National Geographic

Feeding The World

Of all the strange and wonderful sights I took in when I was reporting the story on global food supplies, the most disturbing vista was the human river I saw on the roads of Africa. Everywhere I went in rural Africa, the muddy thoroughfares were filled with a slow-moving tide of people walking from village to town, from town to village. Occasionally a battered truck or a wheezing, windowless bus would rumble by, but most traffic on these roads was pedestrian. And virtually all the pedestrians were carrying things—sacks of flour, stacks of wood, rusting motorcycle frames, chairs and tables, cases of Coca-Cola, whatever. People carrying stuff—this is the standard mode of freight transport in many parts of Africa.

The main commodity being transported on those roads was the simplest of all: water. Every day I saw hundreds of women—for the water-bearers are almost always women—walking down the cratered roads with yellow plastic cans strapped to their backs. For those of us who never give a moment’s thought when we turn on a faucet for the clean, steady flow that will wash the car, water the garden, or fill the pool, it is almost painful to contemplate the daily parade of water-carriers down those African roads. In that part of the world, hardly anybody has water pipes or faucets. For many, a simple glass of water requires hours of hard labor. The women of the villages strap the 20-liter (5-gallon) plastic cans to their backs and walk a mile or more (about 2 kilometers) to the nearest stream or well. Each woman fills her can and struggles back home, now carrying 44 pounds (20 kilograms) of water. Many have to spend four to six hours every day on these arduous treks just to meet their family’s minimal need for cooking, drinking, and washing.

These tiring trips brought home in vivid fashion a simple truth: The problem of feeding our planet is not simply a problem of food. People, animals, and crops all need a steady supply of fresh water as well. The gentle rain falleth equally on the rich and poor, but it falls not at all evenly on different corners of the earth. There are many inhabited places where the land is parched, the rivers are sun-dried gulches, and the rain does not fall for months at a time.

As is the case with food supply, the problem of fresh water is primarily a problem of distribution. As they say in Arizona—a great parched basin that is now full of green suburban lawns and glistening blue backyard pools—water will flow uphill if there’s enough money to pump it. Not many people have to walk down the road for water in Saudi Arabia, a desert nation much drier than the places I saw in Africa. The Saudis have the political will and the financial wherewithal to produce fresh water (from one of the world’s most ambitious desalination plants) and pipe it out to the people.

In a prodigious piece of scholarship, Professor Joel E. Cohen, director of the Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations, set himself the task of figuring out how much fresh water the Earth has available in a given year, and how much the residents of our planet consume. To do this, the indefatigable scholar had to calculate how much rain and snow falls around the world every year, how much of it falls over land, how much fresh water flows out to sea before humans can use it, how much leakage there is from a mile of water pipe, how much water is locked up in glaciers, how deep a well can be, how long it takes to replenish an underground aquifer, and numerous other variables.

After dozens of these calculations, Dr. Cohen estimated that “the world’s available renewable fresh water” ranges from 9,000 cubic kilometers to 14,000 cubic kilometers (about 2,200 cubic miles to 3,400 cubic miles) per year. We consume less than 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) per year. The conclusion, therefore, is plain. Our planet has more than enough fresh water for every living person, “though it is often in the wrong place at the wrong time,” according to Cohen.

Of course, nobody has explained these statistics to those women struggling beneath the weight of their 20-liter (5-gallon) cans. There may be more than enough fresh water for every thirsty person, but for many people it is still hard to get.

The reason, I concluded, is largely political. Water-supply systems cost money, of course, so there is an economic dimension to the problem as well. Generally, though, if a people and a government have the political will to provide adequate water, the job can be done no matter how dry the territory. What is needed is the collective determination to provide water for everyone. The western U.S. is a classic example.

After the Civil War, a great American soldier and geologist named John Wesley Powell was dispatched by Congress to study “the barren areas ” between Kansas and California. Powell reported back that a huge portion of the continental U.S.—the area west of the 100th meridian and east of the Sierra Nevada—gets less than 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rainfall per year. This left two alternatives. This vast and beautiful chunk of America could be left alone, windswept and vacant. Or the government could undertake construction of dams, canals, and diversion projects on a massive scale to provide water. In those heady days of Manifest Destiny, Congress chose the latter course.

Powell was named the head of the United States Geological Survey, and went to work. Today, “the barren areas” are home to millions of Americans. The Sakata family farm—the Brighton, Colorado, vegetable farm that I wrote about in this month’s NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC—exists thanks to federal projects that made the western deserts bloom. Much of the water that irrigates the Sakata’s green fields of sweet corn travels more than 60 miles (97 kilometers) from the snowcapped Rocky Mountains through a giant system of diversion pipes and canals built over several decades.

The water projects have also created an interesting difference in the way Americans from the East and the West view their geography. People who grew up in the eastern third of the country or the Midwest tend to think of lakes as a gift from God. To those of us from the West, in contrast, a lake might be seen as a gift from the Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation. When we come around a wide turn on some highway and see a blue lake shimmering ahead, we reflexively start looking around for the dam that somebody must have built to make a lake in this place.

In recent times, the Bureau of Reclamation and the government’s other great water provider, the Army Corps of Engineers, have fallen out of favor. It has been a decade or more since Washington approved a major water project. Many of those already on the drawing board have been cancelled, partly because they cost so much and partly for environmental reasons. The critics of those water projects make some good points, and it may well be that the Bureau of Reclamation’s day has come and gone in our country.

Still, I think the work of the U.S. government’s dambuilders constitutes a great public achievement. But then, I’m biased. The place I call home is Douglas County, Colorado, smack in the middle of “the barren areas.” If it weren’t for those federal water projects, I, too, might have been walking a few hours every day to get water for my family.

I thought of John Wesley Powell and his works last winter when I went to the dusty town of Sololo, Kenya. There I saw the female water-bearers with their yellow plastic cans walking quietly past, hour after hour. I expressed my amazement to a local water engineer, Steven Danabo. “Yes, it is an incredible burden,” he agreed. “And we are working hard to deal with it.”

With money from the Swedish government, Danabo said, relief groups have built a pair of gravity-fed pipes that carry fresh water from the nearby hills to spots barely half a mile from the town. That reduces the women’s walk for water to less than one hour per day.

It was great to see the women’s backbreaking work alleviated. Still, the project left me confused. Why did they stop the pipes outside the town? If you’re going to build miles of water pipes, why not take them the extra half mile into Sololo’s central square?

The reason, the engineer explained to me, is a fear that the Sololo region may not have a large enough water supply to permit greater water use. “If all they had to do was turn on a faucet for water, they might waste it, and we could run out,” Danabo said. “Since the women still have to walk some ways to get the water, they will continue to treat it as a precious resource.”

And in northern Kenya, water remains precious. “Our basic problem is a simple fact,” Danabo went on. “Sololo only gets 40 centimeters of rain per year.”

I did the math: that means about 16 inches of rain per year. And then I remembered something Bob Sakata, the Colorado vegetable farmer, had told me. Brighton, Colorado, gets even less precipitation: about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in an average year. But the farmers of Brighton live in a society that was willing and able to move mountains to see to it that every citizen had a ready supply of fresh water. The women of Sololo weren’t so lucky.