The water-land-food nexus of natural rubber production

Abstract

The increasing global demand for natural rubber (100% increase in the last 15 years) is for most part met by Malaysia and Indonesia, and e to a lesser extent e other countries in SouthEast Asia and Africa. The consequent expansion of rubber plantation has often occurred at the expenses of agricultural land for staple crops, particularly in SouthEast Asia, where 90% of the land suitable for agriculture is already under cultivation. Here we investigate the extent to which the ongoing increase in rubber production is competing with the food system and affecting the livelihoods of rural communities living in the production areas and their appropriation of natural resources, such as water. We also investigate to what extent the expansion of rubber plantations is taking place through large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and evaluate the impacts on rural communities. Our results show how rubber production needs more than 10 million ha of fertile land and up to 136e149 Â 10 9 m 3 y À1 of freshwater (125 Â 10 9 m 3 y À1 of green water and 11e24 Â 10 9 m 3 y À1 of blue water). These resources would be sufficient to produce enough food to significantly reduce malnourishment in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam if replaced by rice production. Overall, natural rubber production has important environmental, social, and economic impacts. Indeed, despite their ability to bring employment and increase the average income of economically disadvantaged areas, rubber plantations may threaten the local water and food security and induce a loss of rural livelihoods e particularly when the new plantations result from LSLAs that displace semi-subsistence forms of production e thereby forcing the local populations to depend on global food markets.

The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus

“…Competition in water use for food and energy security constitutes the core of an emerging debate on the food‐energy‐water (FEW) nexus: the growing societal needs for food and energy rely on the same pool of limited freshwater resources, a situation that is generating new questions on the environmental, ethical, economics, and policy implications of human appropriation of water resources. The FEW nexus is an emerging research focus for natural and social scientists who are exploring the impact of water limitations on the production of energy and food (Jones et al, ; Rulli et al, ; Scanlon et al, ), and the extent to which the human pressure on the global freshwater system is expected to increase in response to the growing demand for food and energy (Chiarelli et al, ; Grafton et al, ). Although advancements have been made in terms of understanding linkages among FEW systems (e.g., Biggs et al, ; Jones et al, ; Liu et al, ; Ringler et al, ; Smajgl et al, ) and working toward integrated modeling (Bazilian et al, ; McCarl et al, ), the highly interdisciplinary nature of FEW research has resulted in somewhat disparate clusters of FEW studies.…”

The green and blue crop water requirement WATNEEDS model and its global gridded outputs

“…To date, most temporal studies of water use in agriculture have concentrated on national, regional, or basin scales (e.g., refs. 8 – 10 ) or examined the agricultural sector as whole (e.g., refs. 9 , 11 ) and have rarely captured the intra-national and intra-annual dynamics of water demand and availability.…”

Hydrological consequences of natural rubber plantations in Southeast Asia

“…Natural rubber is a tropical tree with high water requirements that are usually met by rainfall (i.e., GW) (Mekonnen & Hoekstra, 2011;Chiarelli et al, 2017). The monsoonal climate of Southeast Asia typically provides only part of the water needed to meet the annual water requirement of rubber trees.…”