The Alarms Are Going Off - Can You Hear Them?

There is a lot of news these days about global disasters but that's mainly because there are a lot of global crises that are looming.

The most common subject, of course, is global warming. Then there's the depletion of non-renewable resources which is an enormous problem for a world built on ready and secure access to cheap gas. One that we don't hear about nearly as often but which threatens to undermine societies around the world is groundwater exhaustion.

We can't live without water, we all know that. We also can't grow our food without water. Eating and drinking is dependent on the supply of water. In fact, our market economy is dependent on access to nearly limitless supplies of cheap water. In many parts of the world man relies on irrigation to produce water for livestock and for crops.

Roughly four-fifths of the world's freshwater is underground in what are called aquifers. There are two types of acquifers: replenishable and fossil. The key difference is in what happens when man exhausts them. In fossil aquifers, when they're tapped they're gone - for all practical purposes they're gone forever. In replenishable aquifers you can pump them out to your heart's content until they're drained but, after that, you can still get water from them but only at the rate of recharge which is usually pretty minimal and vulnerable to weather conditions such as drought.

Most of us know virtually nothing about the state of the world's aquifers and because of that we're not showing much interest in what's coming in the near future.

Today India and China are recognized not only as the world's most populous countries but also as emerging economic superpowers. Don't bet on it. In both countries the aquifers that support their agriculture are becoming severely distressed.

The effects are already being felt in major cuts in food production. Saudi Arabia's wheat production peaked at just over 4-million tons in 1992. By 2004 it had fallen to 1.6-million tons, a 60% decline.

China's wheat harvest peaked in 1997 at 123-million tons. By 2004 it had dropped to 90-million tons because of a lack of water for irrigation in China's semi-arid north, its wheat belt.

India is far worse off than China. Water shortages are a scourge of life in most Indian cities but it is in the agricultural lands that the real danger to the country lies. There are an estimated 21-million drilled wells in India and, in some states, they are causing groundwater tables to drop by 6 metres per year. In some states half of all electricity is now used to pump water.

In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, 95% of small farmers' wells have dried up causing productive farmland to fall by half.

Northern Mexico is facing a critical water shortage as are parts of the United States. In the southern Great Plains the amount of irrigated farmland has fallen by 24% since 1980 and parts of the "corn belt", particularly in Kansas are now running out of groundwater as the fossil, High Plains aquifer is exhausted. This problem will be made worse by the American reliance on corn for ethanol production.

So, what is being done about this looming crisis? Would you be surprised if I said nothing, zip, nada? At the end of the day this may prove to be nature's way of culling the herd. Sad as that may be, we must appreciate that this could bring an enormous degree of instability to an already and increasingly dangerous world.

Canada, being a temperate, northern country with a huge landmass and relatively small population is blessed, there's no other word for it. That said, we need to begin giving serious thought to Canada's freshwater supplies and we need to develop a real appreciation of how very essential they are to the future of this country and our need to preserve them. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Canada eventually may have to protect our water resources.