U.S., and global, water and food security goals are fundamentally interdependent. Eliminating hunger and malnutrition and ensuring sustainable agricultural production require a safe and sufficient supply of water. The world as a whole is expected to need to increase food production by 50% by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing population, necessitating 30% more global water withdrawals than today. However, an estimated 2.4 billion people currently live in countries facing water scarcity, and nearly 40% of the world’s arable land is already water stressed. Equitable access to adequate water services cannot be ensured if ecologically unsustainable agri-food systems endanger freshwater resources and ecosystems. Sustainable food and water security cannot be achieved virtually without each other.
Achieving synergies between food and water security
The U.S. Government’s Global Food Security Strategy 2022-2026 (GFSS) and the U.S. Government’s Global Water Strategy 2022-2027 (GWS) lay a valuable foundation for developing substantive policy integration between the two. Both strategies identify common challenges and set core objectives that are related and mutually reinforcing. The GFSS seeks to promote inclusive and sustainable agriculture-led economic growth; strengthen resilience to climate change and other shocks and crises among people, communities, countries, and systems; ensure nutrition, especially for women and children; improve water resources management; promote more effective governance; and advance the integration of food security, conflict sensitivity, and peacebuilding. The GWS seeks to strengthen water sector governance, finance, and institutions; increase equitable access to safe, sustainable, and climate-resilient water services; improve climate-resilient management of freshwater resources and ecosystems; and anticipate and mitigate water-related conflict and vulnerability. Second, both strategies tout a “whole-of-government” approach, bringing together roughly the same government departments and agencies to lead and coordinate national technical, diplomatic, financial, and other resources. Both strategies also focus policy engagement by targeting specific priority countries: of the 24 countries designated, 16 are included on both lists, providing the potential for country-specific programming and policy coherence.
Policy alignment of the GFSS and GWS can create multiple synergies between water and food security goals. Improving resource efficiency is one such synergy. Efficient water management methods such as drip irrigation and rainwater harvesting not only conserve water but also increase agricultural productivity. By integrating water-saving technologies into agricultural practices, the United States can contribute to both water-saving efforts and sustainable food production. Similarly, climate change will have significant impacts on both water and food security. Rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events will degrade water and agricultural infrastructure, exacerbate water stress, and increase agricultural vulnerability. Developing climate-resilient agricultural practices, such as adopting drought-tolerant crop varieties and sustainable livestock management systems, can mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on both water resources and food production. Harmonizing efforts to improve the climate resilience of the water and agriculture sectors can provide mutual benefits and strengthen overall adaptation strategies. Integrating water and food security efforts can also enable a holistic approach to malnutrition and waterborne diseases, especially in vulnerable communities. By promoting sustainable agricultural practices that prioritize soil and water quality, the United States can help improve nutrition and reduce the spread of waterborne diseases, advancing both food security and public health goals.
Overcoming the policy coherence challenge
However, there are several questions and challenges to effectively realizing the potential synergies between the World Food Security Strategy and the Water Strategy. The first concerns the framework and process established by the strategies themselves. Neither strategy establishes clear requirements, guidance, designated mechanisms, or dedicated metrics to align or drive coherence with the other. Each strategy recognizes the alignment of certain goals it shares with the other, but does not articulate a concrete process for pursuing them in a systematic and coordinated manner. Similarly, of the 12 individual national strategies and two regional plans developed in 2018-2019 based on the first GFSS, only three did not mention the GWS at all. (The current GFSS national plans have not yet been published.) The current Water Strategy national plans make no mention of the GFSS at all.
The second question concerns U.S. government structures and mechanisms. The GWS and GFSS reflect two separate legislative initiatives: Senator Paul Simon’s Global Water Act of 2014 and the World Food Security Act of 2016. These separate congressional mandates give the two strategies different budgetary processes, program calendars and benchmarks, and performance and reporting requirements. Similarly, the different legislation underlying the GFSS and GWS results in different role and responsibility arrangements among the U.S. government agencies tasked with developing and executing the strategies. As a result, the strategies incorporate two different policy structures and processes, creating a different set of implementation and coordination challenges. Any effort to better harmonize U.S. efforts on global food and water security will need to overcome these structural challenges to increase policy coherence.
