Water shortages are adversely effecting food production in many parts of the world, and are going to get much worse. Two examples have been reported on this week. In Fortune magazine, Daniel Pepper reports from India about falling water levels due to over extraction.
Ground water has been depleted to such an extent that it is devastating the country. A soil and water expert estimates that the energy used to subsidize rice production in the Punjab region costs $381 million a year. He and other experts warn warns that, if unchecked, future drilling will bleed state budgets, parch aquifers, and run farmers out of business.
Meanwhile, Reuters says that the Saudi government has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture, and aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.
This is due to fossil aquifers becoming depleted due to the previous policy of self sufficiency when grain was produced regardless of cost. Massive circles of green apeared in the desert as centre pivot irrigation systems were installed. These systems consist of a massive gantry carrying pipes and watering jets that go slowly round in a circle, the pump and well being in the centre.
Saudi became a major food exporter but will now instead become a major importer. As other countries are also changing from exporters to importers, and as big producers such as the US use more grain for biofuel, severe shortages are bound to happen as other threats to food production mentioned in other posts, come in to play.
In The Australian Klaus Schwab and Peter Brabeck said about the coming water shortage,
“The world is on the verge of a water crisis. As the global economy and the world’s population continue to expand, we are becoming a much thirstier planet. It is important to realise just how much water we need to make the various aspects of our economy work.
“Every litre of petrol requires up to 2.5 litres of water to produce it. On average, crops grown for their bio-energy need at least 1000 litres of water to make one litre of biofuel. It takes about 2700 litres of water to make one cotton T-shirt, up to 4000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of wheat and up to 16,000 litres to produce 1 kg of beef…
“…Along the Colorado, the Indus, the Murray Darling, the Mekong, the Nile or within the North China Plain, for example, do we use the scarce water for food, for fuel, for people and cities, or for industrial growth? How much of the upstream river can we really dam? How do we figure out ways for every actor in the economy to get the water they need to meet their human, economic and cultural aspirations? And can we ensure that the environment is not wrecked but can flourish in the process?
“These are tough questions. And unlike carbon reduction, there is no alternative, no substitute to promote. Nor is there a global solution to negotiate. Turning off your tap in Vancouver or Berlin will not ease the drought in Rajasthan or Australia…
“…Climate change will create this situation more quickly and make it worse. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says that if global average temperature rises by 3C, hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to increased water stress. It provides the wake-up call we all need to start acting on water.
“…We can see this crisis unfolding during the next few years. A perfect storm is approaching. And all this sits on top of today’s morally indefensible situation where 20 per cent of the world’s population is without access to improved water supply…”
Until recently, only about 1 billion people out of a 6.5 billion world population have been really big consumers of the earth’s resources. It has been mainly the west who have been using all kinds of raw materials and energy at a rate that is unsustainable and is damaging the planet.
But now billions more want to join the party, and are increasingly able to do so. There is a massive transfer of wealth from the west to the east as the west imports cheap manufactured goods from the far east and energy from the middle east.
This is important for Peak Food, as our ability to grow enough food in the future depends on us reducing CO2 emissions enough to keep the earth from warming more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and on slowing oil reserve depletion so that fossil fuel dependent farming can continue. As the fast developing nations with their huge populations become heavy consumers, this starts to look impossible.
As an example of what’s happening in the east, the Indian manufacturer Tata unveiled its new ‘people’s car’, the Nano. This car will cost about £1,300 in India before taxes, has a 32.5 bhp engine and will have 57 mpg fuel consumption. This has the potential to bring motoring to millions who are now becoming more prosperous but who had previously used mopeds, bicycles or just walked. Other makers have plans to produce similar cars and the sheer numbers involved will use massive resources both to build these vehicles and to power them.
We in the west should have expected that the rest of the world would want to share in the consumption of resources that has given us our high living standards, but the speed that it is happening at will impact on food production and consumption in a big way.
Water shortages will reduce food production. This is because to produce food we need water and lots of it. As the population increases we will need much more water to increase yield but there will in fact be much less available for farming.
Peakfood has previously discussed the effect of climate change on snowmelt and river flow causing reduced amounts of water available for irrigation at the correct time of year. There is also the d
The killing of Benazir Bhutto should remind us of just how insecure our food supplies are. Our farming systems in the West are dependent on sufficient supplies of oil and gas to power our farm machinery and to make the nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides that give us such high yields. Transport and processing of food is just as dependent on these finite fuels.
Unfortunately, most of the remaining oil is in the middle east and any cut-off of supplies from that region would be a disaster for the west and especially for its food supply system. The US has been trying for years to bring stability to the middle east to ensure that the oil keeps flowing, but the killing of Bhutto makes an insecure future much more likely.
That scenario is that after months or years of turmoil in Pakistan, an anti-west Islamist group, backed by Al-Queda takes control. They would then have nuclear weapons and even the US would not dare to intervene. With this power the Islamists would be in a position to bring about their ambition to establish a Caliphate throughout the middle east and deny the hated Infidels of oil. The resulting chaos would cause a collapse of western economies and of the food supply system.
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