following order:

            Irrigation Projects                     -            $ 1.39 billion

            Hydro Power Projects             -            $ 500 million

            Water needs                           -            $ 700 million

            Improving Water Resource            -            $ 424 million

            Management  

It means, averaged annually lending to the tune of $ 800 million against the present figure of $ 200 million.  Clearly in its 60^th year of existence, the World Bank is reinventing itself. Switching away from its high-risk high-reward' strategy, it is sugar coating its past follies in a fresh new package.  For fighting poverty, India may need to make substantive investment in infrastructure in water.  However, this would translate into increasing areas under surface water storage large dams.  In World Bank's parlance, area under surface water storage has been inversely related to poverty.  

Briscoe relates India's poverty to its inability to store surface water, India's per capita figure of 130 cubic meter of stored water is lowest in comparison to China and U.S.A.  While China has an average impressive 5000 cubic meter, whatever one make out of this correlation, this equation is sure to suit the politician-contractor nexus. With vested interest calling the shots, the traditional village ponds as surface storage structure do not get counted.  

With the hidden motive of justifying its interest in hydro-power as potential surface-storage structures, the World Bank has conducted an impact evaluation of the Bhakra Dam after nearly four decades of its commissioning.  Ignoring the much publicized benefits of green revolution from one of the country's biggest hydro-power projects, the World Bank instead argues that the projects had indeed benefited the landers and the poor by generating on-farm employment opportunities, for poor as far as from Bihar.  

John Bariscoe crafty argues for the development of big dams.  However, statistics and projections speak otherwise.  Going by the current rate of silting of country's reservoirs, 65 billion cubic or 38 per cent of the stored water will get replaced.  Can these reservoirs be saved from silting?  And why are village tanks not being considered an option. That may not be John Briscoe's concern.  

The World Bank has also financed the mining of ground water for the Green Revolution. Energized pumping of ground water was central to the controlled input needs of Green Revolution seeds.  The ‘efficiency' was calculated only in terms of energy and horse power, not in terms of whether the withdrawal was in consonance with recharge to ensure the sustainable use of water.  It is estimated that an irrigation pump powered by a 7.5 kg electric motor takes five hours and one man to irrigate an acre of wheat compared to 60 bullock hours and 60 man hours with a Persian wheel.  The calculation that was never carried out by Green Revolution experts was that the Persian wheel has supported agriculture for centuries while the energized pump threatens to dessicate large areas of prime farmland in less than two decades.  

The Green Revolution strategy for generating abundance by improving the productivity of land and water has thus turned into a strategy for creating scarcity of land and water and generating new conflicts.  Both in terms of nutrients and water, the Green Revolution strategists held the view that they were ‘freeing' themselves of nature's processes, central to which are the nutrient and water cycle.  They assumed that:  

In the early stages of economic development when the supply of the “produced factor”, capital, is modest and the level of technology is rudimentary a country's natural resource base looms large in determining the volume of agricultural output and the possibilities for high rates of savings. Advances in technology, capital accumulation, and international trade that come with economic growth progressively free the production process from a one-to-one relationship between output and specific resource inputs.  

Yet the Punjab experience brings home the point that even the Green Revolution was bounded by ecological limits, and by attempting to break out of them, it further increased those limits, generating new levels of scarcity, insecurity and vulnerability.  

The intensive use of water also has major ecological impacts.  The dramatic increase in water use with the Green Revolution has led to a total destabilization of the water balance in the region. The water cycle can be destabilized by adding more water to an ecosystem than the natural drainage potential of that system. This leads to desertification through waterlogging and salinisation of the land.  Desertification of this kind is a form of water abuse rather than water use.  It is associated with large irrigation projects and water intensive cultivation patterns.  About 25% of the irrigated land in the US suffers from salinisation and waterlogging.  In India 10 million hectares of canal irrigated land have become waterlogged and another 25 million hectares are threatened with salinity.  Land gets waterlogged when the water table is within 1.5 to 2.1 meters below the ground surface.  The water table goes up if water is added to a basin faster than it can drain out.  Certain types of soils and certain types of topography are most vulnerable to watelrogging.  The rich alluvial plains of Punjab which have a very negligible slope suffer seriously from desertification induced by the introduction of excessive irrigation water to make Green Revolution farming possible.  

