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Sustainable water use in the Middle East and North Africa

"It is imperative to scale up policies and investments in the Middle East and North Africa to make water use in agriculture more sustainable and efficient and to ensure that all the people in the region have access to healthy diets" FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said.

FAO believes that saving water is not only a good practice, it might soon have to be the only practice.

Integrated Aquaculture Agriculture (IAA) is one way of saving water, and producing more with less.

Aquaponics is an example of such IAA that combines aquaculture, the practice of fish or aquatic animal farming, and hydroponics, the cultivation of plants in water without soil. This means that water is used both for raising fish and growing crops.

Farms using the aquaponics system can reduce water consumption by 90 percent compared to traditional agriculture.

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source document : FAO

photo : ©FAO