Drinking one cup of coffee costs 140 litres of water

Global trade has put water under a lot of pressure in the world market. While water in agriculture is priced far below its real cost in most countries, an increasing volume of water is used for processing export products. In today’s world, people in Japan cause water resource repletion in the United States by importing highly demanding water producing commodities and people in Europe seriously have an impact on the water systems in Brazil, via coffee consumption.

Consumers are hardly aware of the amount of water needed for their consumables. Drinking one cup of coffee costs 140 litres of water. One hamburger takes 2400 litres of water. Wearing a cotton T-shirt requires more than four thousand litres of water. The average world citizen requires 1240 cubic metres per year for the production of his food, drinking water and other consumer goods. The average American citizen requires twice as much. Chinese people need only 700 cubic metres per year.

These statistics are an outcome of a study by the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands. An international team of researchers has estimated the size of the ‘water footprints’ of nations. Research leader Hoekstra: “The water footprint of a nation is the volume of water needed for the production of the goods and services consumed by its inhabitants.”

All countries to greater or lesser extent depend on the water resources of other countries. Jordan for instance imports 5 billion cubic metres of water per year in the form of imported commodities. Egypt, with water self-sufficiency high on the political agenda and an annual water withdrawal inside the country of 65 billion cubic metres, still has an estimated annual water import of 14 billion cubic metres. Major water exporters in the world are the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina. The big water importers are Japan, Italy, the UK and Germany. Ironically, the African continent, not known because of its water abundance, is a net exporter of water to the other continents, particularly to Europe.

The use of water for export commodities production to the global market significantly contributes to the change of local and regional water systems. The people in Japan consume large quantities of American cereals and soybean, thus contributing to the mining of aquifers, emptying of rivers and increased evaporation in North America. Hoekstra: “Between fifteen and twenty percent of the water problems in the world can be traced back to production for export to consumers elsewhere in the world”