[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon and in this podcast we discuss water challenges with leading experts. And today we have Megan Konar, who is an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on the intersection of food, water and trade, and these are very topical with rising prices, increasing concerns about water scarcity, and trade embargoes and geopolitical conditions. Megan is currently spending a sabbatical at Oxford University. Thank you so much, Megan, for joining me and really appreciate your taking the time. How are you enjoying your time at Oxford?
[00:00:49] Megan Konar: Yeah, thanks for the invitation to do this podcast and I'm having a wonderful sabbatical in Oxford. I actually was here for a masters a long time ago, and that's where I met my now husband. And so it's great to be back here at a different phase of our lives. And now we have kids here and we're just really soaking up what Oxford has to offer and putting our kids in to get the full experience, going to British schools and they're just really loving it. And the British uniforms, , the school uniforms and the boarding school experience and all of that sort of thing.
[00:01:26] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. It's really quite different, isn't it, from the US. Do you feel like the curriculum is also different in many ways?
[00:01:35] Megan Konar: Yeah, it's been interesting to see the difference. It seems to really focus a lot on, my son has old-fashioned, spelling quizzes every week, and my daughter's learning Shakespeare. It seems more focused on Shakespeare, and they have Latin and some things that yeah, they wouldn't get in the US so they're learning a lot.
[00:01:54] Bridget Scanlon: That's great. So Megan, your research topics are very important these days. Your work on food and water and food trade, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine and impacts on grain exports from those countries and the countries that are reliant on that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how we can use global trade then to make food supplies more secure and how the countries that were reliant on the Ukraine and Russian grains, what they are doing now to try to increase food security.
[00:02:26] Megan Konar: Yeah, it's a good question. And there was a lot of concern when the invasion happened because Russia and Ukraine together accounted for a large share of global wheat export markets and corn as well as canola oil and fertilizers as well. So disruptions to some of their exports could have had pretty significant impacts for agricultural production and trade around the world. So there was a lot of concern. And in particular, there's some countries that were very heavily reliant on grain imports from Ukraine and and Russia, wheat imports and corn imports in particular for some Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, other countries like Armenia, Sudan and Lebanon, get a large fraction of their total imports from those two countries. So disruptions there could have had pretty significant impacts in a certain, in a few vulnerable countries. So, yeah, so there's a lot of concern. And, what can we do? I think, whenever there is a disruption, it's important to remain calm and, keep the trade flowing. I think initially there's a lot of countries who get worried and they might start putting export bans in place or changing policies so that they ensure that they keep grains for their own consumers, their own citizens, which makes sense. But then that's actually what you don't want. You want to make sure that the grain and other food is able to keep freely being traded around the world that will keep prices low, ensure that countries that need to import and get access to supplies of grain can still do that. So, that was a major thing that did happen. Most supplies, most trade was able to still go on and yeah, my group's been thinking, what, what can we take from this going forward?
How can we try to figure out ways to improve food security for some of these vulnerable countries. Some of these countries that are heavily reliant on potentially risky countries for their grain supply. So we've been actually trying to apply modern portfolio theory to help major grain importers determine how they can better balance risks and rewards in their grain supplies. And, we think this is a really important and useful framework because it quantifies the price volatility in historical import records and then identifies opportunities to minimize import risk but not increasing the cost of imports. And so I think that's something that's really important because there's a lot of talk and interest and research now on how to make food systems and food trade more resilient. But you know, at the end of the day, consumers and importing countries are also very concerned with the cost and that affordability is a key component of food security as well.
[00:05:30] Bridget Scanlon: And I really like that your research group considers the economic aspects because that's a huge factor that needs to be considered with the food or with water, with many of these things, energy and I guess diversifying their portfolio then, and not relying on single countries and whether it's a geopolitical issues or floods and droughts or whatever, need to understand the reliability of the food source that you are importing, the country that you're importing from. So I think we always learn from these issues and maybe we will be stronger going forward. Hope so. And you mentioned another issue that is of concern these days is that food prices have been increasing a lot in the last few years, and I'm not sure what it's like in England or the UK but certainly in the US and many other countries.
