It also highlights another important but overlooked fact: that farmers are the managers not only of the food supply and the land they work but also of the water they use, water that is vital to many other human activities as well as to nature itself, both upstream and downstream of the farm.
Water is said to provide “ecosystem ser vices,” by which the experts mean keeping landscapes functioning so they can provide us with food, clothing, shelter, and clean water to drink as well as maintaining the landscapes, air, biota, and natural systems on which our survival ultimately depends. Healthy landscapes in turn provide fertile soil, soak up more carbon from the atmosphere, cleanse water, and maintain the diversity of life. Damaged landscapes spell the loss of these benefits. Poor management of agricultural water not only degrades the water itself for everyone and everything else that uses it but also has consequences for the wider landscape and the survival ser vices it provides to humanity and to nature.
Scientists now urge the management of the “agro- ecosystem”—the landscape in which farming takes place, along with its resources and natural values— as a single whole. In practice this means that today’s farmers are being asked not only to produce far more food (often for far less money)— but also to use less water, to clean it up, and to make sure it gets back into rivers, wetlands, and wilderness areas. This responsibility was highlighted by four hundred of the world’s top agricultural scientists in a report to the World Bank in which they wrote of the need to “recognize farming communities, farm house holds, and farmers as producers and managers of ecosystems.”
To do this, they add, there must be changes in incentives “all along the value chain,” which is another way of saying that those who wish to eat in the future are going to have to start paying a lot more for the true environmental costs of producing their food, especially for the water used to produce that food.
Water Management Policies
