False Economy - Alan Beattie [51]
Despite the rise in imported virtual water, the same remains true in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa, thanks to governments' failing to price water sensibly. The all-time record for spectacular defiance of common sense must go to the government of Saudi Arabia, which elected to exploit a large underground aquifer in order to become, in the early 1990s, the world's sixth-biggest wheat exporter. It pumped up vast amounts of water from the aquifer, which does not refill itself, to create irrigated wheat fields literally out of the desert. Fortunately, relative sanity has since prevailed, and the country has become a big net importer of embedded water.
But the undervaluation of water persists. Many Middle Eastern countries implicitly subsidize the overuse of water by their farmers by maintaining high government support prices for crops while keeping out cheap imports with steep tariffs. They also subsidize credit and energy for farmers. In countries like Iran and Syria, which retain strong limits on trade and government control of water rights, the value of exports of water-saving crops like fruit and vegetables barely rose in the twenty years after 1980 while other countries were rapidly expanding theirs. In Morocco, low-value sugar beet and fodder crops have traditionally received special water allocations, together with tariffs protecting them from lower-priced imports. It has been estimated that taking away their tariff protection would cut their net profits by 40 percent. But those farmers could entirely make up for that loss if they were allowed to sell their water rights to other growers producing higher-value crops. In December 2005, farmers in Tadla, in Morocco, echoing the fourteenth-century peasants of Aix-en-Provence, staged a demonstration to argue just that.
Globally, imported virtual water contributes about 16 percent to the average national water footprint, not a great deal when one considers the huge differences between countries in endowments of water. Without such trade, global crop-water use in growing cereals would be 6 percent higher—not a negligible saving, but not a dramatic one. Part of this is because of other natural influences, such as the relative availability of land and labor, but a good deal has to do with artificial restrictions on letting the market work.
Even in Egypt itself, embedded water imports provide only around a quarter of the country's water footprint. Food security—defined as food self-sufficiency—is a god to which Egyptian politicians are obliged repeatedly to pay homage. The country maintains import restrictions and subsidies that prevent it becoming too dependent on the rest of the world for food, even at the cost of using some of its limited water in a highly inefficient fashion.
Around the world, the global food-price crisis that began in 2007 has only encouraged this tendency. Governments, rather than recognize the importance of allowing the most efficient producers in the world to exploit their advantages, have retreated toward growing everything themselves. The Philippines, a crowded and populous country that grows rice expensively and inefficiently on mountain terraces, nonetheless announced its intention to become self-sufficient.
It is easy to understand the political imperative that drives a country toward doing so. No one wants to rely on a fickle international market in which prices can rise very suddenly, and thus risk being left without food. Such retreats into self-sufficiency will prevent the specialization that turned Egypt from the granary of the Roman empire to the world's biggest importer of wheat, and in both situations managed to feed huge urban populations with reasonable efficiency and calm.
Like much of the trade that makes up the global economy, embedded water is a market perpetually struggling to break free from impediments both natural and artificial—the cost of transport,