And of course there can be a lot of drivers of food prices, including, the demand and supply and the trade aspects that you mentioned. But also floods and droughts, Pakistan flooding and all of that sort of thing. But energy prices and impacts on fertilizer production, fertilizer plants closing, all of those things. Maybe you could comment on full prices and how you see it going forward.
[00:06:48] Megan Konar: Yeah, it's a really important issue. And yeah, it has been noticeable. Being in England, the grocery store bill has been noticeably increasing since we've been here in general. Yeah, food inflation has been persistent because a combination of factors, like you mentioned, have impacted both the supply as well as the demand for food. And this really began with the pandemic. The pandemic caused significant changes in consumer behavior. People were staying home, buying more groceries, cooking more. It affected workers and particularly, workers in food plants and restaurants. And it led to supply chain disruptions, increased transport and labor costs. And yeah, like you mentioned, also increased energy prices. So we have that as background. And then Russia's invasion of Ukraine further led to a surge in food commodity prices as well as energy and fuel prices in 2022. And so that kind of further increased fertilizer prices and the cost of energy that's needed to produce, process, and transport food.
But I also think it's important to note that the ingredients in food that we buy make up a small share of the prices of food. So the raw agricultural goods themselves, I think on average, contribute about 10% of the price of actual food that we might buy at the grocery store. So the majority can actually be attributed to other input costs, other value added activities, transportation and labor and packaging. So that is important to note and climate change has been another contributing factor. So extreme temperatures and drought in the last year have further reduced production in some key regions and led to lower yields and increased costs more.
[00:08:40] Bridget Scanlon: Right. It's interesting how all these factors kind of come together and amplify the whole issue, and it's difficult to disaggregate the component factors and how important each one is, but that is a very important point you raise, is that the raw food accounts for about 10% of the total price.
So the farmers growing that food are not getting very much of the economic value of it. And so a lot of it is transportation, refrigeration, storage, all of those other factors after it's grown and harvested. You mentioned, recently one of the issues, and you mentioned covid, so post covid, then food security issues in the US and the Biden administration wanted to identify choke points in in food supplies and stuff, and I'm not sure if you did any analysis on that, but maybe some of your previous work on food trade within the US could contribute to our understanding of potential choke points there.
[00:09:39] Megan Konar: Yeah. Thanks. So, yeah. Well, and important to note related to the pandemic and policy surrounding the pandemic was that it really did lead to more demand for foods. There's been a lot more money that has been given to consumers throughout the country in the US. So there's been increased consumer spending largely due to accumulated savings during the pandemic and government stimulus payments. So there's been more demand, which has further increased prices. But yeah. Then as part of this, president Biden did issue an executive order with the goal of researchers, the policy community and others in the private and public sphere to identify choke points in a few critical supply chains that included pharmaceuticals and other technological sectors. But President Biden did also point out agricultural and food supply chains as an important sector that we would like to know what the choke points are.
And so, yeah, my group has been tackling this and we've been working on some research to try to look at identifying the choke points using network statistics. So thinking about food flows, the movement of food as complex networks within the United States, that way you can think of the choke points would be the locations that are really critical to the movement and the distribution of food, as well as the processing hubs for food throughout the country.
So this is gonna be more like your transit hubs, your major ports, your transportation arteries, Chicago, Los Angeles, those sort of Georgia, or Atlanta. Those sorts of places are what we'll identify as choke points rather than some of the key production locations. So that's how we've been thinking about it. And we've identified them as, as, yeah, places like LA and Long Beach, the key harbor there, the Port of Chicago. The New York and New Jersey ports and the San Jose and San Francisco ports as well. And so we have done some work by individual food items. So from grains to meat to fruits and vegetables and and processed food. And we find, the choke points vary depending on the different commodity you're looking at. And that's largely, so, for example, the grain choke points will often be in the grain belts, transportation hubs within the grain belts. Meat choke points will tend to be more in the cities that are receiving and processing a lot of animals, for example. But yeah, we hope that, identifying these locations can help us figure out how to increase their resilience to risks. And, stakeholders can figure out what to invest in in these different locations: producers, distributors and processors may want to invest in cybersecurity infrastructure, particularly within these choke points, since we know that the whole national network would be targeted to some sort of disruption or attack in these locations.
