Threatened Food Systems and Livelihoods.

 

Agriculture accounts for over 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, providing food, employment opportunities, and stable livelihoods to billions of people. But about 3 billion people and over half of the world’s food production are located in regions that are already experiencing, or are projected to face, declining trends in total water storage— including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater—driven largely by groundwater depletion and irrigation. Around 1.2 billion people already live in agricultural areas facing severe water constraints, and over 170 million hectares of irrigated cropland, roughly the combined land area of France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, are under high or very high water stress. These conditions translate directly into food insecurity as well as employment and income shocks. In many low- and middle-income countries, agriculture still accounts for 25–60% of total employment; when water shortages reduce yields or force fallowing, wage laborers and smallholders lose their primary source of income, often without social protection. Droughts and irrigation shortfalls reduce harvests and disrupt livestock systems, increasing food prices in local and global markets, with the poorest households spending the largest share of their income on food. In parallel, deteriorating water quality is eroding the foundations of food systems. Farmers in many basins increasingly rely on marginal-quality water—saline groundwater, polluted rivers or untreated and poorlytreated wastewater—to sustain production, especially near growing cities. While such practices can provide short-term relief, they often lead to soil salinization, contamination of crops with pathogens and chemical residues, and longer-term productivity losses, with disproportionate impacts on smallholders and periurban farmers. For consumers, degraded water quality translates into heightened food safety risks and potential health costs, further illustrating how thedegradation of water capital is transmitted throughfood systems and labor markets. As drying basins struggle to maintain historical production levels, the resulting food insecurity and livelihood losses contribute to distress migration and displacement. As a result, drought and water scarcity are now implicated in a growing share of internal displacement events and are an important driver of projected internal water and climate-related migrations in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. This shows that the changing dynamics of the biophysical system of the world due to the degradation of its freshwater resources are pushing many societies into a socio-economic failure mode that threatens human security and has major local and global implications for the labor markets, food systems, and demographic pattern.

 Agricultural water withdrawals as a share of total water withdrawals. The map shows the proportion of water withdrawn by each country for agriculture relative to combined agricultural, industrial, and domestic water withdrawals. Map produced based on data from AQUASTAT, FAO.