Related challenges pose for policy actors and institutions in countries where the GFSS and GWS are deployed. Both strategies emphasize the importance of U.S. collaborative engagement with host governments, implementing partners, stakeholders, and communities in priority countries. However, promoting resilient, country-led food and water security policies and practices in target countries also requires strengthening domestic policy coherence in those countries. This includes building internal governance capacity for host governments and stakeholders to effectively engage and coordinate. Yet studies of priority countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia have documented persistent policy disconnects, as well as “horizontal” misalignment between sectors and “vertical” misalignment between regional, national, and international priorities and challenges. For example, across Africa, households, communities, and national governments are responding to water and food security risks through a wide range of initiatives, from behavioral change and technological infrastructure to nature-based solutions and institutional innovations. Yet extensive research on these interventions has found that a lack of coordination across scales, sectors, and levels of governance in these countries often hinders effective adaptation and creates adverse impacts.
Another challenge is to achieve inter-sectoral alignment between the main objectives of the GFSS and GWS. For example, urban water supplies are facing increasing strain. The global urban population, exposed to water scarcity, is projected to grow from the current 933 million to 1.7-2.4 billion in 2050. In many urbanized regions, rapid population growth and urban development are causing increased water pollution, reduced agricultural land availability, and conflicts over water allocation between urban and rural areas. Against this backdrop, future GWS initiatives to enhance urban water security and address the impacts of urbanization on water resources and ecosystems may clash with GFSS efforts focused on increasing agricultural productivity and food access. Globally, an expansion of irrigated agricultural land is needed to strengthen agriculture-led economic growth in the face of increasing climate risks. However, more than half of the increase in irrigated area achieved so far in the 21st century has occurred on lands that were already under water stress. By 2050, growing urban water demands may collide with agricultural needs in more than two-fifths of all river basins. Moreover, the GFSS excludes the urban poor and targets only rural residents. Because there is a strong correlation between household water insecurity and household food insecurity, excluding the urban poor from the GFSS program would miss out on potential synergies between household-level programs that address food and water insecurity for urban households.
Similarly, interdependencies in water and food systems are complex and multifaceted, characterized by feedback loops, externalities, and trade-offs at different scales. Policies and interventions designed to increase agricultural resilience to emerging climate impacts may undermine water availability and vice versa. In Ghana, a priority country for both the GFSS and GWS, droughts and other climate stressors simultaneously strain household drinking water sources and agricultural production on which the rural economy depends. Farmers have deployed a range of resilience strategies, including expanding and intensifying irrigation. However, uncoordinated increases in water withdrawals for crops may compete with the needs of other users dependent on the same water sources and promote conflict between households and communities. Small-scale irrigation therefore also represents a key strategy to increase smallholder farm production, income, food security, and climate resilience. Yet in many low-income countries, women not only bear primary responsibility for household water collection and agricultural labor, but also often have limited access to irrigation technologies, credit, and extension services compared to men. In contexts where gender inequality is pronounced, such irrigation interventions may fail to empower women producers or may disempower them due to women’s limited agency and involvement in decision-making, adversely affecting access to water for households not included in the irrigation scheme.
Getting the policy circle right
Finally, policymakers who want to strengthen the coherence and cohesion of the U.S. Global Food Security Strategy and the Global Water Strategy must necessarily address the question of how these efforts align with or are constrained by other U.S. policies. Thus, the GFSS and GWS strongly support the goal of strengthening societal resilience to climate risks to food and water security. Yet the U.S., and the world, has done little to contribute to providing the means to achieve those objectives. Building climate-resilient water and agri-food systems requires significant funding. Yet climate finance remains woefully inadequate. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) calculates that adaptation needs in developing countries are 10 to 18 times larger than international public funding flows, leaving an adaptation financing gap estimated at $194 to $366 billion per year. Africa, where most of the GFSS and GWS priority countries are concentrated, will need $579 billion for climate adaptation by 2030, according to a report by the Global Adaptation Center. The international community has allocated nowhere near this amount. Official adaptation finance flows to developing countries have fallen to just $21 billion in 2021. In contrast, UNEP estimates the annual adaptation costs for the agricultural sector in developing countries at $16 billion, and the adaptation costs for river flooding alone at $54 billion per year.
Increasing harmonization of the GWS and GFSS holds great potential for addressing interrelated challenges and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. Leveraging synergies in water and food systems can help the United States increase resource efficiency, build climate resilience, improve nutrition, and foster economic development. Achieving these synergies will require overcoming difficult hurdles related to intersectoral coordination, resource constraints, and socio-political dynamics. The outcome of strengthening global food and water security will contribute to greater peace and prosperity around the world.
David Michel is a senior fellow for water security in the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