[00:12:51] Bridget Scanlon: And that leads me to thinking, Megan, I really like the network analysis approach that you apply to food, and then you also combine that with the water issues and the water used to grow the food, the water - food concepts. And maybe you can describe that a little bit, especially with your emphasis on the US initially with the major aquifers, the Central Valley, the High Plains, and the Mississippi, and how you link those things together.
[00:13:24] Megan Konar: Yeah. That's great. Well, my research group we're interested in both water, food supply chains, and infrastructure. So water is one of the main inputs to agricultural production. So it's really important to think about the water and any potential water shortages or even access water and what risks that might pose to agricultural production, and that'll be transmitted to food supply chains. And so in particular, we've been thinking about unsustainable groundwater use as a more of a long-term chronic risk that's facing agricultural production and potentially then supply chains. Within the US and I should mention, the US is a very important country for global food systems, it's a major producer, consumer, and it's one of the key exporters globally. So disruptions or impacts to agricultural production within the us. Will likely have ripple effects to other countries throughout the world. So it's not just a local issue within the US. But yeah, we're interested in all sorts, all the water hazards and how they interact with food supply chains, so drought, how that might impact supply chains, floods.
We saw this past summer floods on the Mississippi and the Danube restricted transportation in some important grain belts, for example. Also, the Yangtze in China. So those are kind of shorter-term weather risks. And then another risk you can think of as a longer-term unsustainable water use risk. And that's where these aquifers in the US come in because we do have some really important aquifers. Three, the Mississippi Embayment Aquifer, the Central Valley Aquifer, and the High Plains Aquifer, where for the last couple of decades they've been being used unsustainably largely for agricultural production. And so, we wanted to trace where those goods, where those crops and the food produced with those aquifers is traveling around the US and around the world.
And I think we found around 35 cubic kilometers of unsustainable groundwater from those aquifers is incorporated in our domestic supply chains, and roughly about 10% of that actually does go abroad as well.
[00:15:47] Bridget Scanlon: And so the major hubs in the US then would be the Central Valley. A lot of, food goes out, it accounts for a lot of the food production in the US, particularly vegetables, and then you show the linkages with these circular networks, I think those diagrams are fantastic, where you can see the linkages then between production and where the demand is and where it's being used. And you also show the linkages between the US and international countries, and maybe 50% of it goes to Asian countries, and a lot of it is 50% may be coming from the Mississippi Embayment system. So those diagrams are fantastic.
[00:16:27] Megan Konar: Thank you. I think those, yeah, we have these circular network diagrams that show how interconnected we are through our food supply chains. There's production locations, but consumers were heavily reliant on these production locations. And that's one of the reasons we wanted to do this type of work is so consumers across the country might think that they're disconnected from water resources in California or disconnected from how water's being used in the Colorado, but through our food supply chains, we're all intimately connected across the country and around the world actually. And we looked and calculated that kind of back to food security.
Food security is often thought of as being heavily reliant on cereal supply of a country because cereals make up, not frosted flakes or Cheerios, but the staple grains make up such a large fraction of people's diets and they're affordable. So we looked at that. There's other countries around the world that about 10% of their total national cereal supply rely on these aquifers. So the US you know ourselves, 18% of our domestic cereal supply relies on these three aquifers. So, they are significant contributors to the food security currently of the US and several other countries.
[00:17:50] Bridget Scanlon: Right. More recent work that the US Geological Survey and others have been doing and we have been doing with satellite data is showing that maybe the situation with Mississippi may not be as as dire as we thought previously because in that humid region when you pump groundwater, you are capturing a lot of surface water.
And so new models that are being developed by the USGS are showing that there's not as much depletion as they thought previously, which is good news. And so it suggests then that maybe we should produce more food in humid regions. But in contrast, we produce most of our food in the desert. I don’t know if you had a chance to look at it.
