Water and Food in Africa

This week I thought I would write a slightly briefer post to discuss a TED talk that really opened my mind. The talk, given by the young social entrepreneur Andrew Youn, discusses the idea that we are what we spend, and how this very notion should be seen as nothing other than an opportunity for global scale social change. Source: ( Andrew Youn, 2018 ) Andrew is the founder of a non-profit organisation called One Acre Fund which typically helps smallerholder farmers in East Africa. The organisation’s aim is to enable the farmers to lift themselves out of poverty with the correct investments, asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty. One Acre Fund has been very successful with great results, growing 3 times the size since receiving an investment from The Audacious Project. The talk begins with Andrew discussing his long-term fascination with the scale of global poverty. Citizens of the western world can throw foo...

Week 6: The Virtual Water Nexus: Misleading Metaphor? Last week’s blog post introduced virtual water, the concept capturing the amount of water required to produce a product, or the volume of water integrated into our society but not in the form of water. In the blog a discussion was started about virtual water trade and how water stressed nations can reduce their water usage by being tactical with imports and exports ( Lillywhite, 2010 ). Essentially virtual water trade is about importing products that have large volumes of integrated or virtual water and exporting products that have low virtual water. Whilst the discussion was opened last week, it certainly wasn’t finished. This week I want to more critically analyse the concept of virtual water and the trade of it. I will specifically focus on the impact of the concept on agriculture in Africa. Whilst the blog will take a critical focus, it is important to note that there are multiple benefits of the concept...

Virtual Water: An Introduction This week, leaving ground water behind and coming out of the earth, I want to focus on a concept that captures the hidden water integrated into our lives, not necessarily in forms we might expect. This is the concept of virtual water. For a more succinct definition: Virtual water is the amount of water required to produce a product, from start to finish and is a mainly neglected and hidden component of production ( Lillywhite, 2010 ). The concept was first developed as a way of understanding how the volume of water embedded into food and trade of clothing is vastly greater than the volume of water we drink. Virtual water creates the idea of a water footprint, similar to that of an ecological footprint, making the consumer focus on the production chain as well as the final product ( VirtualWater, 2019 ). To put the concept into perspective; the average person drinks around 900 to 1000 litres of water per year, the simple avera...