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-Caveat Lector-
- Asian Farmers Sucking
The Continent Dry
By Fred Pearce
New Scientist
8-28-4
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.
© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996321
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