Replacing Imports of Crop Based Commodities by Domestic Production in Finland: Potential to Reduce Virtual Water Imports
2018
Global
water scarcityis a severe threat facing humanity today and it is expected to become even more alarming in the future. Agriculture is the biggest user of freshwater and large volumes of embedded
virtual waterin food products are traded through the global
food systemannually. Although Finland has vast water resources, it imports large quantities of
virtual water– partly from countries suffering from
water scarcity. In this article, we present a novel combination of the
virtual waterstudy together with an analysis of the potential reallocation of the outsourced production of rice, soybeans and
rapeseed, from the water
resource-efficiencypoint of view. To assess how Finland could reduce the outsourced water consumption by these three crops, we evaluated Finland’s potential to replace their imports with local comparable products: domestic barley and oats,
field peasand faba beans, and
rapeseed, respectively. This replacement would both potentially ease the global pressure on already stressed regions and increase the agricultural diversity of the local agricultural systems. We found that by replacing the imports of the selected crops, considering the realistic potential in Finland, up to 16% of the
blue waterand almost 30% of the green water embedded in crop imports could be reduced. Although Finland is a minor player in the global
food markets, our study presents a highly relevant case of how an industrialized country, with a relatively small population, can contribute to the sustainability of
food systemsglobally.
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