85
large state-organized production teams to farm families, China’s
cattle, sheep, and goat populations spiraled upward. While the
United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has
97 million cattle, China has a slightly smaller herd of 82 million.
But while the United States has only 9 million sheep and goats,
China has 284 million. Concentrated in China’s western and
northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s
protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the
soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.27
China’s desertification may be the worst in the world. Wang
Tao, one of the world’s leading desert scholars, reports that
from 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles turned to
desert each year. By century’s end, nearly 1,400 square miles
(3,600 square kilometers) were going to desert annually.28
China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claim-
ing its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advanc-
ing and new ones are forming like guerrilla forces striking
unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. Wang
Tao reports that over the last half-century, some 24,000 villages
in northern and western China have been entirely or partly
abandoned as a result of being overrun by drifting sand.29
Soil erosion often results from the demand-driven expansion of
cultivation onto marginal land. Over the last century or so there
were massive cropland expansions in two countries—the United
States and the Soviet Union—and both ended in disaster.30
During the late nineteenth century, millions of Americans
pushed westward, homesteading on the Great Plains, plowing
vast areas of grassland to produce wheat. Much of this land—
highly erodible when plowed—should have remained in grass.
This overexpansion culminated in the 1930s Dust Bowl, a trau-
matic period chronicled in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of
Wrath. In a crash program to save its soils, the United States
returned large areas of eroded cropland to grass, adopted strip-
cropping, and planted thousands of miles of tree shelterbelts.31
The second major expansion came in the Soviet Union
beginning in the mid-1950s. In an all-out effort to expand grain
production, the Soviets plowed an area of grassland larger than
the wheat area of Australia and Canada combined. The result,
as Soviet agronomists had predicted, was an ecological disas-
ter—another Dust Bowl. Kazakhstan, where the plowing was
Population Pressure: Land and Water
37
control. As a result, half of the world’s grasslands are degraded.
The problem is highly visible throughout Africa, the Middle
East, Central Asia, and northwest China, where the growth in
livestock numbers tracks that in human numbers. In 1950,
Africa was home to 227 million people and 273 million live-
stock. By 2007, there were 965 million people and 824 million
livestock. With livestock demands now often exceeding grass-
land carrying capacity by half or more, grassland is turning into
desert.23
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is losing 351,000
hectares (867,000 acres) of rangeland and cropland to desertifi-
cation each year. While Nigeria’s human population was grow-
ing from 37 million in 1950 to 148 million in 2007, a fourfold
expansion, its livestock population grew from roughly 6 million
to 102 million, a 17-fold jump. With the forage needs of Nige-
ria’s 16 million cattle and 86 million sheep and goats exceeding
the sustainable yield of grasslands, the northern part of the
country is slowly turning to desert. If Nigeria continues toward
its projected 289 million people by 2050, the deterioration will
only accelerate.
24
Iran, with 73 million people, illustrates the pressures facing
the Middle East. With 8 million cattle and 79 million sheep and
goats—the source of wool for its fabled rug-making industry—
Iran’s rangelands are deteriorating from overstocking. In the
southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan, sand storms have
buried 124 villages, forcing their abandonment. Drifting sands
have covered grazing areas—starving livestock and depriving
villagers of their livelihood.25
Neighboring Afghanistan is faced with a similar situation.
The Registan Desert is migrating westward, encroaching on
agricultural areas. A U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP)
team reports that “up to 100 villages have been submerged by
windblown dust and sand.” In the country’s northwest, sand
dunes are moving onto agricultural land in the upper reaches of
the Amu Darya basin, their path cleared by the loss of stabiliz-
ing vegetation from firewood gathering and overgrazing. The
UNEP team observed sand dunes 15 meters high blocking
roads, forcing residents to establish new routes.26
China faces similarly difficult challenges. After the economic
reforms in 1978 that shifted the responsibility for farming from
36
PLAN B 4.0
84
under the North China Plain, depletion brings pumping to an
end. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of
returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. But
in more arid regions, such as in the southwestern United States
and parts of the Middle East, the loss of irrigation water means
the end of agriculture.36
In Yemen, a nation of 23 million people neighboring Saudi
Arabia, the water table is falling by roughly 6 feet a year as water
use outstrips aquifer recharge. With one of the world’s fastest-
growing populations and with water tables falling everywhere,
Yemen is quickly becoming a hydrological basket case. Grain
production has fallen by half over the last 35 years. By 2015, irri-
gated fields will be a rarity and the country will be importing
virtually all of its grain. Living on borrowed water and borrowed
time, Yemen ranks high on the list of failing states.37
Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvests
in some larger countries, including China, which rivals the Unit-
ed States as the world’s largest grain producer. A groundwater
survey released in Beijing in August 2001 revealed that the water
table under the North China Plain, an area that produces over
half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, was falling
fast. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer,
forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is
not replenishable.38
The survey reported that under Hebei Province in the heart
of the North China Plain, the average level of the deep aquifer
was dropping nearly 3 meters (10 feet) per year. Around some
cities in the province, it was falling twice as fast. He Qingcheng,
head of the groundwater monitoring team, notes that as the
deep aquifer is depleted, the region is losing its last water
reserve—its only safety cushion.
