Food securityImproving “crop per drop” boosts global food security, water sustainability
New study shows increasing crop water productivity could feed an additional 110 million people while meeting the domestic water demands of nearly 1.4 billion.
Improvements in crop water productivity — the amount of food produced per unit of water consumed — have the potential to improve both food security and water sustainability in many parts of the world, according to a study published online in Environmental Research Letters 29 May by scientists with the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE) and the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation (INRES) at the University of Bonn, Germany.
A University of Minnesota release reports that the research team, led by IonE postdoctoral research scholar Kate A. Brauman, analyzed crop production, water use, and crop water productivity by climatic zone for sixteen staple food crops: wheat, maize, rice, barley, rye, millet, sorghum, soybean, sunflower, potato, cassava, sugarcane, sugar beet, oil palm, rapeseed (canola), and groundnut (peanut). Together these crops constitute 56 percent of global crop production by tonnage, 65 percent of crop water consumption, and 68 percent of all cropland by area.
The release notes that the study is the first of its kind to look at water productivity for this many crops at a global scale.
— Read more in Kate A. Brauman et al., “Improvements in crop water productivity increase water sustainability and food security — a global analysis,” Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (29 May 2013) (doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024030)
