3. Membrane operations for desalination in agriculture
Desalination and wastewater reuse provide an additional opportunity to avoid complete depletion and contamination of natural water resources. Desalination is an opportunity to reduce water stress in coastal and inland regions through the production of fresh
water from seawater, saline groundwater, drainage water and treated wastewater. There has been water production from seawater and brackish waters for decades with the first industrial multi-stage flash (MSF) and multi-effect distillation (MED) plants being established in the late 1950s [15]. Water treatment and reuse for agriculture is already practised in some parts of the World. An example can be found in Spain where 22% of the desalted capacity [16] and 71% of the reclaimed wastewaters [17] are utilized in the
agricultural industry. However, one of the main issues of the utilization of treated waters is the additional cost of water production. For this reason the major aspects of water production for the sustainable development of agriculture are to keep costs as low as possible.