10% Of Planet's Crops Irrigated By Sewage - New Scientist

[hatrack]

tenth of the world’s irrigated crops - everything from lettuce and tomatoes to mangoes and coconuts - are watered by sewage. And much of that sewage is raw and untreated, gushing direct from sewer pipes into fields at the fringes of the developing world’s great megacities, reveals the first global survey of the hidden practice of waste-water irrigation.

And, however much consumers may squirm, farmers like it that way. Because the stinking, lumpy and pathogen-rich sewage is rich in nitrates and phosphates that fertilise crops free of charge, suggests the survey presented at the Stockholm Water Symposium on Tuesday.

“Wastewater irrigation is in an institutional no-man’s land,” said Chris Scott of the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute, co-editor of the study. “Water, health and agriculture ministries in many countries outlaw the practice, but refuse to recognise that it is widespread.”

He estimates that 20 million hectares of the world’s farms are irrigated with sewage. A quarter of Pakistan’s vegetables, including salad crops, are grown in sewage effluent, the study found. And business is booming. One farmer in the heart of an un-named West African city grows 12 crops of lettuce a year from his sewage farm. In many fast-growing megacities, clean water is in desperately short supply, where sewage is plentiful. And the sewage pipes keep flowing even in the dry season, when irrigation canals often dry up."

EDIT

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996297&lpos=home1

[Maple]

1. Hey, they're

organically grown.

[RobertSeattle]

2. What next - Mushrooms grown in manure?

:evilgrin: