Asia Farmers Sucking Continent Dry

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=6&u=/nm/20040825/sc_nm/science_asia_water_dc

Science Magazine: Asia Farmers Sucking Continent Dry
Wed Aug 25 By Andrew Cawthorne

LONDON (Reuters) - Asian farmers drilling millions of pump-operated wells in an ever-deeper search for water are threatening to suck the continent's underground reserves dry, a science magazine warned on Wednesday.

"This little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia and could cause widespread famine in the decades to come," London-based New Scientist said in a report on scientists' findings at a recent water conference in Sweden....(in India).. small farmers have abandoned traditional shallow wells where bullocks draw water in leather buckets to drill 21 million tube wells hundreds of meters (yards) below the surface using technology adapted from the oil industry, the magazine said. Another million wells a year are coming into operation in India to irrigate rice, sugar cane and alfalfa round-the-clock.

While the $600 pumps have brought short-term prosperity to many and helped make India a major rice exporter in less than a generation, future implications are dire, New Scientist said.

"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," it said. <snip>

Shah said Indian farmers were taking 200 cubic kilometers of water out of the earth per year, with only a fraction of that replaced by the monsoon rains. <snip>

In China's breadbasket, the northern plain, 30 cubic kilometers more water is pumped to the surface each year than is replaced by rain, it said. Officials have said water shortages will soon make China dependent on grain imports.

Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past decade to 1 million, while water tables are plunging in the Pakistani state of Punjab, which produces 90 percent of the country's food, New Scientist added. <snip>

[kestrel91316]

1. Run out of H2O, famine awaits, 1 billion die..........n/t