39
AWorld Bank study indicates that China is mining under-
ground water in three adjacent river basins in the north—those
of the Hai, whichflows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow;
and the Huai, the southern most of the three. Since it takes
1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, the shortfall in
the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton
equals 1 cubic meter) means that when the aquifer is depleted,
the grain harvest will drop by 40 million tons and China will
lose the food supply for 130 million of its people.40
Population Pressure: Land and Water
39
concentrated, has abandoned 40 percent of its grainland since
1980. On the remaining cultivated land, the wheat yield per acre
is one sixth of that in France, Western Europe’s leading wheat
producer.32
Athird massive cropland expansion is now taking place in
the Brazilian Amazon Basin and in the cerrado, a savannah-like
region bordering the basin on its south side. Land in the cerra-
do, like that in the U.S. and Soviet expansion, is vulnerable to
soil erosion. This cropland expansion is pushing cattle ranchers
into the Amazon forests, where ecologists are convinced that
continuing to clear the area of trees will end in disaster.
Reporter Geoffrey Lean, summarizing the findings of a 2007
Brazilian scientific symposium in London’s Independent, notes
that the alternative to a rainforest in the Amazon would be “dry
savannah at best, desert at worst.”33
Water Tables Falling
Nowhere are falling water tables and the shrinkage of irrigated
agriculture more dramatic than in Saudi Arabia, a country as
water-poor as it is oil-rich. After the Arab oil export embargo in
the 1970s, the Saudis realized they were vulnerable to a counter
embargo on grain. To become self-sufficient in wheat, they
developed a heavily subsidized irrigated agriculture based large-
ly on pumping water from a deep fossil aquifer.34
After being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, in early
2008 the Saudis announced that, with their aquifer largely
depleted, they would reduce their wheat planting by one eighth
each year until 2016, when production will end. By then Saudi
Arabia will be importing roughly 15 million tons of wheat, rice,
corn, and barley for its population of 30 million. It is the first
country to publicly project how aquifer depletion will shrink its
grain harvest.35
The Saudis are not alone. Scores of countries are overpump-
ing aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water
needs. Most aquifers are replenishable but some are not. For
example, when aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under
the North China Plain are depleted, the maximum rate of
pumping will be automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.
But for fossil aquifers, like the Saudi aquifer, the vast Ogal-
lala aquifer under the U.S. Great Plains, or the deep aquifer
38
PLAN B 4.0
85
the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to
nearly 2 meters a year.45
In the province of Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan,
water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters
per year—pointing to the day when the city will run out of
water. Sardar Riaz A. Khan, former director of Pakistan’s Arid
Zone Research Institute in Quetta, reports that six of Balochis-
tan’s basins have exhausted their groundwater supplies, leaving
their irrigated lands barren.46
Iran is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion
tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one fourth of its
annual grain harvest. It too faces a day of reckoning.
47
Israel, even though it is a pioneer in raising irrigation water
productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers—the
coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with
Palestinians. In response, Israel has banned the irrigation of
wheat, its staple food, and is now importing nearly all the wheat
it consumes. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the
allocation of water are ongoing.48
In Mexico—home to a population of 109 million that is pro-
jected to reach 129 million by 2050—the demand for water is
outstripping supply. Mexico City’s water problems are well
known. Rural areas are also suffering. In the agricultural state
of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a
year. In the northwestern state of Sonora, farmers once pumped
water from the Hermosillo aquifer at a depth of 10 meters (35
feet). Today they pump from more than 120 meters. At the
national level, 51 percent of all water extraction is from aquifers
that are being overpumped.49
Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many
countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers
and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the
same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means
this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable
food scarcity.
Farmers Losing Water to Cities
The world’s freshwater supplies are shrinking, and the world’s
farmers are getting a shrinking share of this shrinking supply.
