Water footprint in Agriculture
If the world is to reduce its use of water, the most obvious area in which to look for savings is where most water goes: agriculture. How much water this accounts for varies enormously from country to country. Insight in the ‘hidden water use’ has created awareness for the fact that a lot of goods are imported from areas with water-stressed catchments.
Many countries are importers of embedded or “virtual” water (that consumed in producing any crop or product). In Egypt it is about 84%, and in India as much as 90%. It is known as a global water “footprint”—a concept developed by Arjen Hoekstra, a Dutch scientist—including not just the direct uses of water in agriculture, but the indirect ones all the way along the chain from field to fork, agriculture accounts for 92%. Professor Hoekstra invented the concept of the Water Footprint that introduced a complete novel thinking on the real water use that is needed to make our daily products. We must credit this discussion by Professor Hoekstra whose work[1] on the Water Footprint method shows the ´hidden water use´ of products. Hoekstra´s method to calculate the overall water use of a product, reveals that it takes about 3,000 L to produce one 200 g steak, 3,400 L for a 200 g chocolate bar and 2,700 L to produce the cotton needed to make a single t-shirt.[2]
[1] https://www.dutchwatersector.com/news/in-memoriam-arjen-hoekstra-creator-of-water-footprint
[2] http://ayhoekstra.nl/pubs/Hoekstra-et-al-2011-TheWaterFootprintAssessmentManual.pdf