Nettle beer and the Kenya bean conundrum

One of the lessons of my increasingly wide-ranging forays into self-production is an appreciation of the amount of water that's consumed in making things.  This is something you never really consider when you pick something off the shelf, but perhaps we should start paying more attention (and asking for more information), because as this Guardian story demonstrates, there are serious implications for parts of the world that are already in dire trouble over water.

Take the nettle beer I have just bottled (and which I sincerely hope wont be exploding on me in a few days).  To produce just two gallons I have to do the following involving water:

• Wash the nettles (using 5 gallons of water?)
• Rinse out the pots I'm going to boil them in (using 1 gallon?)
• Boil the nettles up in two gallons (the only water that I actually end up consuming)
• Sterilise the fermenting tub - this involves washing it out, filling it with water and the sterilising powder, then rinsing it several times (10 gallons?)
• Sterilising the bottles - similar process (5 gallons?)
• Cleaning the fermenting equipment (5 gallons?)
• Washing and rinsing the bottles after use (3 gallons?)

So to make my two gallons of beer I have used 31 gallons of water, plus whatever water was used to produce the two kilos of sugar that went in - so say 35 gallons in all?  At least my nettles were growing anyway, or I would have to add whatever the water consumption was in cultivating them (as I would if brewing beer made with malt and hops).

The Guardian story on Kenya is the lesson writ large - first the massive environmental costs that we impose on countries that grow and produce things for us; and now the massive water costs in countries like Kenya where vast tracts of previously fertile land are now gripped by an apparently permanent drought.  Time to think through the employment arguments again:  what are we truly achieving employing farmers to grow beans for us when the effect of the water usage involved is probably to contribute to removing the livelihood of the herder down the road whose cattle now have nothing to drink?