Global Threat To Food Supplies As Global Wells Dry Up

Global Threat To Food Supply As Global Wells Dry Up

BY JOHN VIDAL

LONDON – Wells are drying up and underwater tables falling so fast in the Middle East and parts of India, China and the United States that food supplies are seriously threatened, one of the world’s leading resource analysts warned on July 7.

In a major new essay, Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world’s people, are now overpumping their underground water tables to the point — known as “peak water” — where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year.

The situation is most serious in the Middle East. According to Brown: “Among the countries whose water supply has peaked and begun to decline are Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By 2016 Saudi Arabia projects it will be importing some 15 million tons of wheat, rice, corn and barley to feed its population of 30 million people. It is the first country to publicly project how aquifer depletion will shrink its grain harvest.

“The world is seeing the collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Because of the failure of governments in the region to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.”

Brown warns that Syria’s grain production peaked in 2002 and since then has dropped 30 percent; Iraq has dropped its grain production 33 percent since 2004; and production in Iran dropped 10 percent between 2007 and 2012 as its irrigation wells started to go dry.

“Iran is already in deep trouble. It is feeling the effects of shrinking water supplies from overpumping. Yemen is fast becoming a hydrological basket case. Grain production has fallen there by half over the last 35 years. By 2015 irrigated fields will be a rarity and the country will be importing virtually all of its grain.”

There is also concern about falling water tables in China, India and the U.S., the world’s three largest food-producing countries. “In India, 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping, in China 130 million. In the United States the irrigated area is shrinking in leading farm states with rapid population growth, such as California and Texas, as aquifers are depleted and irrigation water is diverted to cities.”

Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvest prospects in China, which rivals the U.S. as the world’s largest grain producer, says Brown. “The water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its maize is falling fast. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is not replenishable.”

The situation in India may be even worse, given that well drillers are now using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water half a mile or more deep.

End of excerpt

~~~~~~~~~~

I never thought I would see such times. I always thought that if people understood anything it was how important water was to our survival...

This is how the Arab Spring began. This is a big part of the civil war in Syria. This is what is the underlying basis for the ongoing war between Israel and Palestine... WATER. And it is now spreading to other parts of the world including the US. Farmers are having to fight multinational oil and gas companies to stop them from using water for fracking when we see severe persistent drought and decreases in food yield.

The lucrative hydro-power dam business that also affects agriculture combined with fracking and climate change effects as well as land-grabs and water privatization that see countries and companies grabbing land particularly in Africa to grow biofuels is pushing us to the breaking point as a species. I don't think the question is if that will happen now, but when. It is hard to look at all of this and not think we humans are just hard wired for self extinction.