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Headlines : Human RightsWater scarcity affects one in three
More good news. Reading stories like this, and seeing films like Syriana, make me want to find a place in the mountains to hole up and wait for everything to come crashing down. Is this all just hype? Or will we live to see serious food shortages in our lifetimes?
[Posted By Shogo]Republished from Financial Times
Scientists had forecast in 2000 that one in three would face water shortages by 2025, but water experts have been shocked to find that this threshold has already been crossed.
Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the International Water Management Institute, said: “We will have to change business as usual in order to deal with the growing water scarcity crisis.”
About a quarter of the world’s population lives in areas of “physical water shortage”, where natural forces, over-use and poor agricultural practices have led to falling groundwater levels and rivers drying up. But a further 1bn people face “economic water shortages”, because lack the necessary infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers.
Posted by Shogo
it’s not hype – it’s ecology: exponential population growth + limited resources —> scarcity of resources —> competition for resources. lemme know if you can find that place in the mountains where we can escape – all the ones i encounter are still going to be fucked somehow in the near future.
Funny, eh? The Bilderberg group has been talking about buying up the worlds water supply for years now.
Well then a lot of people gonna die.
Big deal, a lot of people is dying right now, and lack of water isnt the reason…
Yikes! I can still recall my aunt in northern India telling me how concerned they were that it would be harder and harder to secure clean drinking water in the coming years. And yes poor agricultural practices were the main source of this crisis in Punjab, but not for the reasons that one might think.
I think one thing to remember in terms of “poor agricultural practices” is that, despite what the so called “life sciences” corporations would have us believe, it is not indigenous and organic forms of farming that are the primary source of dangerous declines in groundwater tables, but rather it is the US capital intensive model that was exported throughout the world and inexplicably termed as the “green” revolution. Punjab was held up for many years as the ultimate success story of the green revolution, but if anyone here were to spend even a day in the Punjab countryside now they would quickly discern the ecological violence which has erupted as a result of the input (including water) intensive hybrid seed technology advanced by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in the 60s.
So when these biotech and lifesciences companies now argue that we need gmo technology to save the environment and feed people, remember that they were making similar arguments in the 60s and 70s vis a vis the need for capital and chemical intensive farming. And look at where that has left us.
I have said it before and will do so again here….the Cuban organic agricultural model that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc is where those concerned with sustainable and sufficient food production should focus their studies, instead of on the myopic “get rich quick” solutions offered by the profit seeking sector of the scientific community.
they were making similar arguments in the 60s and 70s
World population was roughly 3,708,751,360 in 1970.
It’s now nearly twice that.
Climate scientists were also warning people about global warming in the ’70s, and nobody wanted to believe that either.
not entirely sure what your point is. I was not questioning the premise of the article – water scarcity…rather, I was pointing out that the life sciences industry (monsanto, syngenta, etc) will attempt to frame these crises in a very particular way so as to make it seem that the only possible solution is gmo technology, of which of course a small number of corporations hold monopsonistic property rights. A similar strategy of “frame problem, offer solution” was put forth in the 60s/70s with the green revolution technologies, and just look at the ecological disaster that they have contributed to (including groundwater depletion). So yes, there is indeed a real problem of water scarcity/management, but we need not allow the biotech companies to frame the crisis for us – there are other, more historically informed avenues that can offer better analyses of the crisis, and which can also lead to more ecologically sustainable and socially just solutions.
I wouldn’t want to be a arid, pariah country, surrounded by enemies, with my back to the sea.
Peace.Food, Biofuels Could Worsen Water Shortages: Surging demand for irrigation to produce food and biofuels is likely to aggravate scarcities of water, an international report said. Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 percent increase in water use for agriculture.
Annan, Jay-Z announce UN-MTV global campaign on world’s water crisis:’Partnering with someone with a huge voice such as MTV, people that knew what they was doing, who know their way around countries, like the UN; it was a smart partnership for myself,’ – Jay-Z