iDEas in iNNOVATION

Swiss Parliament Gets Irrigated

Drip Irrigation in Front of Swiss Parliament

by Urs Heierli

SDC – the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is using the occasion to launch an initiative to educate the public about its work. As the Global Water Initiatives Division of SDC has launched a major cooperation program with iDE, SDC has included information about more efficient irrigation systems targeted to reach the poor. As part of a rotating exhibition in major Swiss cities, an iDE Family Nutrition Kit was shown as a model and attracted quite some interest. In late May, the exhibition was in Berne on the Federal Plaza, just in front of the Swiss Parliament. The Swiss parliament has recently increased the development aid budget from 0.4 to 0.5% of GDP and a major focus of the increased resources will be targeted to water projects. There is an increasing awareness that global water scarcity will severely affect all societies if “business as usual” policies are pursued. iDE has a lot to offer in this domain: affordable drip and sprinkler irrigation systems and other productive water technologies for small farmers provide really interesting solutions.

iDE’s SDC-supported program “Scaling up productive water technologies” will develop dissemination programs in several regions, including Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and later Mexico), West Africa (Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad) and Asia (Kirgizstan, Vietnam). Together with the Gates Foundation, It also supports the global dissemination of productive water technologies.

In addition, iDE is launching a “Fair Trade Water project” funded by the Sustainability initiative of the Swiss retail chain COOP aimed at increasing the water efficiency of Fair Trade Cooperatives in Central America. COOP is the second largest retail chain in Switzerland and was selected as the world’s most sustainable retail chain, especially for the chain’s attention to the farmers who supply them. This project will be operating in Central America and will deliver affordable irrigation to small farmers belonging to Fair Trade cooperatives, with a special focus on diversification.

The Water Malthusians

From IDE CEO Al Doerksen’s blog:

I grew up in a family with eight kids. We never had a lot of money but I don’t recall thinking we were poor. We did have water restrictions however. We bathed once a week in 3 to 4 inches of shared water, and just urinating in the single toilet was not sufficient rationale to flush. The driver for some of these family rules were not water scarcity – it was a captive sewage system that had grossly inadequate absorptive capacity especially in our frozen Alberta winters. Water consumption, however, was never an articulated concern in my growing up years; we added ice cubes and tea bags and instant coffee as often as we wished, and the hoses ran freely when flooding the community hockey rink. In our local Mennonite church, water was a symbol of everlasting life and the medium of baptism.

Well, that was fifty years ago; now I enjoy my daily showers; I have graduated to double espressos and I no longer play ice hockey but I must confess that concerns about excessive flushing are still in my psyche. In terms of its psycho-metaphorical value, water thoughts seem to generate more feelings of guilt than grace.

The water messages these days are not encouraging. So many dire predictions from the water Malthusians. Water tables are dropping. The world is running out of fresh water. We’ve got a time bomb. Our water is getting more and more polluted with agricultural pesticide and herbicide run off, and industrial complexes still flush without abandon. The next wars will allegedly be fought over access to water, and every double espresso I consume uses up 140 litres of water. Eating beef is even worse – one kilo is like consuming 16,000 litres of water – enough water to fill the pool we no longer own. I am part of the fortunate middle class world which owns a completely unsustainable water footprint – 2500 cubic meters per person per year. One could drown in the statistics (and in the empty water bottles), and to change metaphors, all of this gives me a headache; I wish it was just the consequence of dehydration on a hot day.

My first water career was with Trojan Technologies, winner of the 2009 World Water Week Industry Award for its global leadership in the development of large scale ultraviolet water disinfection systems. Our concerns were about safe (chlorine-free) drinking water, about safe discharges of waste water back into the environment, the removal and destruction of industrial contaminants in the ground water and river systems. I was based in Europe; the EU Water Frameworks look at water from a river basis perspective. The Rhine is used for agriculture, fisheries, industry, transportation, recreation and tourism and using its water must accommodate the interests of all.

My second water career is with IDE. We encourage the productive use of water; in our experience irrigation is one of the best leverage opportunities available for smallplot dollar-a-day farmers. We offer affordable technologies to pump/lift water, store water and distribute water. The trouble with irrigation, however, is that is uses water – on average 6 litres per sq meter per day in irrigation season. Some days this feels perverse; in a water stressed world, we are promoting the use of more of it. We are not likely to be able to wean ourselves off food and water, however, so our focus, especially in agriculture, which uses 70% of available fresh water supplies will increasing promote the more careful stewardship of this resource.

Some 200 years ago, Malthus predicted that exponential increases in population would outstrip arithmetic increases in food supply, and that dire consequences would occur. So far, he has been wrong, and to some extent, our ability with technology and innovation to grow more food has been a big part of the solution. To some extent, these problem solving successes cause us to want to underestimate the challenges emerging.

For some water organizations, this emerging water stress is the imperative and rationale for fundraising. “One billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation, specifically a toilet. But there is good news – by giving $20 you can provide one person with clean water for 20 years.”

A less trite approach is found in the recently published IWMI report “Water for Food, Water for Life.” While acknowledging the challenge faced, the report argues “The hope lies in closing the gap in agricultural productivity in many parts of the world … and in realizing the unexplored potential that lies in better water management along with non-miraculous changes in policy and production techniques. The world has enough freshwater to produce food for all its people over the next half century. But world leaders must take action now—before the opportunities to do so are lost.”

At IDE we will continue to pursue innovative approaches to more responsible use of productive water. We want to use statistics responsibly. So far it is not yet easily possible to destroy matter as so many of the water Malthusians seem to imply. On the other hand, we will deepen our inquiries about falling water tables.

And I will continue to be conscious of my flushing habits.

Poverty and Climate Change

IDE’s founder, Paul Polak has just launched a new blog where he will be writing regularly on poverty and development issues from his visionary point of view. His first post discusses poverty from the angle of climate change and biodiversity, and I thought the excerpt below captured a lot when read from the perspective of IDE’s work in food security and small farm food production.

In 2006, the World Food Program distributed 4 million metric tons of food to 87.8 million poor people in 78 countries. Consider the carbon footprint of growing 4 million tons of food, transporting it to 78 countries, and transporting, housing and feeding the army of experts who supervise its distribution. Now add the carbon footprint required to regularly distribute food and water to regions in chronic deficit, like China’s Yellow River Basin and India’s Deccan Plateau. In Mumbai alone, 79 water tankers made 222 trips daily this year to deliver water to poor people during the dry season. Add to this the carbon footprint of the $100 billion we spend each year in futile massive development projects, and a picture begins to emerge on the impact of poverty on carbon emissions and climate change.

But the impact of poverty on the environment goes far beyond climate change.

Continue reading here for further interesting, and perhaps contentious, connections Paul makes between poverty and “green.”