Water and food in South Africa: A Case Study

The link between water and food is critical in determining the sustainable and secure future of a country. The increase in the global population requires the security of natural resources in order to cover the rising demand for food (Bhatt et al., 2016). This can be especially applied to developing countries, and more specifically in Africa, where it has the largest number of water scarcity-prone areas along with the highest level of malnutrition (Rockstrom et al., 2003). In this blog, I will use South Africa as an example to assess the relationship between water and food, and how they are interlinked with each other regarding their insecurities by assessing the three facets mentioned above. The analysis will be done in three facets, water price, water shortage and water quality. 

 

Water Price

South Africa is unfortunately on its way to approaching physical water security (IWMI, 2007), as the country’s demand for water will gradually grow over its domestic supply. In South Africa, water has been underpriced for a long time, however, due to the lack of supply, the government imposed strategies to increase water prices to ensure the balance between the demand and supply of water. The increase in water price grew at a drastic rate in the past decades, where the rate of increase in price was higher than the inflation rate (NEDLAC, 2007). The spike in the increase of water price led to an increase in water tariffs, which therefore caused an impact on food prices. As water is needed in the agriculture industry, the increase in the price of water would lead to an increase in the cost of production, resulting in an increase in the price of agricultural products. Studies have shown that 60% of local South Africans experience food insecurity (Development Bank of Southern Africa, 2011). Moreover, this increase in the price of food would lead to a huge impact on the poor in South Africa, as they now have to spend a larger proportion of their disposable income on food (Jooste, 2012), causing them to become more food insecure. The South African Water Pricing Strategy had seen this problem in recent years and have revised the policies, for example, tariffs have now been kept low to reduce food insecurity by allowing more imports and subsidies to be given out from the government to ensure that food is affordable for the poor (Gulati et al, 2013).

Water Shortage

South Africa ranks as the 29th driest country globally, meaning it is extremely scarce in water (Crookes, Hedden and Donnenfeld, 2018). Furthermore, the distribution of rainfall also varies dramatically both in season and location across the country (Gulati et al, 2013). The lack of water puts food production in extreme danger where the domestic supply of food cannot support the boost in population as there are not enough natural resources. 

Water availability per capita in countries - Source

As shown in the figure above, South Africa has the lowest volume of water per capita per annum in these countries, even lower than the less economically developed countries of Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In South Africa, water scarcity reached its peak in 2018. Citizens were encouraged not to flush the toilet in restaurants and there were competitions in seeing who can use the least water in washing their clothes (Edmund, 2019). The country was faced with the worst ever drought in history and led to huge impacts on the agriculture industry. The decrease in rainfall worsened the problem of variation of rainfall, putting places that are lacking rainfall in danger. In areas that were rich in rainfall, the decrease in water supply led to a drastic decrease in the yield of production in the agricultural industry, putting food security in danger.

Water Quality

Other than the volume of water, the quality of water can also affect food security. The quality of water would affect the agricultural industry, reducing both the quality of the diminishing yield of crops (Gulati et al, 2013). In South Africa, farmers and food producers have failed to meet the regulatory requirements of the safety and quality of food due to the increase in water pollution (Gemmel and Schmidt, 2010). This had led to more problems including the decrease in the volume of food exports and pushing up the cost of mitigation, leading to the decrease in the economic growth of the South African economy (Gulati et al, 2013).