FEEDING THE WORLD IN A SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker:  Dr. Roberto Lenton

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Water, Sanitation, and Food Security:  Synergies and Trade-offs

DR. ROBERTO LENTON
Co-Chair, UN Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation
Executive Director, International Research Institute at Columbia University

           I want to thank you very much, Judith, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And let me just say right from the start how delighted I am to be at the symposium and in Iowa, my very first visit to this state and just a wonderfully warm welcome that we’ve had here.

            What I’m going to talk about this morning is a subject that I guess I have not heard as much as I would have liked over the last 24 hours. And that’s the subject of water – water and sanitation. And if I’ve got one message, it’s that water and sanitation is absolutely crucial to the fulfillment of the Millennium Development goals on hunger. And that’s what I’m going to focus on. But also to recognize that it’s more than what may initially meet the eye.

            I’m going to be concentrating on the countries that are most off track in reaching the Millennium Development goals. As Sakiko Fukuda-Parr emphasized yesterday morning, there is a tremendous variety of situations in which countries around the world face themselves, vis-à-vis the Millennium Development goals, and we need to focus very, very much on those that are most off track in achieving those goals.

            One of the things we have to recognize right off the bat is that water and sanitation is one term, but it really has two meanings. And the way in which they connect, interconnect with the Millennium Development goals really depends on that meaning.

            The first is, when we talk about water and sanitation, what the professionals in the field call “wat-san,” very often is the water and sanitation services, the access to drinking water and sanitation that 1.2 billion people around the world simply do not have. And that’s embodied in a specific target.

            And then there’s the management of the resource itself, the management of the water resource, which impacts on a variety of the Millennium Development goals in different ways. And it’s important to recognize that dual nature of the term.

            Now, just to emphasize this point:  We all have heard about the eight Millennium Development goals. The seventh Millennium Development goal is on environmental sustainability. Within that goal there are three specific targets. One of them is the target on water and sanitation, reducing by half the proportion of people without safe drinking water, without basic sanitation.

            But we also have several other goals that relate to the water resource more generally. The issue of poverty and hunger, goal number one, clearly related to water and sanitation. The issue of child mortality, the issue of disease, and, as I mentioned earlier, environmental sustainability.

            And on our task force we have developed this table that tries to pinpoint the multiple ways in which water and sanitation influence each of the Millennium Development goals, both directly and indirectly. I’m not going to go into the details of this, but this is a table simply to emphasize that there are many relationships, and they’re not necessarily direct; many of those are indirect as well.

            But let’s talk specifically about what is the interest of this symposium itself, and that’s food security. And clearly all of us recognize immediately the role of water in terms of food security from the supply point of view, that very simply said we need water to grow crops. And that’s the way most of us see that relationship as fundamentally important. A disproportionate amount of total food supply comes from irrigated agriculture.

            We all know that the Green Revolution had its impacts primarily in irrigated agricultural zones around the world, particularly in Asia. And we also recognize that it’s not only a positive relationship – water as an input to crops – but we also know that providing water to crops has adverse impacts in terms of the quantity of water consumed but also in terms of the quality of water that returns to the groundwater or returns further on downstream.

            But the supply side of the relationship – water as a factor, as an input to crop production, is only a part of the story. And it’s the other part that I think needs perhaps more emphasis. And that’s the role of water in terms of providing economic access to food, the role of water in income and livelihood generation and the role of water and sanitation in terms of health. And we’ve emphasized earlier in the symposium the important role that healthy people have in ensuring food security.

            Let me just illustrate this with a couple of graphs. The first one is a study reported on by the World Bank, relating average income levels with irrigation intensity in India at the district level. So the districts all across India were examined, and there is a clear relationship between the average income levels in the districts and the percentage of area irrigated as indicated here.

            But some of the net effect is useful to summarize, because those districts with less than 10% of crop area irrigated had 69% of people below the poverty line. And those with 50% or more of crop area irrigated had only 26% below the poverty line. And that gives a very, very strong message that irrigation not only helps farmers in growing crops but also provides, at a more broad level, people with the income that they need to buy the food.

            The second is the very, very important role of irrigation in smoothing out the seasonal dimensions of livelihoods. People who work the land depend very, very much on farm employment, and there is a very great degree of seasonality – this is from a study by Michael Lipton, also in India – great seasonality in unirrigated areas and a much greater smoothing out on the irrigated side.

            We just move now to the issue of health. We’ve talked a lot about the various different impacts of disease in terms of food security. After malnutrition, water and sanitation accounts for the greatest percentage of global disability losses as measured in light years. And this graph illustrates that point very, very dramatically.