Water logging and salinity are problems linked to the overuse of water in regions where the nature of the topography and soils rule out intensive irrigation as a productive use of land and water. The natural ecological solution to these problems would be to shift to more water prudent cropping patterns, to crops and varieties that need less water.  The engineering solution, on the other hand is to redesign nature by artificially transforming the drainage characteristics and chemical composition of soils. The cure is worse than the disease; more water consumption, more drains to get rid of excess water quickly, more energy and capital for desalting.  These cures are neither affordable nor sustainable.  

2.            Industrial agriculture and water pollution  

Industrial agriculture does not merely abuse water through over use.  It also abuses it through pollution.  

Chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides pollute the water which we drink.  It is not just food that becomes toxic, but water too.  

In Punjab, 88 per cent of the ground water is contaminated, both with run off from fields, as well as heavy metals due to deep mining.  Sixty five per cent of blood samples tested by the Chandigarh based Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) showed DNA mutations; there has been a sharp increase in cancer, neurological disorders, liver and kidney diseases, congenital defects and miscarriages.  While account for only 2.5% of the countries access, Punjab, the land of the Green Revolution, accounts for 18% of the pesticide use in the country.  The Malwa region has become known as the cancer belt.  A team leaving Bhatinda to Bikaner has been dubbed the “cancer express” as most patients from here go to Bikaner's cancer hospital for treatment.   

Industrial aquaculture also pollutes water.  Commercial shrimp farming is being actively encouraged in India since the beginning of the 90s.  Both the Indian government, including the state governments, as well as international aid agencies like the World Bank subsidise the production of shrimp for exports.  These subsidies, which take the form of soft loans, tax holidays, tariff relaxation of imports, are made available to the corporations who enter this industry because of the high profit potential. In their rush to garner profits, the governments hae also become parties to violations of ntional land and environmental laws.   

With the market as the ruling ideal, under the Globalisation paradigm of development, new networks are being established between the Northern and Southern elites, governments and funding agencies aimed at expanding the ambit of corporate control in the name of development.  

Globalization, then as never before in history, is providing immense opportunities to the elites of the world to unite, transcending national loyalties and boundaries, while inflicting tremendous hardship to the underprivileged and poor.  

The key players involved with prawn aquaculture are Transnational Corporations (TNCs), the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, the Northern and Southern elites, who are creating policies and systems of trade favourable to meet their needs through trade liberalistion and globalization.  

After having created an economic climate favourable to trade through their Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP), the World Bank and the IMF as well as other international funding agencies, are helping industrial aquaculture expand by giving loans for this purpose to both, the Central Government and the state governments directly. While the World Bank loan to India is for improved fish culture, shrimp aquaculture forms a substantial component. The expansionof this industry is justified on the ground that it will benefit the poor by providing them with better nutrition, more employment opportunities and higher incomes; also that, it makes use of land that is unfit for any other agricultural or forestry purposes.  The lure of earning foreign exchange is also a key factor.  

The ministries of agriculture, both at the central and the state level are responsible for the development and promotion of aquaculture.  Land ceiling laws are undergoing changes in various states to allow individuals and corporations to acquire large tracts of land for aquaculture.  In fact, some states like Orissa and Karnataka have changed their land acts to allow the construction of huge aquafarms on agricultural and forest/mangrove lands.  In other places, state governments help aquafarm owners by declaring such land as wasteland, and then leasing it or selling it to the industry.  

Communities all along the coast, who have been shrimp farming for centuries-catching shrimp along with other fish, or intercropping it with paddy during the appropriate seasons; and who helped maintain India's position as the top producer at shrimp in the world, are today being marginalized by the industry.  As the technology involved in large scale shrimp production destroys both the marine and the coastal environment, their fish and shrimp catches have critically declined.  Those involved in agriculture have had their lands destroyed through salinity. Another factor that has upset the ecological and economic balance of the fragile coastline is the increasing influx of non local population, as a result of the increase in the aquaculture industry.  This has created social and law and order problems all along the coast.  

