The Politics and Consequences of Virtual Water Export

Abstract

Virtual water is the water used or contaminated to produce a good or a service. With the large increase of export of agricultural produce during the last decades the amount of virtual water export has grown as well. Increased water contamination and water extraction for export from relative dry areas affects local ecosystems and communities. Simultaneously, the increased virtual water trade has weakened the local control over water resources by local communities, to the expense of multinational agribusiness and retailer companies. This repatterning of water control is fomented by numerous national governments, and at the same time contested by local communities. Partly as reaction to the critics on water depletion, agribusiness and retailers have created a number of water stewardship standards. Notwithstanding the possibilities for local communities to articulate their demands with these standards, until now most water stewardship standards have had littleor even negative -effects.Keywords Virtual water Á Agro-export Á Communities Á Water stewardship Á Contestation Virtual water represents the water used and contaminated to produce a product or service. Virtual water can be seen as "embedded" in products. It is an indicator of the amount of fresh water that evaporated or was contaminated during the production and transport of a product. Though the concept has been framed recently (e.g., Allan 1998), obviously, the practice of "virtual water trade" is as old as people have engaged in trade relations. Ancient empires as the Roman traded and transported large volumes of food throughout their territory and thereby, implicitly, conveyed huge quantities of virtual water across geographical scales (Dermody et al. 2014).

Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers of Water Justice Struggles

“…Producers' compliance with production standards is monitored by third-party private audit companies that usually inspect production facilities once a year. Competition between the various standards and also among the audit companies contributes to superfi cial inspections and permissive enforcement (Vos and Boelens, 2016 ).…”