The World Wildlife Foundation report on should we move Central Valley food production to Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta region, and, the issues associated with that, but so we could possibly try to move food production to more humid regions. What are your thoughts about that? What other factors would we need to consider?
[00:18:53] Megan Konar: Yeah. Well first I guess I would just say that's great that the groundwater levels appear to be stabilizing in the Mississippi Embayment. Yeah, that's really exciting that the irrigation there leads to enough recharge that the water levels aren't being depleted the way we initially thought. So that's really great. But then in terms of rewiring or completely changing how we produce crops, where we grow crops within the country. You and I were definitely heavily concerned in the water, and water is a key input to agriculture, no doubt. But there are other inputs that I think producers have to think about, other considerations that they give to where they choose to grow and produce their crops.
So if we're just thinking about one dimension, water, we might be missing some of these other important multi-dimensional considerations that farmers take. The climate, the various soils, the access to labor, different policies and legal regimes and irrigation infrastructure and just other infrastructure.
So there's a whole host and systems in place to support agricultural production in certain places. So, yeah, so I'd say water is definitely important, but it is one critical dimension, but there's other considerations that I think need to go into how we, if we were to recommend any changes, these other considerations would have to be taken into account.
[00:20:20] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, I think you know, a lot of socioeconomic factors and the legacy of production in those regions, and so they have everything the infrastructure set up, and so I think the World Wildlife Foundation, when they were discussing production in Mississippi, said that California had access to a migratory labor force and in an arid climate you have a lot of sunshine and they have good soils. And so if they can control the water application, then through irrigation, then they can optimize for them the crop production. Whereas maybe you might have more pests and other things in more humid regions that may be more difficult to control. So a lot of things that need to be considered. You've done a lot of work in the Central Valley and we've done some there also. It's an interesting area and irrigation accounts for most of the water use for food production and the source of the irrigation water is important. Our finding was, during wet periods like 2010 and 2011, 70% of the water might have come from surface water, and then during the long-term drought, 2012 to 16 through 16 could be 70% groundwater. So can you talk a little bit about many of the other factors that go into crop production in California and what the future looks like there?
[00:21:42] Megan Konar: Yeah, California and the Central Valley is definitely a fascinating place when it comes to agriculture and water and yes, we were also interested in the California drought. We had done some work on just thinking about the aquifers around the US and how they were supporting our national food supply chains. And as we were doing this, the millennial drought was unfolding 2012 to 2016. And so we were wondering how that would impact our findings and so the drought meant that there was less precipitation available for farmers to grow their crops, and then as the drought progressed, it also meant that the extensive irrigation systems throughout California, eventually there were less surface supplies available for irrigation.That was particularly true in the southern part of the Central Valley, that because they have, they're typically junior water rights holders when it comes to surface irrigation down there. So we found that groundwater was a really important buffer to drought in the Central Valley.
So farmers were able to turn to groundwater for irrigation. That was an important way that they were adapting to the drought. But I'd say that wasn't, that's not the only way that farmers adapt or change their behavior during a drought. So two other important things that they could do. Farmers were fallowing their fields. So if farmers didn't have enough water through their irrigation, their surface irrigation supplies, or through their access to groundwater, they could fallow fields, and then they would often grow more high value crops on their remaining fields. So this might mean switching from certain perennial crops like hay, which tends to be pretty low economic value, but use a lot of water. Instead, they might be switching to a higher economic value crop, some nut trees or fruit trees or vineyards where they would get more dollar per drop of water. So from a farmer's perspective, they were optimizing their revenue for the amount of water that they were using, which is great water in that situation is a scarce resource. So you want it to be used in a economically efficient way, but you know, in a way that led to what's called drought hardening. So since there was a good amount of, transitioning from field crops to these perennial crops, there's been a lot of investment in planting these crops, and then they can't be fallowed in future droughts.
So now there's been often tens of thousands of dollars invested in these tree crops, getting these other crops planted. And so then when there is a future drought, the farmer is going to want to irrigate. They're not gonna wanna fallow that. So it makes the agricultural system as a whole a bit less flexible when a future drought hits. But in general, those were some of the changes we found. But then in the end, it was really the changing crop mix, coupled with the ability to pump more groundwater that enabled supply chains to keep operating from the Central Valley.