World Bank's promotion of aquaculture  

The World Bank is a multilateral funding agency designed to ‘ensure liberal, capitalist world economy by enforcing rules favouring a free movement of capital internationally'.  

The bank became involved with aquaculture in the 70s when it began providing loans to governments of Asia and Latin America for development of shrimp ponds.  The bank financed development projects in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Bangladesh.  By the 1980s the bank broadened it support to include China, India, Brazil, Columbia and Venezuela.  

The aim of the investments in prawn aquaculture was to set up a basis for processing and products for the market, which meant an emphasis, had to be placed on infrastructure in the form of roads and refrigeration, so that industrial shrimp production could expand by the 80s. In 1992, the Bank invested $1,685 billion in agriculture and fisheries, of which India received $425 million for shrimp and fish culture.  

The government is providing the aquaculture industry with technical assistance for transfer of knowledge and production, with financial assistance coming from various overseas agencies such as the EG.  Import-export policies have been changed to stress ‘freedom' for trade, substantially eliminating the need for licensing, quantitative restrictions and other regulating controls.  It has further set up MPEDA for assisting the industry and for overseeing the development of both the industry as well as its trade.   

Subsidies for exports  

MPEDA offers the following subsidies to support the industry:  

• Subsidy for new farm development, assistance of 25 per cent of capital investment of Rs. 30,000/ha. Up to a maximum risk of Rs. 1.5 lakh.  

• Subsidy for establishment of medium scale shrimp hatcheries of 30 million seed/year capacity and above; assistance of 25 per cent up to maximum of 5 lakh; can be availed of by private parties/individuals;  

• Subsidy for feed and seeds; assistance at 25 per cent up to Rs. 3000/ha. And Rs. 450/ha. Respectively;  

• Subsidy for establishment of brood stock bank; assistance of 25 per cent of capital cost subject to a maximum of Rs. 1.5 lakh.  

• In addition, shrimp farmers are allowed to import shrimp feed at concessional customs duty.  

MPEDA has also established two hatcheries of its own; one each in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.  The Ministry of Agriculture is setting up five hatcheries with help from UNDP.  

Apart from government support, financial assistance for the aquaculture industry has been provided by several public financial institutions such as National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).  Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, Shipping Credit and Investment Corporation of India, and industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI).  

In addition to the direct subsidies, industrial aquaculture for exports is also based on the ecological and social subsidies in the form of environment destruction and destruction of livelihoods.  

The ecological and the economic impacts of the Blue Revolution indicate that aquaculture projects have actually aggravated the poverty of fishing and farming families.  In addition, the aquaculture industry exists at the expense of marine fisheries and does not enhance overall fish production when diverse species, diverse producers and diverse consumers are fully taken into account.  

Environmental impact  

The first impact of shrimp land and forests in the coastal region is when the land is bulldozed and excavated for making the gigantic fish farms.  Mangrove destruction is a major impact of prawn farming.  

The destruction of coastal vegetation destroys the buffer zone against destructive wind and water action, increasing cyclone and flood vulnerability.  

The large scale pumping of sea and ground water into the fish farms is the most serious environmental impact of shrimp farming.  The massive extractions of fresh water from underground aquifers for salinity control in the ponds pose a serious threat to the salinity control of the coastal ecosystems.  Emptied acquifers are subject to salt water intrusion.  Seepage from the tanks also increases salinisation of ground water.  In the village of Kurru in Nellore district, there was no drinking water available to the 600 fisherfolk due to salinisation of the drinking water.  

As ground water salinity increases, paddy fields are destroyed.  Shrimp farms flush their effluents and wastes directly into the sea and neighbouring mangrove and agricultural lands.  The wastewater from the ponds carries pollution in the form of excess line, organic wastes, pesticides, chemicals and disease microorganisms.  The waste stifles the growth of aquatic organisms and causes water quality to deteriorate.  Intensive coastal fish farming has also been linked to ‘red tides', an explosive growth of toxic algae that can kill fish and fatally poison people who eat contaminated seafood.  

