Introduction: Water, Africa and the Great Misconception

There remains a common misconception, or what could even be labelled a blanket stereotype, within popular discourse that Africa is a dry and arid continent with a dramatic shortage of freshwater. You only have to stumble across a charity advert on the evening television to see continuous portrayals as Africa and it’s people as teetering on the edge of devastating drought. Whilst the water-based problems seen in these representations are indeed very real across parts of the continent, with a staggering 300 of the 800 million people living in Africa in 2014 suffering from water scarcity, the problems go beyond that of a simple story of too little water. 

The traditional metrics of water scarcity have been increasingly criticised in recent years due to their oversight of variations in rainfall and run-off patterns. Alongside this, they fail to take into account groundwater storage, which constitutes 51% of renewable freshwater resources in Africa, and green water, which is relied upon for almost all food production in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Mean Annual River Runoff metric, which has seen a recent exponential adoption in studies of water scarcity, assumes that these factors have a negligible impact on water availability. However, it is already evident that soil water plays a significant part in meeting the water needs of the African population. On top of this, through masking the seasonality of rainfall, which can be extreme in parts of Africa, many metrics overlook the fact that in Africa, the issue may not be so much a problem of annual water scarcity, but rather water storage and accessibility. 

It is, however, important to define the term water scarcity, despite the need to remain sceptical about current attempts to measure it. Taylor (2009) offers a broad definition of water scarcity as being the ‘shortage in the availability of freshwater relative to demand’. A significant portion of this demand is made up by agricultural production and there are few places where this link between water and food is more explicit than in Africa, with agricultural production responsible for 81% of the continent’s total water withdrawals. It is therefore evident that issues of water scarcity have a significant impact on food production, availability and security. Indeed, as highlighted by Damkjaer and Taylor (2017), the Water Stress Indicator was initially established in the 1980s as a warning system aimed at informing strategies for food self-sufficiency, thus explicitly linking food security with freshwater availability. Due to the absolute necessity of water in order to grow food, the relationship between water and food, and the problems facing both within Africa, will be the primary focus of this blog. Through an exploration of water and food, I also hope to explore the potential for improving access to freshwater across Africa and the consequences this could have on food production. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ethiopian Precipitation Cycles

Image
Sorry readers! It’s been a while since my last post, but whilst I’ve been away I have been taking a look at the extraordinary situation of Ethiopia, on the east coast of Africa (see Figure 1). The pressures facing Ethiopia’s agricultural production are extreme and highlight well the precarious relationship between food and water across much of Africa. I will therefore be   focusing on Ethiopia throughout my blog. This week I will discuss some of the cyclical water-related issues facing Ethiopian agriculture before highlighting long-term and anthropogenic problems posing a threat to Ethiopia’s food security in my next post. Future posts will then explore the potentially devastating impact of these cycles and changes on food availability, before taking a look at some of the solutions that have and could be employed to combat Ethiopia’s chronic food insecurity.    Figure 1: Location of Ethiopia                                          Across Africa, the relationship b
Read more

Can Egypt Show The Way?

Image
Last week I hope I illustrated how Ethiopia does have plentiful surface water resources, at least for part of the year, despite what I may have been pointing to in previous posts. However, this raises the question as to why, with plentiful fertile soils and bountiful rainfall, Ethiopia so often treads the line between food insecurity and famine. There are of course complications that prevent agricultural production, such as extreme topography. Yet with over 124 billion cubic metres (BCM) of river water and around  4 million hectares of potentially irrigable land (depending on the information source), it is perhaps surprising that even during years with good rains Ethiopia cannot produce enough food for its growing population. Through a comparison with Egypt, a nation which, despite having three times less arable land than Ethiopia , achieves near-continuos food security , some of the possible solutions to Ethiopia’s water and food problems become apparent.   Egypt rec
Read more

Anthropogenic Food Insecurity in Ethiopia

Image
Last week , I highlighted the role that global natural phenomena play in influencing Ethiopia’s rainfall patterns. However, there are other factors putting pressure on Ethiopia’s food supply and whilst not all directly water based, it is important to have a complete understanding of the challenges facing Ethiopia’s food and water relationship. This week I’ll be looking at the impact of general warming, the long-term decline in precipitation experienced in parts of Ethiopia and the significance of the nation’s rapidly growing population.   Ethiopia, as with the rest of the globe, is experiencing anthropogenic warming and an average one-degree temperature rise is expected in the imminent future (see Figure 1 ). It is likely that this rise will result in the intensification of the natural cycles that I discussed last week, with rainfall events becoming more extreme, but less frequent, with a 40% increase in the frequency of droughts . This will exacerbate both periods of drought an
Read more