With flooding and devastation occurring everywhere from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, to Brazil to Australia, it’s tempting to think so, but the headlines don’t tell the whole story.
An earlier version of this diary was originally published April 16, 2009 at My Left Wing.
The original was sparked by a horrifying story I saw linked on HuffPo:
1500 farmers in India commit mass suicide over crop failures.
Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today. The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.
At the time I read the above, I was shocked, so imagine my distress when I opened my Yahoo page Monday morning and saw this:
More than 17,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009, a seven percent rise on the previous year, according to new government figures.
Despite economic development in cities, two out of three Indians still live and work in rural areas and as many as 150,000 farmers have killed themselves in the past decade, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences said in 2009.
The subject was taken up in an acclaimed Bollywood film last year called "Peepli Live" made by the production company of superstar Aamir Khan.
The film, directed by first-time director Anusha Rizvi, revolves around two poor farmers who face losing their land over an unpaid debt after poor monsoon rains, with one considering killing himself so that his family receives compensation.
It saddens me beyond belief that this phenomenon is so widespread as to become enmeshed in Indian popular culture.
And it doesn’t appear things will be getting better any time soon:
Indian summer monsoon rains have been decreasing steadily over the past three decades, a trend not seen in the ninteenth century, says a new study.
Global warming? Perhaps. It’s beyond my pay grade to speculate, but there’s no question that human activity has contributed to the problem. In a cruel irony, some of the decrease in monsoon strength may be attributable to increased irrigation:
While the average rainfall over the whole of India remained stable, the study found a drastic change over north-western India where average seasonal rainfall has decreased by 35–40 per cent. The largest region with a negative trend in rainfall included portions in the states of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — which benefited from India's Green Revolution when foodgrain production increased in the 1960s with adoption of high-yielding varieties, fertilisers and pesticides.
You need a warm, dry surface to advance the monsoon," Dev Niyogi, an associate professor of Regional Climatology at Purdue, said. "Because of increased irrigation, you now have a wet, green area, which does not allow the monsoon to reach far enough north."
"With more irrigation, we will have less monsoon rain. With less monsoon rain, you will need more irrigation, and the cycle will continue," Niyogi said.
Welcome to the law of unintended consequences. And the future looks even bleaker:
Freshwater melting from Greenland's ice sheet could weaken the Indian monsoon to the extent of threatening perpetual drought, one of India's leading climate scientists has warned.
The monsoons are essential to Indian agriculture, and the increasing number of farmer suicides in response to crop failures is just the tip of the iceberg. At the same time yields are dropping, demand is rising, driven by a population increasing in wealth and in absolute numbers.
Allowing for local variation, every ton of grain we grow requires roughly a thousand tons of water. Meat is even more water intensive. It takes, on average 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. But because only a small percentage of the world’s population eats a meat-centered diet, agriculture is still the world’s biggest overall water user, accounting for ¾ of all freshwater use.*
Our dollars, sent to China in exchange for pretty much every bit of consumer crap we buy, have freed the Chinese workers to improve their diets. They want bread, not just rice, and would like to use their newfound "wealth" to buy more than the occasional chicken.
India is much the same.
In Chattisgarh, deforestation and government-built dams are being blamed in part for the drop in water levels, leading to the tragic suicides, but the real story is that water is being taken out of the ground faster than it is being replaced.
The worldwide "flattening" described by Thomas Friedman has led to an agricultural expansion which requires much more water than that which falls from the sky. Wells, dams, and other forms of irrigation have expanded farming into areas formerly thought inhospitable, in an attempt to satisfy the appetites of consumers in a new global economy. But the proverbial chickens are coming to roost.
In eastern China, an area which accounts for half of its grain production but has only ten percent of its water resources, water use exceeds the sustainable flow by over 600,000,000 tons a year. Water tables in this area have fallen by up to 300 feet, and continued agricultural production in this area is in jeopardy.
Even areas which receive adequate rainfall are "overdrawing" their water supplies—using water faster than rainfall can recharge it.
In the United States, the Oglalla Aquifer, which supplies water to one-fifth of all the irrigated acreage in this country, is being overdrawn by 3.1 trillion gallons a year, forcing farmers to change to crops which don’t require irrigation or let their lands lie fallow.
According to the World Water Commission (did you even know there was such a thing?) even if irrigated agriculture were made as efficient as possible, "Humanity will still need at least seventeen percent more fresh water to meet all of its food needs than is currently available."
To grow the grain the planet is projected to need by 2050 will require one trillion more tons of water annually than we are using today. Where will it come from?
Rain dance, anyone?
*Any facts not hyperlinked come from Chapter 8 of The End of Food by Paul Roberts.
Great book, I highly recommend it.
Update: Obligatory gushing "thank you" for giving me my first trip to the wreck list. The view is so nice from up here.