EnviroLink Forum

“You have population growth outstripping the ability of the agricultural sector to improve production, which is held back by land and water shortages.”

Egypt grows a large amount, including 7m tonnes of wheat a year, say traders, largely because Cairo offers farmers above-market prices to spur production.

Subsidised bread encourages Egyptians to consume more wheat per person than almost any other country, and demand is set to increase as the 87m population grows. There have been estimations of a population growth at 1.6m people a year.

Farms soak up 85 per cent of Egypt’s water, above global averages, says think-tank the World Water Council (WWC).

While improving yields and allocating more land to farmers could boost production, those measures will not keep up with growing demand, said Gamal Siam, an agricultural economist at Cairo University.

The Nile Valley, almost the only arable land, makes up 5 per cent of Egypt’s area but is home to 95 per cent of its people.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will meet key ministers tomorrow to flesh out plans to reclaim about one billion hectares of desert land for farming.

Mr Siam said the “unrealistic” plan would need 80 billion cubic metres of water a year, more than all Egypt’s Nile waters.

Already, water has turned nasty, pretty much throughout the world. In some places it is disappearing altogether. In fact, massive water stress within highly populated areas is likely to become the world’s greatest-ever migraine. Water wars are certain to follow.

São Paulo, a city of 20 million, where residential water taps are shut off daily at 1:00 P.M., could run dry within several months, nobody knows when for sure, but who knows where twenty million people will go.

Across the globe, millions of people wait patiently, sometimes not so patiently, in long lines to fill a plastic jug, or two, from water trucks. Often times the water is brackish, brownish, fouled.

In Karachi, Pakistan, the 3rd largest city in the world, parched protesters hit the streets because of the invariable unreliability of water trucks, often times delivering foul, brownish water. People become distraught. They protest.

Similar to Karachi, Mexico City (pop. 22 million) has water trucks deliver to neighborhoods where people line up with empty plastic jugs. Mexico City’s water problem is severe, according to Juan Jose Santibanez, environmental scientists: “There is a very high probability that, by 2020, there will be a mini-revolution, at least in Mexico City,” Gwen Ifill, Mexico City Faces Growing Water Crisis, NPR, Nov. 10, 2014.

Over time, depleted aquifers in Mexico City cause the ground to sink, buildings tilt.

Not only that, in the United States, because of aquifer depletion, the ground is sinking in San Joaquin Valley, California, “the food basket of the world.”

Istanbul’s (pop. 14 million) water reservoirs are at 22% of capacity.

One-half of China’s water resources are horribly polluted. In Beijing (pop. 12 million) water consumption is double the amount of local water availability.

India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, one of the most significant agricultural states, has seen irrigated land crop production fall by 50% because of depletion of groundwater aquifers.

San Diego (pop. 1.4 million) is scrambling to build a desalination plant at a cost of $1 billion, supplying the city with 7%-to-10% of its water needs by 2020, only 10% water for $1 billion on a project that takes nearly 15 years to complete!

And so this saga continues

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/afte ... -dry-18562

We have friends in So.Cal, and the news they tell us is not good. Life and food growing in that area will change drastically this year without signifgant precipitation through 2015.

Some people actually think there is no link between this and climate change? Do they ever go outside ?
As climate patterns change they seem to get into longer ond longer term static periods of either one extreme or another, the jet is not behaving as it did for most of the past century. Where we live spring and fall have shifted to aproximately 3 weeks later than what we always considered normal, we now get months of zero precip followed by weeks of deluge. This is making dryland agriculture a huge challenge.
Maybe the Cal. situation really is just a harbinger of what lies ahead for many of us very soon?