Re:Average water use per person*day by country
by sentenza on Sunday February 02, 2014 @02:57PM
(#7167285)
So explain Spain. They have massive farming operations in a rather dry area and yet use significantly less water than the US. A significant portion of the vegetables and fruits in any grocery store here in Germany come from Spain.
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Re:Average water use per person*day by country
by sgk284 on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:08PM
(#7167342)
Every square meter of Spain could be farmland and the United States would still have 3.5x as much farmland (that is, Spain's total landarea is less than a third of the United State's cropland).
As it stands, the United States has about an order of magnitude more cropland than Spain[1].
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=farmland+in+united+stat...
Re:Average water use per person*day by country
by kalleboo on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:36PM
(#7167478)
You'd need to look at farmland per capita to interpret the original numbers, not just total farmland.
Re:Average water use per person*day by country
by sgk284 on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:10PM
(#7167597)
Not sure that's fair if the United States is exporting a larger percentage of it's agriculture (as in, that water is indirectly being consumed by other nations). So we'd need to account for who exports / imports from each nation.
Regardless, the United States has 1.4x as much cropland per capita, which already accounts for a good portion of the 1.8x increase in water usage per capita.