Virtual water trade: an assessment of water use efficiency in the international food trade

By Hong Yang, L. Wang, K. C. Abbaspour, Alexander J. B. Zehnder. 2006

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Amid an increasing water scarcity in many parts of the world, virtual water trade as both a policy instrument and practical means to balance the local, national and global water budget has received much attention in recent years. Building upon the knowledge of virtual water accounting in the literature, this study assesses the efficiency of water use embodied in the international food trade from the perspectives of exporting and importing countries and at the global and country levels. The investigation reveals that the virtual water flows primarily from countries of high crop water productivity to countries of low crop water productivity, generating a global saving in water use. Meanwhile, the total virtual water trade is dominated by green virtual water, which constitutes a low opportunity cost of water use as opposed to blue virtual water. A sensitivity analysis, however, suggests high uncertainties in the virtual water accounting and the estimation of the scale of water saving. The study also raises awareness of the limited effect of water scarcity on the global virtual water trade and the negative implications of the global water saving for the water use efficiency and food security in importing countries and the environment in exporting countries. The analysis shows the complexity in evaluating the efficiency gains in the international virtual water trade. The findings of the study, nevertheless, call for a greater emphasis on rainfed agriculture to improve the global food security and environmental sustainability.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c94ba5764d2c03b156ebdc697bbea560ebf50237

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Citations in the corpus

Virtual Water: A Helpful Perspective, but not a Sufficient Policy Criterion (2010, background): “Several authors have estimated the blue and green components of virtual water in crops that are traded internationally, noting that most of the virtual water is green rather than blue (Chapagain et al. 2006a ;Y ang et al.2006; Yang and Zehnder 2007; Aldaya et al. 2008).”
Water for food: The global virtual water trade network (2011, background): “We find that the number of trade connections follows an exponential distribution, except for the case of import trade relationships, while the volume of water that each nation trades compares well with a stretched exponential distribution, indicating high heterogeneity of flows between nations.”
Temporal dynamics of blue and green virtual water trade networks (2012, background): “Blue water has a direct cost associated with it, due to its infrastructure requirement, as well as a high opportunity cost, since there are many potential end users of blue water resources [Yang et al., 2006; Aldaya et al., 2010].”
“Virtual water”: An unfolding concept in integrated water resources management (2007, background): “For this reason, Yang et al. [2006] pointed out that viewing water use efficiency from global water saving per se is completely misaligned.”
Virtual water trade flows and savings under climate change (2013, background): “Of particular importance, the international trade in food commodities has been shown to save water (Chapagain et al., 2006; Yang et al., 2006; Fader et al., 2011), increasingly so over the last few decades (Dalin et al., 2012; Konar et al., 2012).”
The water footprints of Morocco and the Netherlands: Global water use as a result of domestic consumption of agricultural commodities (2007, background): “Recent estimates of global water savings and losses as a result of international trade have been made by De Fraiture et al. (2004), Chapagain et al. (2006a) and Yang et al. (2006) .”
Over the hills and further away from coast: global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th–21st centuries (2016, result): “This is in line with the rapidly increased global trade (Hoekstra andHung 2005, Yang et al 2006, Fader et al 2013, Kastner et al 2014) and growing dependency on trade to ensure national food supply across the globe (Porkka et al 2013, Kummu et al 2014).”
The global component of freshwater demand and supply: an assessment of virtual water flows between nations as a result of trade in agricultural and industrial products (2008, background): “…flow in the other direction, from countries with low to countries with high water productivity, Oki and Kanae (2004), De Fraiture et al. (2004), Chapagain et al. (2006a) and Yang et al. (2006) have shown that the resultant of all international trade flows works into the positive direction.”
The Global Dimension of Water Governance: Why the River Basin Approach Is No Longer Sufficient and Why Cooperative Action at Global Level Is Needed (2010, background): “[84] calculated a global water saving of 337 billion m 3 /yr, relating to international trade in the most important crops.”