Pakistan’s push to make as much profit as possible through export industries often doesn’t take negative externalities like water footprints into account when calculating profits.
One such export industry – meat production – has a particularly high water footprint, which means, in effect, Pakistan is exporting a lot of its water as well as meat. This is because it takes a lot of water to grow all the feed that livestock eat, and that water is consumed – lost to the system.
This author argues that such externalities must be taken into account, stating, “Pakistani agro-based exports are subsidizing European middle classes by up to $2 billion annually by exporting products that do not account for the cost of water consumed during production.”