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Water, food security and human dignity: a nutrition perspective

This FAO Committee discussion paper highlights the key role of water for food security, globally and for different groups. Climate change projections suggest many regions will become drier and hotter, and droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe. Population growth will most likely largely be in poor parts of the world where agriculture is the main source of livelihood, but where yields are low, partly due to uncertainty in water supply. Elevated risk and other challenges apply both for the part of agriculture that has access to irrigation, and even more for farmers who depend on increasingly uncertain rainfall. The paper analyses ’Society’s New Normal’ as an inconvenient truth of global water resources and the rapid increase in groundwater extraction.