The theme of the 1994 World Food Day Teleconference on October 14 will be water — the rising competition among agricultural, industrial and urban users for its limited supply and its increasing role in maintaining world food security.  The teleconference will explore the economic, social and cultural impact of water scarcity, the reasons for the problems and proposed solutions, especially in the context of increasing water availability and/or conservation and waste reduction.  A sub theme — and relative newcomer as a public policy issue — will be the need to protect the natural freshwater environment of rivers, lakes, wetlands and aquifers.  As in years past, the discussion will be led by an international panel and will put special emphasis on the challenges facing countries in the Western Hemisphere

The 1994 theme reflects the growing international awareness of water as a unique and threatened resource, both renewable and finite, under stress for a number of reasons.  It also recognizes a profound and relatively new fact of life for most countries of the world:  that this resource which was once abundant, free and clean, and is essential to human existence, is suddenly growing scarce, more expensive and often contaminated.  Worldwide, water management is now a major public policy concern.

* Underlying the growing scarcity of water are population growth and economic development.  First, since the water supply is a constant (despite annual climatic variations by region), water availability per capita falls in direct proportion to rising human numbers.  Each doubling in global population reduces per capita water availability by half.  At the same time, economic progress and rising standards of living dramatically increase per capita water consumption.  Globally, developed countries use three times the amount of water per capita as poor ones.  In home use, for example, average per capita use in the U.S. is 185 gallons a day, while in many African countries it is below 10 gallons.

* About two-thirds of all water used by humans is in agriculture — for irrigation.  The amount of land under modern irrigation quadrupled over the past century and now stands at almost 250 million hectares (620 million acres).  Generally speaking, this irrigated land is twice as productive as land farmed only with rainfall.  One sixth of total land under irrigation providing one-third of the world's food.  But irrigation in most countries is woefully inefficient and less than half the water used actually reaches and benefits crops.  World population is still rising rapidly and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that irrigated land must meet an even higher percentage of total food needs in the next century.

* Water for cities and homes, though less than 10 of total water use world-wide, is an area of extreme concern owing to the linkage of water, sanitation and health.  The World Health Organization estimates that up to 4 million children die each year as a result of water-borne infection, mostly in poor countries.  Even in rich countries urban water problems of cost and quality are mounting and are combined with a widespread loss of public confidence exemplified by the extensive shelf space in supermarkets now given to bottled water in cities where tapwater is perfectly safe.  Cities are mushrooming larger throughout the developing world and slum dwellers are very often served by private venders charging up to 100 times the rate for public water but with little sanitation monitoring.  Even at the end of the UN Water Decade (1981-1990). 1.7 billion people in the world lacked internal plumbing in their homes.

* The negative impact on the natural environment from increasing water use and abuse is now a major international policy concern.  Dam construction, river diversion, watershed deforestation, industrial pollution, groundwater and aquifer mining and uncontrolled human waste disposal all are destroying natural habitats and the plant and animal species they nurture.  International lenders, national legislatures and the courts are now demanding environmental impact studies on new water projects and expensive remedial action to reverse past damage.  But the overriding policy factor is that maintaining freshwater ecosystems is now a fourth player at the water table — along with agriculture, industry and cities.

Despite all these problems, only 25 countries in the world — mostly in North Africa and the Mideast — suffer severe water scarcity, which is measured at less than 1,000 cubic meters of fresh water supply per person per year.  No country in the Western Hemisphere except Barbados falls in the severe scarcity category.  But the two factors of population growth and economic development march inexorably forward and it is possible that by the year 2025 a third of the world population could live in countries of water stress or severe scarcity.

With this background, teleconference panelists will address problem and solution alternatives and the help that might come from international cooperation:

• How much international aid is going to urban water sanitation systems and what kind of priority is that given as against industrial loans or other investment needs?
• How can irrigation continue to expand without building more huge dams and how can it be made more efficient in terms of water use?
• How does water scarcity directly affect economic development, apart from agriculture and does it hold down industrial development?
• In water scarce countries, should there be water rationing and government allocation of supplies for the public good and how could that work?
• In what ways does water management fit into the concept of sustainable development?

In preparing "middle hour" panels and discussions, teleconference sites are encouraged to consider how their local and state water needs are met, whether the use of the water resource is sustainable over time, and the role freshwater plays in their economic and social lives.