The large majority of the water used (2/3) is for 'green water', AKA rainfall. If the rainfall wasn't used by the sugar cane, it would probably have been used by another plant occupying almost exactly the same ecological niche.

Blue water is groundwater (1/4) and you may be able to say the same thing about it. Some blue water comes from underground acquifiers, so pumping may be bad thing if you're pumping faster than it replenishes; others is pulled up by the root system so is completely natural.

8% is grey water, water required to flush fertilizer and other pollutants. That sounds bad, but it too is often part of the natural water cycle.

Most of the problematic water usage is caused by irrigation. Sugar cane & beet can and is produced without irrigation, but doing so requires more land usage and possibly extra fertilizer. In other words, it's a matter of trade-offs.

Adding some corn facts, as it's how most American soda is sweetened.

90% of the land area used for growing corn is not irrigated (100% green water) and in this case it's no trade off. It's not irrigated because there is adequate rainfall.

It's not 100% green water since the fertilizer usage will contaminate some runoff, making some water "grey".

Right! Here in Iowa we water the corn the way God intended, by waiting for it to fall from the sky for free. I can always tell when flying to CA when I get into Nebraska, those huge 'crop circles' formed by irrigation start to show up.

Even in droughts?

In Indiana most corn fields have some movable watering things (like http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/field-irrigation-system-34543...). They don't get used much, but in a few week dry spell they might get used for a day to keep the corn alive.

On the western fringes of Iowa in some places, yes. For most of Iowa there is no irrigation.

Nobody has nothing. Rain or not, the corn is on its own.

Besides which, that water isn't lost; in the Netherlands, it either sinks into the soil to eventually become ground water again (after which it's reused), or it ends up in the sea via canals and rivers. It's not like we have a water shortage in NL, not yet anyway. Besides ground water, there are several rivers passing through NL coming from the Alps, sometimes to the point of overflowing.

Really, the only thing wasteful would be the energy needed to pump up and distribute the water. But we get some of the most efficient farmland in return, without harming anyone (unlike e.g. the US that caused the dustbowl thanks to overly aggressive farming)

edit: also that's only when irrigation is actually needed, we get our fair share of rain.

Scientifically-speaking, is any water "lost"? Thinking back to those pictures of plains and mountains with a big circular arrow in my seventh grade science textbook: couldn't you say that even the water used by crops, turned into coke, and consumed by humans is eventually returned the ecosystem in some form or another?

It's "lost" if it's taken from where it's needed (the water table near farm land, for instance) to where it isn't (the ocean).

In plenty of areas where water is needed, the time it would take for the big circular arrow "water cycle" to replenish it is so long, it should be considered a finite resource.

Ars Technica had a great article about this a few years back, likening "peak water" to "peak oil": http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/05/not-just-oil-us-hit-p...

Water vapor is lost to the vacuum of space, though it's obviously not enough to make a perceptible difference, at least on a human scale.

...and replenished from space through slushball comets!

(Almost?) All water on Earth came from a comet, pretty amazing when you think about it.

Extremely. I just can't reconcile the fact that all this water came from multiple comet impacts. It somehow feels wrong.

...and if even one of the trillion comets over a billion years had some spore or cell frozen inside...

The reason U.S. farmers created the dustbowl was, in part, because they were immigrants from the European temperate forest biome and had no idea how to farm properly in the grasslands of the American west.

The Dutch are not master farmers, you are just in a fairly moist climate and the culture has been relatively uninterrupted due to political strength that you obtained through the plunder of the developing world. I don't think your water security is anything to be proud of. How is water security in the former Dutch colonies these days?

Water isn't lost, but water is polluted. And when you put water into the groundwater then it mixes with heavily polluted water from, among other things, agriculture. The Dutch farms may be efficient, but they are definitely polluting.

"In the Netherlands water pollution originating from agriculture is an important environmental concern. While recent trends indicate that the pressure from farming on water quality is diminishing, absolute levels of pollution remain amongst the highest across the OECD (Figures 2-5). Agriculture is the major source of nutrients, pesticides and the only known source of heavy metals in water. Pollution from endocrine disrupters and veterinary medicines in terms of potential impacts on human and wildlife reproductive systems is also a concern. The total external costs of agricultural water pollution are unknown, but in the late 1990s the annual external costs of eutrophication associated with nitrate emissions was estimated at €600 million (US$540 million), and for treating drinking water polluted with nitrates at an annual cost of €23 million (US$21 million)."

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07900627.2010.53...

> ends up in the sea via canals and rivers

That water is "lost" by any practical definition. For humans to use it again, it would have to be desalinated, which is expensive.

It's desalinated by becoming rain again.

We are discovering in California that that rain does not always fall back where the water was taken.

California's discovering that pretty late compared to much of the rest of the world.

Southern india is also taking their time. There is no such thing as a too deep well.

I don't think the amount of rain increases by pumping more fresh water to the oceans.

So what?

One way in which water can and does get 'lost' is river depletion. Colorado river doesn't reach the sea anymore, human demand is greater than its flow. Here's an interesting article about it: http://www.outsideonline.com/1928261/day-we-set-colorado-riv...

>sweetened with beet sugar.

Not in the US. Its corn syrup or an artificial sweeter. Curious to know if corn's water footprint is more or less than sugar beet.

I guess there's a larger issue here on how water like this isn't truly lost or in competition for human drinking water. Its part of a natural cycle of rainwater, runoff, and back into the aquifers or evaporated. A better metric is the real cost of irrigation for those farms. There are a lot of practical areas to grow corn or sugar beet. Those areas are rich in water, so its not a big deal if you use that much water for argiculture. Water heavy farming in the midwest is different than water heavy farming in California.

The parent post has numbers for HFCS too.