While water tensions among countries are more likely to make
Population Pressure: Land and Water
41
As serious as water shortages are in China, they are even
more serious in India, where the margin between food con-
sumption and survival is so precarious. To date, India’s 100 mil-
lion farmers have drilled more than 21 million wells, investing
some $12 billion in wells and pumps. In August 2004 Fred Pearce
reported in New Scientist that “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 kilometer.”41
As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling
technology to reach water, going down a half mile or more in
some locations. In communities where underground water
sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is now rain-fed and
drinking water must be trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the
International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station
in Gujarat, says of India’s water situation, “When the balloon
bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”42
Growth in India’s grain harvest, squeezed both by water
scarcity and the loss of cropland to non-farm uses, has slowed
since 2000. A 2005 World Bank study reports that 15 percent of
India’s food supply is produced by mining groundwater. Stated
otherwise, 175 million Indians are fed with grain produced by
water mining.43
In the United States, the USDA reports that in parts of Texas,
Oklahoma, and Kansas—three leading grain-producing
states—the underground water table has dropped by more than
30 meters (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thou-
sands of farms in the southern Great Plains, forcing farmers to
return to lower-yielding dryland farming. Although the deple-
tion of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain produc-
tion, irrigated land accounts for only one fifth of the U.S. grain
harvest, compared with close to three fifths of the harvest in
India and four fifths in China.
44
Pakistan, a country with 177 million people that is growing
by 4 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In
the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water
tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells
near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in
40
PLAN B 4.0
84
Colorado has one of the world’s most active water markets.
Fast-growing cities and towns in a state with high immigration
are buying irrigation water rights from farmers and ranchers. In
the upper Arkansas River basin, which occupies the southeast-
ern quarter of the state, Colorado Springs and Aurora (a suburb
of Denver) have already bought water rights to one third of the
basin’s farmland.55
Far larger purchases are being made by cities in California.
In 2003, San Diego bought annual rights to 247 million tons
(200,000 acre-feet) of water from farmers in the nearby Imperi-
al Valley—the largest farm-to-city water transfer in U.S. history.
This agreement covers the next 75 years. And in 2004, the Met-
ropolitan Water District, which supplies water to 18 million
southern Californians in several cities, negotiated the purchase
of 137 million tons of water per year from farmers for the next
35 years. Without irrigation water, and with sparse rainfall, the
highly productive land owned by these farmers is wasteland.
The farmers who are selling their water rights would like to con-
tinue farming, but city officials are offering far more for the
water than the farmers could possibly earn by irrigating crops.
Irrigated area in California shrank 10 percent between 1997 and
2007 as farmers sold their irrigation water to cities.56
Whether it is outright government expropriation, farmers
being outbid by cities, or cities simply drilling deeper wells than
farmers can afford, tillers of the land are losing the water war.
Historically, water scarcity was a local issue. It was up to
national governments to balance water supply and demand. Now
this is changing as scarcity crosses national boundaries via the
international grain trade. Since it takes so much water to produce
grain, importing grain is the most efficient way to import water.
Countries are, in effect, using grain to balance their water
books. Similarly, trading in grain futures is in a sense trading in
water futures. To the extent there is a world water market, it is
embodied in the grain market.57
The Middle East and North Africa—from Morocco in the
west through Iran in the east—has become the world’s fastest-
growing grain import market. With virtually every country in
the region pressing against its water limits, the growing urban
demand for water can be satisfied only by taking irrigation
water from agriculture. Egypt has become the leading importer
Population Pressure: Land and Water
43
news headlines, it is the jousting for water between cities and
farms within countries that preoccupies local political leaders.
The economics of water use do not favor farmers in this com-
petition, simply because it takes so much water to produce food.
For example, while it takes only 14 tons of water to make a ton
of steel, it takes 1,000 tons of water to grow a ton of wheat. In
countries preoccupied with expanding the economy and creat-
ing jobs, agriculture becomes the residual claimant.50
Many of the world’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles,
Cairo, and New Delhi, can increase their water consumption
only by taking it from agriculture. This rural-urban competi-
tion for underground water resources is intensifying throughout
India. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chennai (formerly
Madras), a city of 7 million in southern India. As a result of the
city government’s inability to supply water for some of the city’s
residents, a thriving tank-truck industry has emerged that buys
water from farmers and hauls it to the city’s thirsty residents.51
For farmers surrounding the city, the price of water far
exceeds the value of the crops they can produce with it. Unfor-
tunately, the 13,000 tankers hauling the water to Chennai are
mining the region’s underground water resources. Water tables
are falling and shallow wells have gone dry. Eventually even the
deeper wells will go dry, depriving these communities of both
their food supply and their livelihood.52
Chinese farmers along the Juma River downstream from Bei-
jing discovered in 2004 that the river had suddenly stopped flow-
ing. A diversion dam had been built near the capital to take river
water for Yanshan Petrochemical, a state-owned industry.
