El Justo Reclamo

Water Scarcity: The Real Food Crisis

By Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360.

Alternet

In the discussion of the global food emergency, one underlying factor is barely mentioned: The world is running out of freshwater.

After decades in the doldrums, food prices have been soaring this year, causing more misery for the world's poor than any credit crunch. The geopolitical shockwaves have spread round the world, with food riots in Haiti, strikes over rice shortages in Bangladesh, tortilla wars in Mexico, and protests over bread prices in Egypt.
The immediate cause is declining grain stocks, which have encouraged speculators, hoarders, and panic-buyers. But what are the underlying trends that have sown the seeds for this perfect food storm?
Biofuels are part of it, clearly. A quarter of U.S. corn is now converted to ethanol, powering vehicles rather than filling stomachs or fattening livestock. And the rising oil prices that encouraged the biofuels boom are also raising food prices by making fertilizer, pesticides, and transport more expensive.
But there is something else going on that has hardly been mentioned, and that some believe is the great slow-burning, and hopelessly underreported, resource crisis of the 21st century: water.
Climate change, overconsumption and the alarmingly inefficient use of this most basic raw material are all to blame. I wrote a book three years ago titled When The Rivers Run Dry. It probed why the Yellow River in China, the Rio Grande and Colorado in the United States, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in Pakistan, the Amu Darya in Central Asia, and many others are all running on empty. The confident blue lines in a million atlases simply do not tell the truth about rivers sucked dry, for the most part, to irrigate food crops.
We are using these rivers to death. And we are also pumping out underground water reserves almost everywhere in the world. With two-thirds of the water abstracted from nature going to irrigate crops -- a figure that rises above 90 percent in many arid countries -- water shortages equal food shortages.
Consider the two underlying causes of the current crisis over world food prices: falling supplies from some of the major agricultural regions that supply world markets, and rising demand in booming economies like China and India.
Why falling supplies? Farm yields per hectare have been stagnating in many countries for a while now. The green revolution that caused yields to soar 20 years ago may be faltering. But the immediate trigger, according to most analysts, has been droughts, particularly in Australia, one of the world's largest grain exporters, but also in some other major suppliers, like Ukraine. Australia's wheat exports were 60 percent down last year; its rice exports were 90 percent down.
Why rising demand? China has received most of the blame here -- its growing wealth is certainly raising demand, especially as richer citizens eat more meat. But China traditionally has always fed itself -- what's different now is that the world's most populous country is no longer able to produce all its own food.
A few years ago, the American agronomist and environmentalist Lester Brown wrote a book called Who Will Feed China?: Wake Up Call for a Small Planet. It predicted just this. China can no longer feed itself largely because demand is rising sharply at a time when every last drop of water in the north of the country, its major breadbasket, is already taken. The Yellow River, which drains most of the region, now rarely reaches the sea, except for the short monsoon season.
Some press reports have recently suggested that China is being sucked dry to provide water for the Beijing Olympics. Would that it were so simple. The Olympics will require only trivial amounts of water. China's water shortages are deep-seated, escalating, and tied to agriculture. Even hugely expensive plans to bring water from the wetter south to the arid north will only provide marginal relief.
The same is true of India, the world's second most populous country. Forty years ago, India was a basket case. Millions died in famines. The green revolution then turned India into a food exporter. Its neighbor Bangladesh came to rely on India for rice. But Indian food production has stagnated recently, even as demand from richer residents has soared. And the main reason is water.

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