Water and Food Security will be the focus of World Water Day which is celebrated every March 22 in order to increase people’s awareness of the importance of water in the environment, agriculture, health and trade.
The World Water Day in 2012 is intended to draw the international attention on the relationships between water and food security.
According to the United Nations, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” and water is one of the fundamental input factor to the food production."
UN said that there are seven billion people to feed on the planet today and another two billion are expected to join by 2050. Statistics say that each person drinks from two to four liters of water every day, however, most of the water a man ‘drinks’ is embedded in the food he eats: “producing one kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 liters of water while one kilo of wheat ’drinks up’ 1,500 liters.
Department of Environment and Natural Resources Regional Executive Director Rogelio T. Trinidad said that “undeniably, water is a basic need for human survival and is a basic ingredient for agriculture which is the source of man’s food. “In fact, there are claims that people will survive for five days without food for as long as there is water to drink.
The UN said when a billion people in the world already live in chronic hunger and water resources are under pressure we cannot pretend the problem is ‘elsewhere’.
Ensuring access to water and nutritious food for everyone calls for a series of actions every citizen should do - follow a healthier, sustainable diet; consume less water-intensive products; reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30 percent of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost; and produce more food, of better quality, with less water.
BY KIND COURTESY OF WASH CLUB-UDS
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