Although the farmers protested bitterly, it was a losing battle.
For the 120,000 villagers downstream from the diversion dam,
the loss of water could cripple their ability to make a living
from farming.53
In the U.S. southern Great Plains and the Southwest, where
there is little unclaimed water, the growing water needs of cities
and thousands of small towns can be satisfied only by taking
water from agriculture. A monthly publication from California,
The Water Strategist, devotes several pages each issue to a list-
ing of water sales that took place in the western United States
during the preceding month. Scarcely a working day goes by
without another sale.54
42
PLAN B 4.0
85
lion people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in
the long-standing conflict between the Muslim north and the
Christian south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region
in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting
tensions between two Muslim groups—camel herders and sub-
sistence farmers. Government troops are backing the Arab
herder militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of
black Sudanese farmers in an effort to drive them off their land,
sending them into refugee camps in neighboring Chad. An esti-
mated 300,000 people have been killed in the conflict or died of
hunger and disease in the refugee camps.62
Overgrazing and declining rainfall are combining to destroy
the grasslands in this region. But well before the rainfall decline,
the seeds of the conflict were being sown as Sudan’s population
climbed from 9 million in 1950 to 40 million in 2007, a fourfold
rise. Meanwhile, the cattle population increased from 7 million
to 41 million, an increase of nearly sixfold. The number of
sheep and goats increased from 14 million to 94 million, a near
sevenfold increase. No grassland can survive such rapid contin-
uous growth in livestock populations.
63
In Nigeria, where 151 million people are crammed into an
area not much larger than Texas, overgrazing and overplowing
are converting grassland and cropland into desert, putting
farmers and herders in a war for survival. As Somini Sengupta
reported in the New York Times in June 2004, “in recent years,
as the desert has spread, trees have been felled and the popula-
tions of both herders and farmers have soared, the competition
for land has only intensified.”64
Unfortunately, the division between herders and farmers is
also often the division between Muslims and Christians. The
competition for land, amplified by religious differences and
combined with a large number of frustrated young men with
guns, has created what the New York Times described as a
“combustible mix” that has “fueled a recent orgy of violence
across this fertile central Nigerian state [Plateau]. Churches and
mosques were razed. Neighbor turned against neighbor.
Reprisal attacks spread until finally…the government imposed
emergency rule.”65
Similar divisions exist between herders and farmers in north-
ern Mali, the New York Times noted, where “swords and sticks
Population Pressure: Land and Water
45
of wheat in recent years. It now imports close to 40 percent of
its total grain supply, a dependence that reflects a population
that is outgrowing the grain harvest that can be produced with
the Nile’s water. Algeria, with 34 million people, imports more
than 70 percent of its grain.
58
Overall, the water required to produce the grain and other
farm products imported into the Middle East and North Africa
last year exceeded the annual flow of the Nile River at Aswan.
In effect, the region’s water deficit can be thought of as another
Nile flowing into the region in the form of imported food.59
It is often said that future wars in the Middle East will more
likely be fought over water than oil, but in reality the competi-
tion for water is taking place in world grain markets. Beyond
this, several countries in the region are now attempting to
acquire land in other countries and, what is more important,
the water that comes with it.
Knowing where water deficits are developing today tells us
where grain deficits will be concentrated tomorrow. Thus far,
the countries importing much of their grain have been smaller
ones. Now we are looking at the growing water deficits in both
China and India, each with more than a billion people. At what
point does water scarcity translate into food scarcity?60
Land and Water Conflicts
As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital
resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the
wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrink-
age of life-supporting resources per person that comes with
population growth is threatening to drop the living standards of
millions of people below the survival level, leading to potential-
ly unmanageable social tensions.
Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expand-
ing world population has cut the grainland per person in half
since 1950 to a mere quarter-acre, equal to half of a building lot
in a U.S. suburb. The shrinkage in cropland per person not only
threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies, it threat-
ens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build
as landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.61
The Sahelian zone of Africa, with its fast-growing popula-
tions, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, 2 mil-
44
PLAN B 4.0
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
