Our rivals at Fortune magazine have a curiosity item in their latest issue about growing tomatoes in the snows of a Maine winter. They’re hydroponic, raised inside a greenhouse, and reportedly sold locally.
Although this might seem a triumph for locavore eating, in fact it can have much the opposite implication.
Today I attended an off-the record briefing by a U.S. government official about world water security. That topic entails the economic, political and even military implications of the gathering problem of water supply in much of the planet. Informed people are really pessimistic about having enough usable water in the future, and about how ornery societies can become when they run dry. It seems that those who are most worried about climate change tend to be most worried about water, but even aside from that politicized debate, the water resource pinch is a tougher one to envision solving than some of the other “running out of” scenarios.
Economists and those with a free-market bent usually argue that water scarcity can be significantly addressed by getting water pricing right. Usually, it is not right. In many places, including India, which has one of the worst water predicaments, the stuff is basically free to many. In other countries, like the U.S., it is priced much more cheaply for some favored uses, such as agriculture, than for others, like our showers. (Actually, where I live in New York City, I don’t pay directly for my water use so I, too, have much incentive to waste it.)
But there’s a new term coming into play in this analysis–”virtual water.” We don’t know how to create synthetic water, and moving real water is a hugely expensive and tricky thing. But by realizing the water input in goods, and then trading those goods, we can effectively move water. So if we can use technology to grow produce like water-hungry tomatoes in a water-plentiful state like Maine, and then swap them for the “dry goods” of some parched domain, we can take a small step toward solving a large problem. Of course, this is the globalized food industry writ small, and that is something that locavores hate.
(Locavores also tend to hate the use of genetically modified organisms, which can reduce water use, but let’s leave that subject alone.)
What is the most water-rich food staple? According to the presentation I heard today, it’s beef, by a mile. (Much more so than pork, by the way.) Cows consume a lot of what it takes water to grow. So we need to have more cattle raised in snowy or tropical climes, if we can figure out how, and then process the beef for shipment to where, oh, olives might grow better. Instead it’s too often the case that beef comes from a dry country such as Australia and goes to a wet one like Indonesia, and that doesn’t end well.
There are lots more issues to address on water, and keep in mind we’re really only talking about the 3% that isn’t ocean. With that 97%, we’ve done a similarly bad job of looking after fisheries, and that’s another crisis. So we must be modest in our hopes.