The Politics and Consequences of Virtual Water Export
Virtual water is the water used or contaminated to produce a good or a service. With the large increase of export of agricultural produce during the last decades the amount of virtual water export has grown as well. Increased water contamination and water
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Abstract Virtual water is the water used or contaminated to produce a good or a service. With the large increase of export of agricultural produce during the last decades the amount of virtual water export has grown as well. Increased water contamination and water extraction for export from relative dry areas affects local ecosystems and communities. Simultaneously, the increased virtual water trade has weakened the local control over water resources by local communities, to the expense of multinational agribusiness and retailer companies. This repatterning of water control is fomented by numerous national governments, and at the same time contested by local communities. Partly as reaction to the critics on water depletion, agribusiness and retailers have created a number of water stewardship standards. Notwithstanding the possibilities for local communities to articulate their demands with these standards, until now most water stewardship standards have had little – or even negative – effects. Keywords Virtual water Contestation
Agro-export Communities Water stewardship
Virtual water represents the water used and contaminated to produce a product or service. Virtual water can be seen as “embedded” in products. It is an indicator of the amount of fresh water that evaporated or was contaminated during the production and transport of a product. Though the concept has been framed recently (e.g., Allan 1998), obviously, the practice of “virtual water trade” is as old as people have engaged in trade relations. Ancient empires as the Roman traded and transported large volumes of food throughout their territory and thereby, implicitly, conveyed huge quantities of virtual water across geographical scales (Dermody et al. 2014). J. Vos (&) R. Boelens Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 4, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] R. Boelens e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 P. Jackson et al. (eds.), Eating, Drinking: Surviving, SpringerBriefs in Global Understanding, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42468-2_4
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J. Vos and R. Boelens
Nevertheless, traditionally, even in the Roman Empire, food and water security were strongly location-fixed. Local communities and societies aiming for food security, therefore, needed to work on their local water security and availability, with local supply matching local demands (Vos 2010). With the huge expansion of global food trade throughout the last centuries and especially, over the last decades, this relationship between local water availability and food supply to the population of that same geographical location has been challenged profoundly: expansion of the global food trade implies virtual water export, it disconnects the place where water and food are produced from the place where it is consumed (Roth and Warner 2008; Sojamo et al. 2012). First theories on virtual water (Allan 1998) presented it consequently as a potential solution to water scarcity, as these predicted that global market forc
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