permaculture

["Michael Kramer" <MKramer@hawaii.rr.com>]

 If this isn't a call for permacultural intervention, I don't know what is...
Asian farmers sucking the continent dry 

  10:00 28 August 04   Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.  
The world is on the verge of a water crisis as people fight over ever 
dwindling supplies, experts told the Stockholm Water Symposium. 

A generation ago, Indian farmers in the state of Gujarat used bullocks to 
lift water from shallow wells in leather buckets. Now they haul it from 300 
metres below ground using electric pumps. But that technological revolution 
is about to have devastating consequences. 

So much water is being drawn from underground reserves that they, and the 
pumps they feed, are running dry, turning fields that have been fecund for 
generations into desert. 

The world's leading water scientists warned this week that this 
little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia, and could cause 
widespread famines in the decades to come. 


Day and night 


India is at the epicentre of the pump revolution. Using technology adapted 
from the oil industry, smallholder farmers have drilled 21 million tube wells 
into the saturated strata beneath their fields. 

Every year, farmers bring another million wells into service, most of them 
outside the control of the state irrigation authorities. The pumps, powered 
by heavily subsidised electricity, work day and night to irrigate fields of 
thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa. 

But this massive, unregulated expansion of pumps and wells is threatening to 
suck India dry. "Nobody knows where the tube wells are or who owns them. 
There is no way anyone can control what happens to them," says Tushaar Shah, 
head of the International Water Management Institute's groundwater station, 
based in Gujarat. "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of 
rural India," he says. 

Shah gave his apocalyptic warning at the annual Stockholm Water Symposium in 
Sweden last week. His research suggests that the pumps, which transformed 
Indian farming, bring 200 cubic kilometres of water to the surface each year. 
But only a fraction of that is replaced by the monsoon rains. 


China's breadbasket 


The same revolution is being replicated across Asia, with millions of tube 
wells pumping up precious underground water reserves in water-stressed 
countries like Pakistan, Vietnam, and in northern China. 

In China's breadbasket, the north China plain, 30 cubic kilometres more water 
is being pumped to the surface each year by farmers than is replaced by the 
rain. Groundwater is used to produce 40 per cent of the country's grain, and 
Chinese officials warned this week that water shortages will soon make the 
country dependent on grain imports. 

Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past decade to one 
million, and water tables are plunging in the Pakistani state of Punjab, 
which produces 90 per cent of the country's food. 

In India, more farmers now provide their own water via wells and pumps than 
rely on the government's irrigation system, which is based on a network of 
canals. Corrupt management, low investment and drying rivers have made the 
national system increasingly decrepit, and it rarely delivers water to 
farmers when they need it. 

In contrast, the $600 pumps are bringing short-term prosperity to much of the 
country, turning India from a land of famine to a major rice exporter in less 
than a generation. 

Indian farmers have invested some $12 billion in the new pumps, but they 
constantly have to drill deeper to keep pace with falling water tables. 
Meanwhile, half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions of 
shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of suicides 
among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic 
proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump water 
from depths of up to a kilometre. 


Plunging water table 


At least a quarter of India's farms are irrigated from over-exploited 
reserves of water that threaten to run dry in the coming decades, says Shah. 
Hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land turn to desert. "In some 
areas accessible groundwater supplies could be exhausted within the next five 
to 10 years." 

It is already happening in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, says Kuppannan 
Palanisami of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore. A plunging 
water table means that only half as much land in the state can be irrigated 
compared with a decade ago. 

Large-scale farmers with powerful pumps and deep wells still get good prices 
growing water-hungry crops like sugar cane and bananas, but 95 per cent of 
the wells owned by small farmers have dried up, Palanisami says. Some 
villages now stand empty. 

Another crisis hotspot is northern Gujarat, where water tables are dropping 
by 6 metres or more each year, according to Rajiv Gupta, a state water 
official. 

Is there a way out of the crisis? Some states are placing thousands of small 
dams across river beds in a bid to replenish groundwater by infiltration. And 
Hindu water priests are organising farmers to capture the monsoon rains in 
ponds, in the hope that water will infiltrate and recharge the aquifers. 

The last Indian government proposed a massive $200 billion River Interlinking 
Project designed to redistribute water around the country. But the new 
government elected earlier this year has gone cool on the idea. In any case, 
the water supplied would probably come too late.

-----
Michael Kramer
Natural Investment Services
P.O. Box 390595
Keauhou, HI 96739

www.NaturalInvesting.com
808-331-0910
Toll-free: 888-779-1500

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."
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