The state of the world’s land and water resources: Part 3 of 3

January 9th, 2012

Jean-Marc Faurès, Food and Agriculture Organization, Italy

This is the third part of a series of three articles based on the FAO’s report, ‘The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW)’. While the first part of the series discussed trends in the use of the world’s land and water resources and the second part outlined the threats and risks to the world’s land and water resources, the final part of the series looks at the policies that can be adopted to ensure that these resources are managed sustainably.

When discussing the policies that can be used to resolve the challenges facing the world’s land and water resources, it is important to start with the facts. Since policies are designed by decision makers, the role of the FAO lies in informing decision makers of the status of the resources and to provide the facts which can be used as a basis to make the right decisions. In addition to this, we have gone one step further in this report in analysing the spectrum of possible policies that could be adopted, explaining the kind of policies that would have a positive impact and those that would have a negative impact, and recommending what we consider to be appropriate policies.

Policy recommendations

As described in the second part of this series of articles, substantial progress has been made in the recent past in increasing agricultural productivity. It is crucially important that this trend continues because, in order to meet the expected increase in demand for food by 2050, agricultural production will have to increase by 70 per cent globally and up to 100 per cent in developing countries.

With all of the economic, social, and environmental problems we face, increasing the agricultural production that we have today to the required levels is a major challenge and in some continents where demographic growth is still very high, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the challenge will be even greater.

Since we only have one earth, we only have a certain amount of land and a certain amount of freshwater resources that flow in our rivers each year. Thus, the only way to meet these challenges and deal with the growing pressure on land and water resources is through what we call sustainable intensification, that is, continuing the trend of producing more with the same resources by making better use of existing resources without reducing the long term productivity of the environment.

Encouraging better use of the world’s land and water resources has to be done by sending signals to the billions of farmers across the world who carry out the business of farming and feeding us, to invest in agricultural production and use existing resources more effectively. In many countries, one important way of sending such signals to farmers is through securing their access to land and water resources.

The FAO has found that if you improve the tenure of land so that you manage to give farmers a guarantee they will hold an entitlement on the land they crop for a long enough time that justifies investment on their side, then you see an increase in productivity. There are many things that farmers cannot do if they don’t know if they will hold rights to the land next year and, in order help improve productivity, we need to ensure that farmers have recognised access to their land. In terms of water resources it is the same. In Australia there are very advanced land and water rights which are separable from one another, and this has led to very productive systems. However, in many countries this is not the case, and many areas lack strong water use rights and the capacity to disconnect access to land from access to water. Thus, we argue that in order to make better use of the world’s land and water resources, policies need to secure farmer’s access to land and water.

Another important policy signal is to reduce uncertainty over the marketing of agricultural produce. Farmers need to be able to market their products and they need to be able to know, more or less, how much they can get from their produce in order to make good investment decisions. Farming is an extremely risky business and most farmers have what we call a risk aversion attitude – they prefer secure outcomes to risky ones of an equivalent value. This risk aversion attitude means that farmers may not invest much, on the one hand because they don’t know if they will have enough water to grow it, and on the other hand because they don’t know whether they will be able to sell it at a reasonable price. Thus, policies to secure better access to markets, which in many countries is an infrastructure issue, and more transparent markets, are ways in which we can contribute to sustainable intensification by encouraging farmers to use their land and water in a more productive way.

In addition to increasing agricultural productivity, sustainable intensification requires that farming avoids creating lasting damage to the environment which may reduce productivity in the future. Therefore, policies must also address the problem of encroachment on the environment from agriculture. Key to this is removing distortions in policy frameworks that lead to unsustainable practices. In some countries, for example, the energy used for pumping water from groundwater resources is available at no cost so there is no signal to farmers that they should be careful about the way they use their water. In such places you see that groundwater aquifers quickly become overexploited. Removing these non-natural incentives would help make better use of water resources.

Another aspect is that which we call externalities, those impacts which are caused by one group of people but are felt by others such as environmental problems. In agriculture, if one farmer produces in an unsustainable way other people will be affected, for instance, excessive withdrawals of water can affect people’s ability to use water downstream and loss of biodiversity due to the destruction of habitats has an impact on the global community. In order to resolve these externalities we have to find a way to ‘internalise’ them and reward farmers for when they do a good job. Finding such incentives, together with regulations that induce farmers to adopt a more sustainable approach to land and water management are examples of policies that can be used to improve land water resource management.

Finally, there is a whole set of improvements that can be made in land and water legislation, the capacity to enforce legislation, and in the institutions where it is made and enforced. Typically, land institutions and water institutions do business separately despite the fact that they are obviously very much connected (in particular through agriculture) meaning that they often make decisions that are not compatible with each other. Here we have to make a much better effort to improve the coherence of the work and policies that land, water, agriculture, and food security related institutions develop so that we don’t have conflict in terms of these policies.

In conclusion, presented here are a few examples of what should be done now to improve the management of land and water resources. The threat to the world’s resources is not something that can be left to be dealt with in the future, and there are a lot of places where we need to act now. The future will create further burdens in terms of additional people to feed and therefore creates a reason for acting now to try to improve current policies in terms of land and water management.

References:

1. FAO (2011), The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture – Managing Systems at Risk. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome and Earthscan, London.

Jean-Marc Faurès, is Senior Water Resources Management Officer at FAO’s Land and Water Division. His work includes projects related to water resources assessment, water demand management in agriculture and land and water adaptation to climate change, in the framework of FAO’s programme ‘Coping with water scarcity’. M. Faurès participates in several programmes aimed at analysing trends and assessing future development pathways in agricultural water management. The article is based on a recorded interview with the Global Water Forum.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.