Another reason for depletion of marine shrimp is the capture of juvenile shrimp from the mangroves for hatcheries.  This prevents the renewal of the wild shrimp at sea.  

The aquaculture industry thus exists at the expense of existing marine fisheries, which have supported traditional fishing communities over centuries.  

Social impact  

The enclosure of the beaches for pumps and powerhouses, has pushed fishing communities, called ‘pattapu raja', the king of the coastline, off their ancestral homes.  

The depletion of marine fish due to environmental impact of fish farming has destroyed their resource base.  Not only are fishermen displaced, local communities no longer can consume fish.  Since intensive farms are export oriented, they do not supply local markets. The cost of fish locally has risen worldwide as a result of commercial fisheries.  

The destruction of clean ground water immediately translates into increased work burden for women.  Women say they are working 4-6 hours extra to collect fuel and water as a result of the environmental destruction caused by shrimp farms.  

As the shrimp farms render the fertile coastal region a salinated waste land, there is destruction of agricultural livelihoods and food production. Very soon there will be a famine in the rice bowls of Andhra and Tamil Nadu.  

When these social and ecological costs are internalised, intensive prawn farming emerges as a highly wasteful and inefficient technology for ecological and equitable utilization of land, water and fish resources.  

Shrimp farms embody an assumption of the dispensability of coastal ecosystems and the fishermen and farmers they support.  

The NEERI report submitted the following estimation of the social and ecological costs of aquaculture to the Supreme Court of India.  

The ecological destruction caused by industrial aquaculture is thus 2-4 times as high as the revenues earned from exports.  In addition, even though industrial aquaculture is presented as a substitute to marine fisheries, industrial aquaculture actually depends on marine resources both for stocking fish ponds and for feed.  It actually consumes more fish resources than it produces.  As Dr. John Kurien pointed out,  

In 1988, global shrimp aquaculture consumed 1,80,000 tonnes of fishmeal derived from an equivalent of 9 lakh tones wet-weight fish. It is further estimated that by the year 2000 about 5,70,000 tonnes of cultured fish will be produced in Asia. The feed requirement for this will be of the order of 1.1 million tones of feed. This is equivalent of a staggering 5.5. million tones of wet-weight fish, nearly double the total marine fish harvested in India today.  Fishmeal provides the crucial link between industrial aquaculture and industrial fisheries, since the fish used for fish meal is harvested from the sea through trawlers and purseines, which totally deplete marine stocks.  This falsifies the often used argument by the agencies like the World Bank that promotion of aquaculture is like moving from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture in fisheries and will reduce the pressure on marine resources.  

The ecological footprint of ecologically farmed shrimp is thus at least 1015 times larger than the value of shrimp on global markets.  

Factory farming also pollutes water.  In India cow dung is used as a purifier and disinfectant.  It is used to plaster floors and it is used as organic manure..  However, when animals are given intensive feed and kept in intensive production systems, their waste becomes a pollutant.  An estimated 13 billion tons of waste is produced by factory farms. Such farms are polluting scarce water resources.  

Liquid slurry from livestock oozes into watercourses and waterways and the excess nitrogen and phosphorous levels it contains can ruin groundwater quality and damage aquatic and wetland ecosystems.  The reason that levels of nitrogen and phosphorous are so high is that farm animals can only absorb a limited proportion of the amounts contained in their feed. Roughly 70-80 per cent of dietary nitrogen fed to cattle, pigs and laying hens, and 60 per cent fed to broiler chickens, is excreted in faeces and urine.  

In North Carolina which has a population of 6.5 million people and 7 million pigs, the waste has led to massive fish deaths and illnesses caused by the toxic microbe p-fiestera pisicade.  Besides killing water ways through pollution, intensive factory farming is also destroying water in the production of feed.  

3.            Monocultures of thirsty crops

The entire industrial agriculture system is based on monocultures.  And the monocultures are of thirsty crops and thirsty varieties.  

