The New Geopolitics of Food (3)

While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run, creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is necessarily rediced to the rate of recharge. In aris Saudi Arabia, irrigation had surprisingly enabled the country to be eslf-sufficient in wheat for more than 20 years. Now, wheat production is collapsing because the nonreplenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all the grain.
Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bibbles. All together, more than half of the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peacked and begun to decline because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain production is already going down is Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in Yemen. But the largest food bibbles are in India and China. In India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are currently fed by overpumping. The question is: how will these countries make up for the inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted?
Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils, creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land mismanagementis undermining the productivity of 1/3 of the world's cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite imagesshowing two huge new dust bowls: one stretching across northen and western China and western Mongolia, the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert scholar, reports that each year some 1 400 square miles of land in northern China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose international food aid. Civilisation can survive the loss of its soil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.