Water and Food in Africa

The problem in Africa lies in the spatial unevenness of water resources and food supply due the complex physical, climate and human characteristics. You might have asked yourself, some areas have surplus water for domestic, industrial and agricultural use, why can’t you just transfer water from areas of surplus to areas of deficit?  ( Salem, 2007 )  This is what Libya has done by implementing the world’s largest, most expensive water conveyance project in the world, drawing fossil water from ancient aquifers beneath the Sahara and transferring it along with a network of pipes to the northern coastal belt where water demands exist ( Sternberg, 2016 ). The project is estimated to transfer more than 6 million m3 of water/day up north, and 70% of it is to be used for irrigation ( Kuwairi, 2006 ). Diagram of the GMMR project in  Libya    Source: Danmichaelo, 2011 The importance of GMMR in solving uneven water requirement  Libya is one of the driest countries in the world, its aridity is re

In this week's blog, we will explore the agriculture system in Ethiopia and look into smallholder farming and its threats and potentials. About 30 years ago, a disaster in Africa galvanised the world’s attention - the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia that took the lives of 1.2 million. The disaster prompted international aid operations on an unprecedented scale, including the controversial Live Aid concert ,  raising money for famine victims. In contrast to impressions of Ethiopia being a desert that requires desperate help for water and food access, in reality, the agrifood system has emerged as the backbone of the Ethiopian economy. It accounts for about 40% of its GDP ( FAO, 2018 ) and 80% of its exports ( USAIDS, 2020 ), nearly 80% of the labour force the country depends on agriculture for their livelihoods ( FAO, 2018 ). This agricultural success is accompanied by a clear link between agricultural growth and poverty reduction , but the heavy reliance on agriculture has also lef

Falkenmark (1989) proposed one of the first quantitative metrics and currently the most accepted measurements of water scarcity - the Water Stress Index (WSI)  which quantifies water scarcity based on the “hydraulic density of population”. However, the freshwater resources were computed based on simulations of mean annual river runoff (MARR) not only masks the inter-annual variability in discharge which is substantial in semi-arid regions in Africa ( McMahon et al, 2007 ) , but also neglects the importance of groundwater storage ( Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017 ).  The exclusion of groundwater is particularly problematic and the potential of groundwater cannot be underestimated. Building on the last blog which found that climate change will reduce renewable surface water in some parts of Africa with increasing variability in rainfall, the population in sub-Saharan is expected to double , groundwater could be a strategic resource for coping with growth in water and food demands.  Figure 1

Global climate change is affecting Africa, as it is on every other continent in the world.  Water and food security in the area already faces multiple threats stemming from climate variability, entrenched poverty, environmental degradation, rapid urbanisation and high population. Now the impacts of climate change will be superimposed onto these intertwined issues, and the relationships involved are likely to be highly nonlinear ( Carter and Parker, 2009 ). This blog will explore some of the impacts of climate change in Africa. Existing hydrological variability As mentioned in the introduction, we should now know that variability is a keyword in Africa. The temporal variability of rainfall can be illustrated in Table 1 from a study by Peter and Parker. We can see that about 95% of annual rainfalls lie in the range  ±16–45% around the mean; the coefficient of variation CoV is twice higher than what you might find in the UK. This has a significant implication for the water supply that i