An international team of environmental scientists and economists has discovered that efforts to combat groundwater depletion around the world will lead to increased prices for wheat and rice.
The information office of the International Food Policy Research Institute indicates that, according to researchers, the prices of wheat will increase by 6.7 percent and rice prices by 7.4 percent, which will prevent about 24 million people from permanently obtaining food.
Claudia Ringler, a researcher at the institute, says: “We need to develop and implement measures aimed at reducing water consumption while maintaining a high level of food production. This applies in particular to regions that rely heavily on groundwater, such as India and China, where a decrease in water levels will lead to "Groundwater is causing a sharp rise in food prices, so we must act now, otherwise we will not be able to avoid the continued rise in food prices."
The scientific team reached this conclusion within the framework of a project devoted to studying the consequences of taking economic measures to combat groundwater depletion. Because humanity actually uses a much larger amount of groundwater than the soil receives from rainfall and other means, which leads to a decrease in its level and negative changes in soil properties.
Economists and environmental scientists have studied how groundwater extraction has changed over the past three decades and how proposed plans to reduce groundwater pumping will affect agricultural production and food prices over the next two decades. In order to estimate these matters, they designed a computer model of the Earth that takes into account economic, hydrological and environmental factors.
Calculations conducted by scientists have shown that imposing restrictions on pumping water from the ground will lead to a decrease in the yield of wheat, rice and corn by about 1-2 percent, while the prices of corn will rise by 5.2 percent, wheat by 6.7 percent, and rice by 7.4 percent. The reason for this is that a large portion of these crops are grown in countries that actively use groundwater to irrigate fields, including India, China, and the United States of America.
According to these results, about 26 million people will lose regular access to food, 24 million of whom live in third world countries and countries with economies in transition. According to Ringler and her colleagues, these computational results indicate the need for rapid development of technologies and measures that will increase the production of wheat, rice and other major crops in conditions of limited water access.