The Green Revolution was based on the expansion and intensification of irrigation from surface as well as ground water.  The new seeds have an enormous thirst for irrigation water.  Compared to the earlier varieties needing protective irrigation as an insurance against crop failure, the new seeds need intensive irrigation as an essential input for crop yields.  The Green Revolution increased the need for irrigation water at two levels.   

Firstly, the shift from water prudent crops such as millets and oilseeds to monocultures and multi-cropping such as wheat and rice increased the demand for water inputs throughout the year.  

Secondly, the replacement of old varieties of wheat with new varieties of wheat and rice also increased the intensity of irrigation, which went up from 20-30% to 200-300%.  

Irrigation, which used to be protective, now became ‘productive'.  Green Revolution varieties need much more water than indigenous varieties.  High Yielding Varieties of wheat, for example, need about three times as much irrigation as traditional varieties. Thus, while indigenous wheat varieties need 12 inches of irrigation, the HYVs require at least 36 inches.  The comparative yields of native wheat varieties and the HYV varieties is 3,291 and 4,690 Kg/ha respectively in Punjab. The productivity with respect to water use is therefore 620.90 and 293.1 kg/ha/cm respectively.  

From the perspective of water use, the shift to the new wheat varieties and the replacement of millets and maize by rice has therefore led to a decrease in productivity.  In addition, the shift has induced processes of social and ecological disruption.  Social considerations of equity favour the extensive use of irrigation water which assures a protective dose of water to crops over as large an area as possible. The intensive use of irrigation as part of the Green Revolution packet limits the provisioning of irrigation to a smaller region. Thus a shift from millets to paddy amounts to a restriction of irrigation from 3 ha to 1 ha.  

Food insecurity and water insecurity therefore go hand in hand, and food security and water security reinforce each other.  The dominant industrial agriculture paradigm has reduced labour inputs and increased chemical and water inputs.  With respect to water, agricultural productivity has actually declined. Water conservation demands that we measure productivity with respect to water use.  Once we focus on conserving water, organic farming is more productive than industrial agriculture; millets are more productive than rice, and farmers' breeding is more efficient than the green revolution.  

Food and Water are our most basic needs.  Without water, food production is not possible.  Traditionally, food cultures evolved in response to the water possibilities surrounding them.  Water-prudent crops emerged n water-scarce regions and water-demanding ones evolved in water-rich regions.  

The water-use efficiency of crops is influenced by their genetic variation.  Maize, sorghum, and millet convert water into biological matter most efficiently.  Millet not only requires less water than rice, it is also drought-resistant, withstanding up to 75 per cent soil moisture depletion.  The roots of pulses and legumes allow efficient soil moisture utilization.  

Since the Green Revolution, the crops that produce higher nutrition per unit of water used have been called inferior, and have been displaced by water-intensive crops. Water productivity has been ignored.  

Industrial agriculture has pushed farmers to use methods by which the water retention capacity of soil is reduced, and the demand for water is increased.  By failing to recognize water as a limiting factor in food production, industrial agriculture has promoted waste. The shift from organic fertilizers to chemical fertilizers and the substitution of water-prudent crops by water-thirsty ones have been recipes for water famines, desertification, water-logging and salinization.  

The advent of the Green Revolution pushed Third World agriculture toward wheat and rice production.  The new crops demanded more water than millet and consumed three times more water than the indigenous varieties of wheat and rice. The introduction of wheat and rice has also had social and ecological costs.  Their dramatic increase in water use has led to the instability of regional water balances.  Massive irrigation projects and water-intensive farming, by adding more water to an ecosystem than what its natural drainage system can accommodate, have led to waterlogging, salinization and desertification.  

In the Krishna basin, waterlogging at the Malaprabha irrigation project led to farmer rebellions.  Before the introduction of the irrigation project, the semi-arid region had produced water-prudent crops such as jowar and pulses.  The sudden climatic change, the intensive irrigation, and the cultivation of water-demanding cotton aggravated the problem.  Intensive irrigation of black cotton soils, whose water retention capacity is very high, quickly created wastelands. While irrigation has been viewed as a means to improve land productivity, it has had the opposite effect in the Malaprabha area.  