[00:24:51] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And I think Jay Lund at Univ. California Davis mentioned that because they could move the water to the higher value crops than the economic impacts of the drought were not as great as what you might anticipate if they hadn't done that. But also in the past, I've spoken with the people in the Arvin Edison Irrigation District, and they've been doing aquifer recharge, managed aquifer recharge since the sixties with spreading basins. And when they have wet years, then they try to recharge the aquifer. And then during a drought, they can rely on that water.
And so, and they also have a water market. So when they sell water during a drought year, they might sell it for higher prices in the spring so that the higher value crop users would get it and then reduce the price through the summer, so lower value users could use it. So that's kind of another concept, but I often hear about this thing about the economic efficiency and moving to higher value crops.
And then I think, when I was visiting Australia, well maybe all they will grow is all they will have is vineyards and maybe we will have to just drink wine and forget about eating. But, it's an interesting concept. So who's going to produce the lower value crops? And with California, it's either a drought or a flood.
The same as with us in Texas here, we're either in drought or a flood. So in 2017 then they had those atmospheric rivers and had flooding issues. And the same this year, a lot of atmospheric rivers and flooding. So they're grappling with drought or flooding all the time it seems like.
And another, you often look at the water footprint aspects, and I, I don't know if listeners would be that familiar with that concept. It includes beef, it has a very high water footprint, maybe 1800 gallons per pound of beef or, and maybe 500 gallons per pound of chicken or 35 gallons for a cup of coffee.
Maybe you can explain that concept a little bit and maybe the water footprint concept is expanding now, not just to consider how much water is used to produce these things, but also what is the impact on the water resources where these things are being produced.
[00:27:08] Megan Konar:. Yeah, so the water footprint concept is related to pretty much any footprint. A lot of people have heard of carbon footprints, so it's a very similar concept where it's the amount of water, so typically the volume of water per unit of what you're producing. So like you mentioned, it might be the amount of water per hamburger. Or could be the amount of water to grow corn in a field. Yeah. The volume of water that goes into a product. And when we're thinking about agriculture, the vast majority of the water that that we use is evapotranspiration when the crops are growing in the field. So yeah, there's two main types of water use. One is withdrawal water use which, irrigation is, but then it also is what we call consumed, where most of it evapotranspires.
So it's no longer available to the water source that it was taken from. So agriculture globally and within the US has the largest consumptive water use, and that's what we use to calculate the water footprint. Typically, how much water was evaporated to produce this product and it could apply to industrial products, a variety of products.
Most work has been done on agriculture because it's less cumbersome to calculate and want the most important user of water. But as you mentioned, yes, there's lots of other tools and methods to quantify water throughout full production chains. Tools like lifecycle assessment, input-output analysis.
These are other quantitative methods to calculate as items are being further refined and processed, transported, packaged. What is the water throughout that full life cycle of getting the item to consumers so that they can buy it. So yeah, water footprint could cover the whole range, or it could sometimes just focus on just the agricultural stage, but, but there's a lot of active work in this area right now.
But yeah, I will just say, and there's also the water footprint looks at the volume, but then there's also now been a lot of work thinking about the different sources of water that go into producing products. So, and it's I wish if I could go back in time, I would do carbon footprints, because they're in a way much simpler than water footprints, because the carbon emissions are evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere.
So we can pretty easily compare the carbon footprint of different things, and it's pretty well understood that it's bad to have a high carbon footprint but water, unfortunately, is a bit more complex. Where something was produced, what source of water was used to produce it is quite important.
So if something has a high water footprint, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You might have used rainfall to grow rain-fed corn in Africa. Small holder agricultural systems tend to be rain-fed, so they might have a relatively higher water footprint and I wouldn't think that would be problematic.
But then, yeah, if you start thinking about water that's withdrawn from rivers or aquifers or groundwater resources, that's known to have what's called like a higher opportunity cost. So those water sources could have been used for other things, for other industrial uses, for water supplies, for cities. So when we were thinking about supplied water and then in particular, unsustainable supplied water, that's where I think, the water footprint concept can really lend some value because if you have a very high unsustainable volume of water being used to produce your goods, that's more problematic.
