The geographer Tony Allan, who has died aged 84, transformed the way governments and businesses think about water, with implications for everything from eating breakfast to international trade. He did it through devising the concept of virtual water – the water “embedded” through being consumed in the production of food, clothing and industrial goods.
Trade in agricultural products – which account for 70-90% of global water consumption – enables arid countries to alleviate water scarcity by “importing” virtual water. Tony’s analysis challenged the entrenched engineering, economic and political approaches to the management of water. He showed that, above all, it is farmers who manage this critical resource, and fought to dispel the myth that countries may go to war over water: it is always cheaper to trade.
Tony’s extensive experience in north Africa and the Middle East demonstrated that arid countries actively averted conflict by importing water-intensive agricultural products. The quantities involved are substantial: it takes a tonne of water to grow just one kilogram of wheat, a staple food in many countries. Meat has the highest footprint, requiring more than 15 tonnes of water to grow the feed to produce a kilogram of beef. Upon finding this, Tony became a vegetarian overnight.
Having presented the idea of “embedded” water in the 1980s, he developed the term virtual water at a conference in 1994 to describe the connections between water resources, food and international trade. His insights were not always immediately welcomed by powerful vested interests. Scientific and policy debates at the time focused on technical solutions: irrigation, reservoir capacity and deeper wells.
But Tony argued that this narrow focus was both insufficient and counterproductive: increased irrigation leads to agricultural expansion, ultimately increasing water consumption. He sought the best insights from all constituencies, including those with whom he disagreed, and showed that while water scarcity is a local problem, its solutions are global.
Tony was a great convener. He brought together farmers, hydrologists, economists, CEOs, engineers and political scientists for spirited debates over the ethics, science and shortcomings of food and political systems. Deeply sympathetic to farmers, he saw them as being squeezed by complex power structures to produce “underpriced food for underpaid people”. He argued that food prices are kept artificially low by political and accounting systems that are blind to the ecological costs of production.
In his view businesses should account for water, just like labour. Without a radical change in the commodity trade systems, supply chains and consumer habits, society would face major future water and food challenges. He maintained that “we do not live in economies … we live in political economies” and that “good governance is when .com, .org and .gov work together for the good of society”.
Now his ideas underpin metrics such as the water footprints used by companies like Coca-Cola and Marks & Spencer to account for their impacts and dependencies on water resources. In the UK, learning about virtual water is part of the A-level geography syllabus.
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Tony was the second child of Mary (nee Simpson) and John Allan, a policeman. He attended Dame Allan’s boys’ school and gained a first-class geography degree at Durham University (1958). During the second year of his national service (1959-61) he was posted to the colony of Aden (now in Yemen) and neighbouring Oman as a junior officer running a survey team collecting map information.
In 1966 he embarked on research at the School of Oriental and African Studies, now Soas University of London, gaining a PhD five years later. With his lifelong friend and colleague, Keith McLachlan, and Edith Penrose he wrote Libya: Agriculture and Economic Development (1973).
He was involved in establishing the Society for Libyan Studies, produced a further book, Libya: The Experience of Oil (1981), and in 1986 chaired the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies conference. He was also a pioneer in the then emerging field of remote sensing, the gathering of geographical data through imagery captured by satellites.
Appointed professor at Soas in the early 1990s, he took up a position at King’s College London when his department moved to the King’s campus in 2001, and he continued to teach and research as an emeritus professor well beyond retirement in 2002. Six years later he was awarded the Stockholm water prize.
The information and arguments he presented in The Middle East Water Question: Hydropolitics and the Global Economy (2001) and The Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society (2019) provided the basis for his account for a wider readership, Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet’s Most Precious Resource (2011). He shared his time and thoughts with the next generation of researchers and professionals generously, challenging their ideas and pushing them to think critically.
A lifelong member of the Labour party, he felt that it lacked a clear stand on valuing the environment or on the different ways in which capitalism fails over labour and the environment.
He is survived by his partner, Mary O’Shea.
• John Anthony Allan, geographer, born 29 January 1937; died 15 April 2021
