INTRODUCTION: According to recent estimates, more than 80% of usable water resources are exposed to significant risks including depletion and pollution. Agriculture is the foremost consumer of water, accounting for 70% of global freshwater use. Therefore, increasing the efficiency and reducing waste of the agricultural sector’s water use is necessary to reduce global water scarcity. One way to reduce the impact of agriculture on water resources is the international trade of agricultural produce from wet-countries to arid and semi-arid countries. However, trade can have the opposite and adverse effect when water-intensive crops are shipped from dry to wet regions. The export and import of crops can be seen as the export and import of virtual water, the total amount of water used to provide a specific product or service. In the case of crops, this includes the volume of water utilized by the plant, namely evapotranspiration [ET], throughout its growing period. The virtual water concept, first developed by Tony Allan, was further developed into the Water Footprint [WF] concept, that helps quantify the virtual water of the product, but also assess the efficiency of the water use by quantifying the amount of water required per crop yield. The WF of crops takes into account three types of water: Blue - irrigated water from ground and surface freshwater sources; Green - rainwater utilized by the crops; and Grey –the volume of water required to assimilate or dilute pollutants that reach water sources from agricultural fields to levels that adhere to accepted water quality standards. This study focused mainly on Blue WF (Hoekstra et al., 2011). In the past decade, there have been a large number of agricultural virtual water and WF studies on a global, national, and local scale. As these studies are based on data regarding crop water use, yield, and export/ import amounts, they are limited by the accuracy of the data used. In many cases, global databases are used as primary data sources, which can differ significantly from data collected locally. The goal of our study was therefore twofold: 1) to provide a high-resolution analysis of the virtual water or WF of crops grown in Israel (production), exported and imported; and 2) to compare local and global datasets regarding crops WF (m3/ton).
