By 2025, a third of the world's population will be facing acute water shortages and farmers, academics and governments must work together to solve the problem, global experts said on Thursday. Seventy percent of global water usage is taken up by agriculture and using water efficiently is seen as key in preventing serious shortages, with experts studying river basins across the world for clues to boost food production. "We need to find ways of using water more efficiently so as to produce more food using the same water or even less," Jonathon Woolley, co-ordinator for the Sri Lanka based Challenge Programme on Water and Food, which is funded by international donors and the World Bank, told a Johannesburg news conference. In southern Africa, academics from Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are studying ways of using water more effectively in the Limpopo river basin, where inefficient subsistence agriculture leaves many reliant on food aid. There was no point in just looking at one country and ignoring effects up and downstream, he said. Increased demand would put pressure on a finite resource if countries and organisations did not work together. Researchers will look at the effectiveness of strategies such as using different seed varieties, better fertilisers, farming techniques and low-level irrigation projects to boost agricultural output -- an attempt to get "more crop per drop". --More 2042 Local Time 1742 GMT