The shift from rainfed food crops to irrigated cash crops like cotton in Andhra Pradesh was expected to improve the prosperity of farmers.  Instead, it has led to debt.  Farmers borrowed money from banks for land development and for the purchase of seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. While farmers were struggling with unproductive eland, banks were making payment demands. At the same time, irrigation authorities levied a development tax on water, known as a betterment levy.  The latter increased from 38 cents to 63 cents per acre for jowar, and from 38 cents to over a dollar per acre for cotton.  A fixed tax of 20 cents per acre was effective with or without water use.  

Likewise, the Aral Sea, the world's fourth-largest freshwater body, has been ruined by unsustainable agricultural activity. Rivers that recharge the lake are increasingly diverted toward the irrigation of 7.5 million hectares of cotton, fruits, vegetables and rice.  Over the past few decades, two-thirds of the water has been drained away, salinity has gone up six fold, and water levels have dropped by 20 metres.  Between 1974 and 1986, the Syr Darya river never reached the Aral Sea.  

Many proposals to solve the problem of agricultural water waste deny water for food production altogether.  Industrial shrimp farming is a case in point.  The most obvious and important impacts of industrial aquaculture are land and water salinization and drinking water depletion.  Paddy fields once fertile and productive are turning into what local people call graveyards. This is true not just in India.  In Bangladesh too, where shrim;p farming is widespread, the amount of rice production has dropped considerably.  In 1976, the country produced 40,000 metric tons of rice; by 1986, production had plummeted to 36 metric tons.  Thai farmers report similar losses, harvesting 150 sacks they were harvesting before the introduction of shrimp farms to the region.  

Another argument is that genetic engineering will resolve the water crisis but it obscures two important points.  First, peasants in drought-prone regions had bred thousands of drought-resistant crops, which were eventually displaced by the Green Revolution.  Second, drought resistance is a complex, multigenetic unit, and genetic engineers have so far not been successful in engineering plants that posses it.  In fact, the GM crops currently in the field of in labs will aggravate the water crisis in agriculture.  For instance, Monsanto's herbicide-resistant crops such as its Round-Up Ready soya beans or corn have led to soil erosion.  When all cover crops are killed by Monsanto's herbicide Round-Up, rows of soya and corn leave soils exposed to tropical sun and rain.  

Similarly, the heavily advertised Vitamin A-rich golden rice increases water abuse in agriculture. Golden rice contains 30 micrograms of vitamin A per 1000 grams of rice.  On the other hand, greens such as amaranth and coriander contain 500 times more vitamin A, while using a fraction of the water needed by golden rice.  In terms of water use, genetically engineered rice is 1,500 times less efficient in providing children with vitamin A, a necessary vitamin for blindness prevention.  The golden rice promise is in fact “a blind approach to blindness prevention”.  

The myth of water solution by way of GM crops obscures the hidden cost of the biotech industry – the denial of fundamental rights of food and water to the poor. Investing in indigenous breeding knowledge and protecting the rights of local communities are more equitable and sustainable ways to ensure access to water and food to all using water resources efficiently  

Table 1            Average Water use (cm)

Table 2            Water use Efficiency (WUE)

Table 3            Water Requirement for Small Millet, Sugarcane and Rice

Table 4            Comparison of Water use Efficiency and Food Security – Rice and Sugarcane with Millet

*   Most of the Sugarcane is non-food component.  

Tables 1 and 2 show the water use and water use efficiency for different crops.  Water requirement per hectare and per tonne for sugarcane, rice, and millet is shown in table 3.  Table 4 shows the millet production for the same amount of water, consumed by sugarcane and rice production in 2000 AD. Total millet production of about 750 million tones n a year by using water resources efficiently will increase the food security of the country five fold without additional irrigation capacity.  What the country needs is changes in cropping patterns and biodiversity conservation.  

References  

1. V.Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution, Zed Books, London
2. V.Shiva, Stolen Harvest, Southend Press, Boston, USA
3. Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi, Financing the Water Crisis