Is the world really running out of water because we eat too much meat? The short answer is no.
Google meat consumption and water usage and you will find a litany of stories about how people need to consume less meat in order to save water. “The world is simply running out of water,” says a senior representative of the Stockholm Water Institute. About 97.5 percent of the water in the world is in our oceans as salt water. About half of the 2.5 percent of water that is fresh is found in glaciers. The rest is found deep underground in aquifers, in surface water such as lakes and rivers, and in the air as water vapour. But the planet is a closed system — water is neither created nor destroyed by agriculture, but merely transformed. We do not lose water , we merely displace it or transform it.
Agriculture uses fresh water either from irrigation systems (surface or pumped aquifer water), and transforms it into agricultural waste water. This water may have residual fertilizers or bacteria from animal waste in it. Often, it is simply drained away from fields using extensive pipe systems to prevent water logging where there is too much water. Waste water can be re-used for any number of purposes, including human consumption subject to filtration. Innovative agricultural systems incorporate fish ponds with crop production because the fish waste is an excellent natural fertilizer. Water is also, of course, converted into fruits, vegetables, and grains, which we then eat — or fed to animals before we eat them in turn.
One major problem with the idea that we are running out of a key resource is that it ignores the possibility that humans will evolve new technologies that will reduce the need for specific inputs or change to a new input entirely. The idea that we are running out of water relates not to the total amount available, but rather to the idea that a certain amount flows through our rivers and aquifers in the form of fresh water that can be consumed on an annual basis. We cannot live on water but only on the foods we choose to grow from it.
However, we are already not restricted to the use of fresh water to serve our needs. In some places, there is nowhere near enough fresh water to serve the needs of the people. The United Arab Emirates, for example, desalinates sea water from the Arabian Gulf to cover the 6 billion L used every day. Groundwater is too saline for agriculture or everyday consumer use in most of the country. The country has around 70 desalination units that work every day and a major reservoir built under the desert in 2018 serves as a backup should the desalination units go offline for any reason.
This solution is certainly not cost-free, both in terms of cash and environmental externalities as the process produces not only fresh water but also concentrated salt water brine that is re-injected into the sea. The Arabian Gulf is slowly increasing in salinity because of the number of large-scale desalinators that are necessary to meet the country’s needs for fresh water. But for now, the technical constraint of limited fresh water has been alleviated.
Most of the world’s water supply is salt water. We can eat a lot of food that is produced in salt water environments, including fish and sea vegetables (sea weeds for the most part) and coastal salt tolerant plants. My ex-colleague Dionysia Lyra has spent a lot of time working on salicornia production. It’s a tasty salt-tolerant sea-side plant that has a nice crunchy and slightly salty taste. It’s sold as sea asparagus or samphire or sea beans or some other funky name, and varieties of this plant grow in most of the world. It could be produced at a higher volume commercially, and it is just one of a large number of tasty salt-tolerant plants we could eat regularly. Currently, most fish species are being over harvested and we risk a collapse of the aquatic ecosystem at great cost to humanity and all other species who share our planet. My own conclusion is that aquaculture needs to be significantly further developed. However, it is usually considered a sideline for to the majority of food-based researchers and policy makers. It is an area where technical change could have a major impact on global food supplies, and deserves far greater attention and funding.
Currently, the majority of our food is produced using fresh water as an input. Most of the world’s agriculture is rain-fed, so it is not displacing water from other usages. If we use the grain to feed cattle, then we are re-using water to produce protein when we could indeed consume plant-based foods. There are trade-offs for nutrition in consuming plant-based foods only, however, as plant-based diets are deficient in several nutrients, in particular vitamin B12.
And, what few people advocating this approach discuss is that plant-production agriculture is by its very nature an extractive industry. We put seeds in the soil, and the plants extract the nutrients they need from the soil to grow, in the presence of sun and water. Thus, these nutrients must re replenished if we are to continue to grow our food. In the “good old days,” farmers replenished the soils using animal waste in the form of manure or animal bones and other non-consumed part of farmed animals. It’s not a perfect solution as the nutrients provided do not completely reflect what plants need to grow, but it’s better than no replenishment. One might argue that it’s better than using oil-based extractive techniques to produce the major soil amendments of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. (N-P-K fertilizers), which is what many large-scale commercial farmers do now.
The argument for eating less meat may well hold IF one assumes a high input American-style meat production system in which animals are produced with processed grain-based diets such as oilseed cake where we produce soy or canola/rapeseed and then use that to feed animals. That may indeed be wasteful, and it may be due to policies that encourage the production of oilseeds at higher than efficient levels. That is a different question for a different day.
But for the majority of the world, feeding livestock grains or oilseeds is not an option as the oilseeds and grains are too valuable to feed to animals and are used for human consumption. Throughout most of Asia, Africa, or South America, animals are grazed. They constitute an extremely important source of income and family nutrition in the form of meat, dairy, eggs, or animal byproducts such as leather for many poor people. This is why international aide organizations run seasonal gift giving campaigns to encourage people to give someone poor a goat rather than your sister or mother another sweater she won’t wear.
Animals are also grazed in areas where there is too little rainfall for rainfed agriculture such as most of Australia or New Zealand. These countries have ample grazing lands that are less suitable for cropping so meat production is not displacing cropping systems. Here, because the animals are eating rainfed grasses and other naturally growing plants, there is no loss or displacement of water from eating meat.
Is our current system in much of North America and parts of Europe sustainable with respect to meat consumption? Here I agree with those who argue that our system is unsustainable. In particular, much of North American oilseed and grain production is based on irrigation using pumped aquifer water from the Ogallala aquifer, and it is being overused. Within my lifetime, this system may well collapse. Thus, we are certainly running out of sufficient sources of fresh water to continue as we are now. We cannot invent more water, so those of us in the rich “west” must change what we eat, how we produce it, and how much of it we consume.
For everyone else (which to be clear includes around 1.3 billion people in India, 1.3 billion people in China, and 1 billion people in Africa — at least half the global population), the issue is moot. They will continue to graze livestock and consume animal products that they can produce using the resources available. They may be poor now and they may stay poor because they cannot produce and consume like the rich countries, but they are not going to run out of water. They may have too many animals and overgraze their lands, but they will not run out of water.
No, it’s just those of us in the rich countries who are going to have to figure out how to deal with a new world order where the existing structure of food production and consumption isn’t going to last.