[00:31:06] Bridget Scanlon: Right. Many years ago I was doing a lecture tour and I focused a lot on the water footprint and said we should all be vegetarians, but then later I kind of revised my ideas about that because should I be eating almonds from California when they're in a drought and it takes about a gallon of water to produce an almond? Or maybe I should be eating beef from Nebraska where groundwater levels have remained fairly stable over the last several decades, and the US Geological Survey has been monitoring that. so you are, you are correct, and I really like your comparison with the carbon footprint. There's lots of differences between those things, and we have to kind of understand the nuances. Then it makes it more difficult to make blanket statements.
[00:31:52] Megan Konar: A complicated thing with footprints is if you were to, you could normalize the water volume by a variety of things. It could be the water volume per mass produced; the water volume per dollar value produced could also look at the water volume per calorie or protein. So there's some people who you know are arguing that if you look at the water volume per nutritional contribution, that animal products and beef might actually not be relatively as bad as we think. So it's an interesting discussion.
[00:32:26] Bridget Scanlon: Right.. And also in some of your work then you look at policies and stuff and their impacts on food security or water impacts.
And one of the things that some of your studies analyzed was the impact of crop insurance. And I think some of those findings may be a bit counterintuitive, and maybe you can explain what that work resulted in.
[00:32:49] Megan Konar: Sure. Yeah. So I think when we're dealing with human systems, it's important if we're going to try to look at the causal impact of something on a variable that we care about, say water use or water sustainability, I think we can really learn a lot from the field of economics where they've thought through causa causal inference, trying to figure out the causal impact of x on y when you're in an economic setting. It's called econometrics. And the reason this is really problematic or important to think about when you're dealing with humans, unlike purely physical systems or climatological systems like we might be more familiar with in hydrology, if you're just looking at physical systems, the correlations between the variables can often go pretty far in telling you what variable is causing other variables to change. But when you're thinking about humans, you can't just look at the simple correlations because humans select into different behaviors. They adapt and change. And so you have to think about, what's called selection bias.
And so this is true in this research paper where we wanted to look at the causal impact of crop insurance on water use. So if you think about it, but if you were just to look at the data on farmers with crop insurance and farmers without crop insurance and say, how do they use data differently? You can't just do that because the farmers who choose to buy crop insurance are going to be inherently different to farmers who do not buy crop insurance.
So you have selection bias. So the farmers who choose to buy crop insurance are likely gonna have bigger, bigger fields, probably more machinery, maybe more money. So they'll purchase the crop insurance and they are probably different to maybe more small scale farmers who might have smaller land and and less inputs.
So you have to try to account for this. And so, yeah, I worked with an economist colleague, Tatiana, and we used a method called Instrumental Variables where we tried to then really pin down the causal impact. And yeah, this could have gone either way. We, before we did this, we weren't quite sure because water is not priced typically where we're thinking, but we did find that crop insurance leads farmers to use more water. And when we thought about it more and read a bit more in the crop insurance literature, It makes sense because insurance companies want to make sure that farmers are taking good care of their crops before they'll be willing to pay them the insurance. So the farmers have to prove basically that they've irrigated their crops properly, they've done everything right so that they're worthy recipients of getting the crop insurance.
So that's why when the farmers are going to claim for crop insurance, they might irrigate even more than they might otherwise because they want to ensure that they get that insurance payout.
[00:35:48] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, it's very interesting and I remember many years ago talking to people at the US Geological Survey who were working on water use and they were evaluating water use in Alabama, and they indicated that some of the banks were requiring the farmers to have irrigation so they would increase the reliability of their yield. And then of course, once you install the irrigation system and you've invested in it, you are going to use it more. And so many of these policies and economic factors can impact food production and water use.
So it's very interesting. So Megan, we've talked a lot about different things, food trade and crop production and water use and impacts on aquifers and stuff. So how do you see things going forward? I mean, globally, yet you've done a lot of analysis globally and you've done work in sub-Saharan Africa and stuff, so how do you see that?
