Food and Virtual Water in the Great Lakes States

Abstract

The virtual water content of food needs to be understood and regulated, due to the vast amount of water involved in food production. Virtual water is the total amount of water used to produce a product. Such water consumption has been coined “virtual,” because the water use is hidden, embedded in the production of the product. For example, it takes approximately 119 gallons of water to produce one ear of corn. The virtual water content required to produce the corn is largely invisible to the consumer.

As water scarcity increasingly affects food security, negotiations over water rights, allocations, and exports will become more contentious. The quantification is insufficient to prevent conflict, especially in times of scarcity. Legal mechanisms must be in place to address the emerging concept of virtual water and to provide protection against inadvertently diminishing the water commons via agricultural trade.

The purpose of this Article is to illuminate discussion of virtual water in food. We focus this analysis on the Great Lakes states because this is a significant agricultural region for the United States and there is an existing legal structure in place that governs the shared use of Great Lakes waters under the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact.

This Article provides first-of-its-kind calculations of the quantity of virtual water being exported from the Great Lakes region via agriculture. These data show that the Great Lakes region is a net exporter of virtual water through its agricultural production and export. We analyze these data in light of the existing legal framework for managing the waters of the Great Lakes Basin and discuss the potential for existing laws to address the net water loss in the Great Lakes region resulting from exports of virtual water through food production. Through this analysis we identify complex, and largely unanswered, questions for policymakers, and make normative recommendations for how the law should evolve to simultaneously promote sustainable water use and food security.