ABSTRACT
The principle of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), which has become a central tenet of global water discourse, is based on the intuitive notion that water use in one part of a common water basin will affect the water options in other parts of that basin (GWP 2000). When natural water basins are connected through trans-basin tunnels or pipelines, the effective basin is correspondingly enlarged. If we consider the exchange of “virtual water” in the form of agricultural commodities, or cars or computer chips, the freshwater resources of the entire planet are interconnected. Land and water grabs, the purchase of vast tracks of agricultural lands along with rights to use the associated water, are a particularly dramatic example of connecting water basins in one country with hungry consumers in another country (Mehta et al. 2012). Against this backdrop of the interconnected world of water, this chapter
considers the biggest user of the world’s water: agriculture. More than twothirds of the fresh water that is taken out of nature for human use, is used in agriculture. All the water used by cities, factories, mines, and rural communities comprise the other one-third of global water use.1 Given the popular and professional perception that the world is in a water crisis, with dire predictions of ever-increasing stress from climate change along with population increase and (we hope) continued economic development, there is a lot of interest in the two-thirds of water that agriculture is using. Cities regard agricultural water as the logical source for expanding urban water supply systems (Molle and Berkoff 2009), while agricultural researchers focus on increasing irrigation productivity (Giordano et al. 2006). The response to low economic returns from agricultural water reflects
value assumptions (ethics) about how that water might be used “better” where the concept of better becomes an ethical touchstone. What do we want agriculture, and more specifically, agricultural water, to produce? More crop per drop, more money per drop, or more value in overall human well-being, or perhaps the well-being of nature? In this chapter we will discuss a range of benefits that we could ask from
agriculture, corresponding to the four categories of ethics outlined in Chapter 1: economic, environmental, social, and cultural, and spilling into
additional benefit categories as well (e.g. nutritional, psychological, aesthetic, and spiritual). The potential benefits from agricultural water are not limited to the agricultural sector, since the water could be transferred to other sectors (e.g. those thirsty cities or energy development), or back to nature, where there is a growing water deficit.
