Water and Food in Africa

This week, I am looking at the Hadejia-Nguru Floodplain,  and at the value of maintaining floodplain use.   The Hadejia Jama ’  river basin is located in North Eastern Nigeria, and includes a floodplain formed by the Hadejia and Jama river converging to form the Yobe river, which drains into Lake Chad (Thompson,1995) .  The river basin ’ s climate is dominated by the ITCZ which drives variability of rain flow, leading to periods of flooding and drought.  This floodplain provides a variety of positive benefits for  local communities including agriculture, resources for grazing, fuelwood, forest products and fishing (Barbier,2003) .    Figure 1- Hadejia-Nguru (Muhammed,2013) Irrigation Project Potential ? There have been several large-scale irrigation projects aimed at limiting flooding and increasing irrigation upstream. The most significant of these is the Kano River Irrigation Project ( “ KRIP”), which supplies water from the Toga dam to Nigeria ’ s second-largest city, Kano.   Howev

What is Virtual Water? The term Virtual water was first coined by John Allan in the 1990s  (Hoekstra, 2003 ).    Put simply, it seeks to recognise the significant use of water in countries' resources, including that of food, and to encourage countries which have a low stockpile of water to import water intensive food products, so as to lower the strain on their country's water supply. The volume of virtual water  ‘ hidden ’  or  ‘ embodied’    in a particular product is defined as the volume of water used in the production process of that product. The volume of virtual water transfer is so great that in Middle Eastern and North African countries, it exceeds the outflow of the Nile in a year  (Allan, 2003) . The simple fact is, food needs water. Grain is an often-used example: one kilogram requires 1000kg to 2000kg of water. Between 5000-6000kg of water is needed for a kilo of cheese ( Hoekstra, 2003 ) . Thus, there is a huge amount of water hidden within our food. Allen (2003)

The volume of groundwater in Africa is estimated to be 600,000 km 3 but it doesn’t get the attention it deserves  (Macdonald,2012) . To put this in perspective, that is 100 times more than the ‘ renewable freshwater resources ' and 20 times more than the  freshwater  in African lakes. Furthermore, Falkenmark’s Water Stress Index, once seen as a definitive measure of water scarcity in Africa, only measures water scarcity through river discharge, completely ignoring groundwater!    Today I will discuss the potential of groundwater irrigation, particularly focusing on the Sub-Saharan region of Africa.  Groundwater Distribution    There are many different  groundwater irrigation schemes in Africa through privately as well as publicly funded projects. Specifically, Sub-Saharan Africa has huge potential for increased agricultural production as only 3.3% of arable land is irrigated , compared to 37% of arable land in Asia (Vilhoth,2013) .   Picture 1   (Macdonald,2012,5) This shows tha