Water Withdrawal by Sector 2021

Report year 2021·Data year 2021

Freshwater withdrawn for agriculture (% of total)·Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a score·Published by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

33 reference years (1990–2022), covering 88 to 178 countries, from FAO's AQUASTAT and served through the World Bank's indicator API. What a country's fresh water is used FOR: the agricultural share is the headline, with the household share (ER.H2O.FWDM.ZS) and the industrial share (ER.H2O.FWIN.ZS) stored beside it. The three sum to 100. ⚠ NEITHER END IS BETTER. A high agricultural share describes a farming economy, not waste; a high household share usually means very little irrigation rather than generous supply. Read it against WATER STRESS, already on the site, which is what says whether the total is sustainable. ⚠ 106 ROWS WERE DROPPED because their three shares did not sum to 100 within two points — Bolivia's 2020 agricultural share reads 521.9%, which is impossible for a share of a total, and Namibia and Brunei have smaller versions of the same fault. A broken row is not a wide error bar. ⚠ AQUASTAT updates a country only when it reports, so one figure can stand for several years. The FAO ranks nobody; the POSITION is a SIZE ORDER derived here and labelled as ours.

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