We can try to increase food security and also do it more sustainably in considering Africa or the US or other regions.
[00:36:58] Megan Konar: Yeah, that's a good question. And I am heartened and have a pretty positive outlook going forward, especially seeing the huge disruptions that national and global food supply chains and other supply chains really we were faced with during the pandemic and during some of the recent climate extremes and wars. I think they've withstood pretty well and they've shown that these complex networks are inherently stable and that the ability to have this interconnected web of producers and consumers and a variety of intermediaries really adds to our resilience and makes our system more stable.
That being said, I think the focus now to make sure that we have sustainable resilience so that we are using resources sustainably. We want to kind of balance and make sure that we're not reducing our resilience while moving towards sustainability. But at the same time, if we're not using water sustainably, we're at risk of long-term reducing our resilience.
So I think we want to think about these two goals in tandem and make sure that we keep interconnected stable network while also trying to make the production and and transport processes more sustainable.
[00:38:24] Bridget Scanlon: And of course we are all consumers of food and we all drink water and stuff. And so you think, what can a consumer do? We go to the grocery store and we look at the labels and we see, well, this is coming from X country or whatever, and water is being over, is being depleted there or whatever. We try to figure out some of these things and of course your, trade networks and your visualization tools are fantastic. So when you ask somebody, where did they get this? And they say what the store, they can understand a bit better where the food is coming from and going to. And I think that's great. And you've also started to look at industry, the food industry, and I don't think we can rely on consumers to help with sustainability or resilience maybe, but maybe the food industry.
If we could, work with them more. And I think some groups are working with them quite a bit to try to make their practices more sustainable. Maybe you can describe a little bit about your experience with talking with some of those groups.
[00:39:26] Megan Konar: Yeah, I think it's, it's a good, good question and something I always yeah think about. but at the end of the day, some sustainability challenges I think would be hard to solve with consumer labeling and through consumer pressure efforts, because the sustainable use of a common pool resource, like groundwater, so groundwater is a common pool resource where there's not currently private or public ownership.
So you can't exclude others from using this resource. So trying to move towards a sustainable use of a common pool resource, it's a collective action problem. So that's something that no individual consumer or person can really address just by changing their own purchasing behavior. But yeah, I think, there's a role for companies if they realize that this is something that's important to their consumers, they can work, maybe more directly with all their producers and have a variety of tracking mechanisms.
I know. This hasn't necessarily happened in water, but this has happened more with sustainable forestry coming out of the rainforest. For example, there's been a large consumer push for ensuring that forest products are being sustainably harvested, and so there's a lot of tracking and mapping and companies are doing a lot of ensuring that they're sustainably harvesting timber. So, yeah, I think it would require an industry-wide sort of working with producers to meet consumers interest in this.
Right, and I think you mentioned forestry, and also I'm familiar with the, on the energy side that they have responsibly sourced gas and they have companies developing metrics. And then if the producers then meet those standards, then they can get different labels or whatever, or maybe have a different market or a bigger market, or especially in Europe, for natural gas and liquid natural gas. So it's an interesting concept and it would be nice to sort of close the loop and your research is improving all of our understanding on where food is coming from, where it's going to, and its impacts and sustainability. And I think, if we could get companies to do more of that, then maybe we'll have more information and maybe we would never get out of the store because we'd be wondering what we should or should not buy.
I think, I think it would be information overload if you too much of this burden on consumers, but I will mention that, yeah. Some producers in the High Plains have actually come together in, in some small areas and said that they want to form a coordinated body and work together to reduce their pumping and not use the groundwater unsustainably because they're interested in the long-term viability of the groundwater. They want their kids and their grandkids to be able to farm the way that they've been farming. So it's also part of their communities and it's in their best interest to use the water sustainably. So there are, there are some really exciting developments, I'd say happening in the High Plains where it's now a collective program, and in California there's a statewide groundwater management plan. So, Those, basins will also be moving towards sustainable groundwater use,
[00:42:58] Bridget Scanlon: right Yeah. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California and the farming groups in Western Kansas. They're great examples. And lastly, considering food security, I mean, I think if you look at the millennium development goals or sustainable development goals, you see a lot of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Are food insecure and going forward then, I don't think they can rely on trades solely, so they will have to try to close the yield gap.
