Water: Source of Food Security

Prospects for agricultural water use in the 21st Century

International Electronic Conference
organised by the
Land and Water Development Division of the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Water: Source of Food Security
The coming World Food Day (16 October 2002) will be celebrating the important role of water for a healthy and sufficient food production for the world's growing population. For FAO, this will be the start of a series of events to bring the issues related to the sustainable use, development and management of water resources to the forefront of the political debate during the year 2003.
From September to November 2002, FAO will organise an e-mail conference on the theme. This conference is open to all interested parties, stakeholders and experts dealing with water resource development and management for agriculture.

How will the outcome of the e-mail conference be used?
The Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) will be responsible for the conference. The purpose is to discuss a set of fundamental issues on water for food security and agriculture. The outcome of the conference will serve in preparing FAO's contribution to the third World Water Forum (WWF-3) to be held in March 2003 in Japan. By contributing to this electronic conference, participants will be assured that their voice will be heard at the next most important world-wide meeting of specialists and policy-makers in the field of water resources management. A special presentation of the conclusions will be made at the Agricultural Ministers Meeting, to be organised by FAO and the Japanese government in conjunction with the WWF–3.

Timing and participation
If you wish to subscribe to the e-mail conference address an e-mail message to:
mailserv@mailserv.fao.org leaving the subject blank and entering in the first line of the message the command: subscribe WSFS-L. The e-mail conference itself will start on 15 September. The background papers will be distributed and the e-mail discussion will take place between 15 September and 1 November 2002. Every week a new sub-theme will be started.

Subject of the E-mail Conference
The title for this electronic discussion "Water: Source for Food Security" may be a truism, but the issues for agricultural water management are critical. Wherever water is scarce or rural poverty and hunger is prevalent, business as usual is not an option. As the debates at the Second World Water Forum in the Hague in March 2000 have shown, views are divergent on what measures are necessary. Opinions often reflect a partial vision of the problem, based on simplified or biased information.

Global food security is accepted as a moral imperative, but in practice it has proved to be a complex issue. Food security (FS) exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. In many developing countries, the majority of food insecure people subsist in rural areas as a consequence of extreme poverty. For many poor farming households in the third world, increasing agricultural production and availability of food is still possible, as long as production factors, including markets, are available and investments in key infrastructure and improved techniques are introduced.
The key-question for FAO in this debate is: How can development and management of water resources contribute to Food Security and Poverty Alleviation while conserving the resource base to maintain environmental integrity of natural systems and their inherent productivity.

To deal with these issues in a manageable form, the subject has been split into five sub-themes, as follows:

1. Water for sustainable rural development and poverty alleviation
2. Enhancing productivity of water in agriculture
3. Risk management in agricultural water use
4. Alleviating environmental costs of water resource development
5. Modernization of irrigation water management

These five sub-themes, will serve as guidelines for the discussions. This activity aims specifically to collect, discuss, analyse and dissiminate case studies, examples of success stories and on-going research in the field of water management for agriculture and rural development.