Scientists combat water shortage in Africa, Mid East

Food security experts on Tuesday announced the launch of an ambitious seven-country $1 million project that offers new hope to farmers in the face of acute water shortages.

Hundreds of international scientists are attending a global conference on food security and climate change in Amman, Jordan, to address declining water resources in the world and find ways of cushioning poor farmers from the effects of global warming.

The conference was opened on Monday by Prince El Hassan bin Talal.

The scientists are confronting the real and rapidly escalating challenge of water scarcity, which threatens to frustrate farmers’ efforts to produce food in dry areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

In Kenya, climate change is rapidly affecting biodiversity with disappearances of wild animals and insects such as safari ants being reported.

A recent study in Mandera and Turkana in northern Kenya found that women’s workloads and pastoralists’ over-reliance on relief food had increased because of climate variability and change.

Although not among the initial beneficiaries of the $1 million, Kenyan farming communities are set to benefit from the increasing focus on the need to shift away from rain-fed agriculture to efficient irrigation methods.

Through the fund, seven Middle Eastern countries—Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen—will work jointly to improve water management in agriculture as part of a 10-year effort called the Water and Livelihoods Initiative (WLI).

The initiative is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and is led by International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which is supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The WLI will focus on improving rural livelihoods through sustainable land and water management in three agro-systems—irrigated agriculture, rain-fed agriculture and rangelands.

During the conference, experts reported that improved irrigation techniques in rain-fed cropping will allow farmers to more than double their wheat yields using only one-third of the water they would use with full irrigation.

The new methods have been shown to improve farmers’ yields five -fold over crops which relied on rainfall only.

Such innovative strategies could provide a much-needed lift to livelihoods in dry areas in the developing world, home to almost 25 per cent of the world’s population.

Regions most affected by drought and water scarcity are also disproportionately challenged by high population growth, climate unreliability, frequent droughts, and widespread poverty, the experts said, citing figures from the UNs’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“In some countries in the region, per capita water availability has dropped to as little as 170 cubic meters per year, well below the internationally recognised water scarcity standard of 1,000 cubic metres,” said Dr Mahmoud Solh, Director General of ICARDA.