Breaking the Cycle: The Nexus Approach to Water Scarcity, Pollution, and Food Production

Water demand is increasing at a higher rate than the population growth (Oki and Kanae, 2006) and there is a critical need to reappraise perspectives on urban water and wastewater management. Globally, around 20 million hectares of agricultural area is under wastewater irrigation (Hamilton et al., 2007). In the developing world, especially in South Asia wastewater irrigation is a common livelihood practice. Farmers around the urban agglomerations continuously depend on the wastewater released from nearby urban centres (Qadir et al., 2010), which is untreated or partially treated or diluted wastewater and also sometimes it is a mixture of industrial wastewater (Amerasinghe et al., 2009). The scant data on wastewater generation, treatment and reuse in the developing world makes it difficult to understand the fluxes and processes in peri-urban systems (Minhas and Samra, 2004). There is a need to take advantage of emerging scientific methods for evaluating the wastewater reuse options for sustainable crop production and groundwater management (Minhas and Samra, 2004; Qadir et al., 2010).