Global Water Crisis Worsening (Joan Delaney)

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

Glaciers are melting, aquifers are drying out, droughts are worsening... and what's worse, the world's population keeps on growing…

By Joan Delaney -- Epoch Times Victoria Staff

Dec. 2, 2006 -- For years, experts have been warning that the world is facing a freshwater crisis of unprecedented proportions. As populations grow, demand for fresh water is soaring, yet there is less water on earth now than there was 2,000 years ago, when the population was 3 percent of what it is today.

While the crisis is already well underway in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the freshwater shortage isn't just confined to a particular region -- it's a worldwide issue. The World Bank has said that the scarcity of freshwater is likely to be one of the major factors interfering with economic development in the coming decades.

A third of the world's population lives in "water-stressed" countries. Cities such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Mexico City have heavily overdrawn from their groundwater aquifers. Hydrologists say large areas of northern China and Africa, and parts of the Middle East, India, Mexico, and North America are on the brink of severe water shortages.

Green Revolution

In the 1960s, experts sounded an alarm bell of a different kind. They predicted that if the world's population doubled in 30 years as anticipated, famine on a mass scale would occur, resulting in billions of deaths. The population did indeed double, but the famine never materialized because scientists developed high-yielding crop varieties which basically met the food needs of developing nations.

It was called the Green Revolution, and it saved the day to a large extent. But it had a downside in that these newly designed crops, besides needing copious amounts of pesticides and fertilizers, had an extremely high demand for water. Huge irrigation projects as well as small dams and wells were built, and farmers began withdrawing massive amounts of water from underground reserves -- water that in many cases is not being replenished. Some countries, such as India, implemented a system called "double cropping," whereby crops were grown during the dry season as well as in the wet season, resulting in added water demands.