Rethinking on the methodology for assessing global water and food challenges

ABSTRACT

The article delinks food security challenges from the challenge of supplying water to meet the needs of the industrial, livestock, domestic and environmental sectors to analyze the food security and water management challenges of individual nations. For this, three indices are developed: the water adequacy index, water-land index and water-land-pasture index. Their values are computed for 172 countries. The analysis suggests that the criteria for assessing the magnitude of food insecurity and water scarcity problems should include agricultural land, particularly cultivated land and pastureland, along with renewable water.

KEYWORDS:

• Global water scarcity
• water-land index
• water-land-pasture index
• water adequacy index
• virtual water export
• cultivated land

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2019.1707071.

Notes

1. This article is derived from an occasional paper by Kumar et al. (2017).