Water and Food in Africa

In writing this blog I have learnt about issues of water scarcity and food insecurity in Africa.  Not only this, but I have also learnt about Africa’s deep-rooted, complex and place-specific colonial histories that act to complicate these contemporary issues, helping me to develop a critical understanding of the issues, and indeed towards many of the proposed development ‘interventions’.  As well as these spatially specific historical nuances, I have learnt that the African continent is vastly heterogenous in its physical setting - from fossil aquifers under the Sahara Desert, to monsoonal climates in West Africa and the large variation in biomes across the continent. I have learnt that issues of water scarcity and food insecurity are often a result of a combination of both Africa’s heterogenous, and thus place-specific, physical and non-physical factors, whereby access to water, and thus food, is as much governed by Africa’s wide-ranging socioeconomic capacities as it is by freshwater

Virtual water in theory Oki et al. (2017) highlight that, in the case of water, areas of high demand do not necessarily align with areas of natural supply – much like many other resources. To combat this, other resources are commonly traded from areas of high resource availability to areas of low resource ability.  In the context of water, they go on to explain how the trade of ‘real water’ – water in its natural liquid state – is not economically feasible due to the high costs of storage and transportation relative to the real value of water.  Therefore, water needs to be traded by virtually; they define ‘virtual water trade’ as: “the international trade in water-intensive commodities between water abundant countries and water-poor countries…”, which they estimate to occur on the scale of 1100-2300km3 per year.  Put simply, instead of trading actual water, water can be traded virtually, embedded within high-water goods, therefore reducing the demand in the water-poor destination coun