What Is Virtual Water?

We use water in various ways such as drinking, bathroom and other things.

What are the scenes people use water?

What Is Virtual Water?

Virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food or other products needed for its production.
Japan imports food from all over the world. For example, Japan imports bananas from Philippines. We do not expect we use water, but people in Philippines used water to grow the bananas.
It means Japan ‘indirectly’ used water from this import.
This is the concept of virtual water.
Virtual water also occurs in industrial products import, while agricultural crops imports account for the largest amount of virtual water imports.

Quantity of Water Required for Food Production

The figure below shows the quantity of water required to produce 1kg food.
Beef needs a lot of water. For example, the quantity of water required to produce 1kg beef is 15,500 litter and poultry is 3,918 litter.
Among all kinds of meat, beef needs water the most because a lot of water is required when producing animal feed such as corn.

Black,M. King.J. (2010). The atlas of water (Oki. T & Oki. A, Trans.). Tokyo: Maruzen(original work published 2009)