And I know you have some students working in some of those countries and maybe we will need to increase irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa to try to improve food security there. What are your students working on there at the moment?
[00:43:46] Megan Konar: Yeah, Africa is very interesting because they, are typically small holder farming systems. So they have very small plots of land and they typically are rain fed, so they're reliant on the vagaries of weather. And they often have very minimal infrastructure. They store the maze that they harvest for pretty much the whole lean season on site, at their, at their houses. So, so yeah, my group we're interested in understanding, basically, yeah, targeted ways that we can improve food security, improve the stability of maze and cassava supply chains that we're working in Zambia.
But interested in all of Africa and there, I know there's a lot of other researchers and groups working on ways to close the yield gaps to improve food security. And so we're interested in what other interventions in the food system could be made that could make significant improvements in, in particular infrastructure.
So what infrastructure investments could we make in Zambia where the roads are very poor and you often can't, it's not very easy to move maize or cassava around the country. So how much can improving transportation infrastructure, improve food security? And where would we wanna target? Building roads.
[00:45:08] Megan Konar: Same with storage, where, how much could storage, if you could, store maze from a bumper season to a lean season, how much could that improve? Could improve food security? And then where would we wanna source the storage? And then the same for irrigation. Irrigation would be very helpful in some cases to, so farmers could.
Water their crops when there is a drought. So yeah, so we're looking at that portfolio of infrastructure. How much improvements can we get for food security and how does that compare to yield gaps? or closing yield gaps. So that's something we're very interested in. what, if we take a suite of all these adaptation ways to adapt, how far can we go?
[00:45:52] Bridget Scanlon: I think that's fantastic. And I think with expansion of renewable energy and solar energy in Africa, in these rural areas that may help with refrigeration and food storage and, also transportation. I mean always. when I think about economics, I think supply and demand. And so resolving disconnects in those through storage and transport and with increasing energy access, in rural areas, I think that will also help.
Well, is there anything else that you would like to add to our conversation today? I know you did work on trade openness and showed that, that actually reduced water use. That was a very interesting analysis. Maybe you could just briefly touch on that and then maybe we can close up.
[00:46:37] Megan Konar: Sure. Yeah. So again, yeah, trying to answer the question of what is the causal impact of trade on water use. We were also interested in the causal impact of trade on nutrient use. So we turned to tools from econometrics again to try to. Really get at that causal link. And we found when we looked at those studies that trade actually doesn't lead us to use more water.It, it doesn't necessarily reduce how much water we use, but it doesn't increase how much water we use, which is, important. So, here, if we're thinking about. A lot of the studies quantify the amount of water embedded in supply chains or trade, but that's, those are important accounting studies, but it doesn't necessarily tell you the impact of trade on water use.
So what you really wanna know is how much water would the world be using if there was no trade? And so there, it's not like countries are gonna stop using water if they're not trading. You're still gonna be growing food for your own domestic populations. So you're trying to really kind of tease out, if there is no trade, the world's still gonna be growing food.
Consuming food is just not gonna be trading. So do we find that the world would be in terms of water, do we find that trade impacts leads to more or less water use? And we found that, that it just doesn't have a significant impact on using more water. So that was heartening. So I think that just further reinforces that trade can be an important to the resilience of our global food system.
[00:48:15] Bridget Scanlon: Well, thank you so much. Our guest today was Megan Connor from the University of Illinois, and currently in sabbatical at Oxford. I'm hugely impressed with your work, Megan, that you and your group do, and really appreciate all the insights we get from your combining water, hydrology, food production, economics, and network analysis.
It's really amazing. So thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed the rest of your sabbatical.
[00:48:42] Megan Konar: Thank you, Bridget. Thanks for the invitation and also always been inspired and impressed by your group. Great, great groundwater studies.
[00:48:51] Bridget Scanlon: Take care. Bye-bye.
