The water footprints reveal immensely important knowledge on the dependence of water imports and thus political dependence. As it is well-known, agricultural trade like wheat for example is highly political. VW and the WF can and do serve as a tool in foreign-policy decision-making of trade dependent countries to diversify their portfolio. Unfortunately, you do not even take the political factors into account.
The label you attach to the WF as 'meaningless' is highly uninformed. You only throw a very thin slice of the cake to the general audience but fail to even acknowledge that there are other factors to consider. Using 'society' as a reference point is somewhat comical because you do not specify the geographical origin. For example, a society like Yemen or Saudi Arabia has very little problems to provide pesticides, fertilizers, labour, farm equipment and even capital. However, both economies lack water resources to match food production with population growth. Agricultural trade informs us to what extent the two economies depend on which countries to import food. This often coincides with politically motivated food aid shipments, preferential trade agreements. The WFs can serve as a formidable tool to escape from political coercion by diversifying the portfolio of food imports using the vw/wf argument.
I often wish you would take on other indicators such as GDP forecasts in a similar way. Governments across the world plan their budgets according to possibly indicative numbers suggested by their economic planning departments.
Dear Dr Wichelns,
The water footprints reveal immensely important knowledge on the dependence of water imports and thus political dependence. As it is well-known, agricultural trade like wheat for example is highly political. VW and the WF can and do serve as a tool in foreign-policy decision-making of trade dependent countries to diversify their portfolio. Unfortunately, you do not even take the political factors into account.
The label you attach to the WF as 'meaningless' is highly uninformed. You only throw a very thin slice of the cake to the general audience but fail to even acknowledge that there are other factors to consider. Using 'society' as a reference point is somewhat comical because you do not specify the geographical origin. For example, a society like Yemen or Saudi Arabia has very little problems to provide pesticides, fertilizers, labour, farm equipment and even capital. However, both economies lack water resources to match food production with population growth. Agricultural trade informs us to what extent the two economies depend on which countries to import food. This often coincides with politically motivated food aid shipments, preferential trade agreements. The WFs can serve as a formidable tool to escape from political coercion by diversifying the portfolio of food imports using the vw/wf argument.
I often wish you would take on other indicators such as GDP forecasts in a similar way. Governments across the world plan their budgets according to possibly indicative numbers suggested by their economic planning departments.
Best
Martin