            I think it’s important to emphasize that you need to have healthy people if you are going to grow the food. And so people who are suffering from diarrheal diseases clearly are going to be less productive on the farm. But there’s the other dimension, which is that people suffering from diarrheal diseases aren’t going to be able to take the nutritional intake from foods. As one of my colleagues has said, you don’t want to be in a situation where you have to feed the worms before feeding the people. So getting rid of diarrheal diseases is an absolutely vital part of food security.

            So I guess the main point that I am making here is that we’ve got to look not only at the direct relationship of water to food, but we’ve got to look at the relationship between sanitation and food, the relationship between water and poverty and food, the relationship between water and health and food – and the same is true on the sanitation side – and all the time looking at ways in which we can maximize positive impacts on food security and minimize adverse impacts on the environment on Goal Number 7.

            What are the implications of these multiple interconnections? Clearly what we need, as others have emphasized today, are combined multi-goal approaches. We’ve got to be able to maximize the synergies. We’ve got to be able to reduce the negative impacts.

            We need more agroforestries, if that’s one way of putting it. Agroforestry is clearly a multi-goal strategy. We need more agroforestries around the world. Let me illustrate with some examples of things that are already happening.

            Clearly one of them is to be able to move from what are called open systems of excretal disposal of sanitation to more closed systems where we can look at waste as a resource, where we can take advantage of excreta and use them on it as soil fertilizer, which then has positive impacts in terms of crops. We want to go from open-loop system to closed-loop systems.

            And by the way, one way of looking at this is similar to the telecommunications field, where we’ve gone from line-based systems to wireless technology. We want to go from pipe-based systems to pipeless technology that really takes much more full advantage of the opportunities for closed-loop approaches. That’s one clear way of maximizing the synergies, the ecological sanitation approach, as some people have called it.

            Second one is simply to recognize that by and large much of the sanitation in the world is and will continue to be water-based sanitation. And we’ve got to recognize that for a variety of reasons, already much of untreated wastewater is used for agriculture in peri-urban areas. It’s a combination of water shortages, lack of money for treating wastewater, and willingness of farmers to use wastewater that is leading to a situation where you do, in fact, have around the world untreated wastewater being used in peri-urban agriculture.

            But because of clear concerns about standards on the health side and so on, this is largely ignored. And the point that many people are making – and this is a study that IMI did in Pakistan – the point is not to ignore it but look at ways in which this can be improved in ways that meet both health and productivity standards. One of the clear conclusions of IMI in Pakistan was:  If you mixed untreated wastewater with irrigation water in canals, on about a one-to-three ration, you would expand the amount of area irrigated, but at the same time you would become much closer to meeting health standards and meeting the level of nutrients that the crops required.

            Other examples of combined, multi-goal approaches (many of you might be aware of them) – the landless programs in Bangladesh, Proshika, work, trying to put control of the water into the hands of those that do not have control over the land. Again, multi-purpose strategies.

            Second one is looking at ways in which household water can be provided, not only for drinking but also for productive purposes. Not going all the way to full-fledged irrigation but providing households, instead of 50 liters per capita per day, perhaps 200 – so that they can have home gardens, a small amount of productive use of water, micro-entrepreneurship activities like growing saplings and so on that can provide not only income but also reduce costs and provide a greater incentive for the maintenance of systems.

            And finally an example that many people have referred to over the last day – school feeding programs. How about linking those with latrines, with hygiene education, multiple impact, particularly on girls’ education that can have, again, multiple impacts.

            All of this shows that in most situations we’re looking for local solutions. But local solutions can be catalyzed in at least two ways. One is clearly research and development. I like to think that we do have the technology for achieving one goal. If we’re really only concerned about water and sanitation service delivery, we have the technology, I think it’s fair to say.

            That’s probably also true in meeting some of the other goals. But we certainly do not have the technology if we are committed (as I think all of us in this room are) to achieve the full set of the Millennium Development goals by 2015. So research and development is vital in such things “crop per drop” but also on such things as closed-loop water and sanitation systems.

            One of the interesting points in that area is that there is a lot to learn from other fields – space research, for example. Up in space, closed-loop water and sanitation systems are the only way to go. So how about learning from some of that experience and bringing it down to earth, in a more literal way, to help those that don’t have access to water and sanitation.

            But another important catalyst is looking at more integrated ways of managing water resources. That’s what IWRM is all about – the Integrated Water Resource Management approach – which incidentally was a specific target agreed upon in Johannesburg last year. And there we’ve got to be thinking integrated ways right from the basin all the way down to the bucket. So from bucket to basin we need more integrated approaches.

            So, ladies and gentlemen, let me just reiterate again – water, absolutely vital to food security, absolutely vital to the goals that you have before you. But it’s important to think of that relationship in more than simply one way.

            Thank you very much.