Water Wars

[tannybogus]

World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The world's supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain today's "profligate" use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm .

"Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly worsen as climate change impacts intensify," Leape said. "Irrigation-fed agriculture provides 45 percent of the world's food supplies, and without it, we could not feed our planet's population of six billion people."

Leape warns that many of the world's irrigation areas are highly stressed and drawing more water than rivers and groundwater reserves can sustain, especially in view of climate change. At the same time, he said, freshwater food reserves are declining in the face of the quickening pace of dam construction and unsustainable water extractions from rivers.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/20/11083/

McCain has stepped into a mess out West with his ideas: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6684852

Water will be increasingly fought over. It will make the problem with oil look like pattycake!

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[Dover]

1. Yep. And many countries are turning to recycled sewage to use on crops...n/t