Seminary Journal 2008 (August) - Virginia Theological Seminary

serves. I am old enough to remember,
back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the
great fear was that the world would
not be able to feed itself. Population
would double in 30 years, but we
asked how on Earth could food production
double? The California biologist
Paul Ehrlich wrote a book called
The Population Bomb in which he said
“the battle to feed the world is over…
billions will die in the 1980s.”
But it didn’t happen. The world’s
population did double. But so did
food production. Scientists came to
the rescue. They produced a new
generation of “high-yield” varieties
of crops like rice and wheat that have
kept the world fed. But it now turns
out that those super-crops use much
more water than the supposedly ineffi
cient crops they replaced. So, while
the world grows twice as much food
as it did a generation ago on much
the same amount of land, it takes
three times as much water to do it.
We thought we were going to run out
of land to grow food. Instead, we are
running out of water.
Everywhere, agriculture is emptying
the world’s rivers—with dramatic
consequences for the world around. I
stood on the banks of the Rio Grande
in Texas at a small town called Presidio,
where the fi elds have been
irrigated for more than 400 years,
probably longer than anywhere else
in the U.S. Now farmers are going
bankrupt and the fi elds are returning
to brush because of over-abstraction
by upstream irrigators of cotton and
corn and alfalfa. There is no water left
in the river.
“While the world grows
twice as much food as it
did a generation ago on
much the same amount
of land, it takes three
times as much water
to do it. We thought we
were going to run out of
land to grow food.
Instead, we are running
out of water.”
You won’t spot this in any atlases but,
in fact, the mighty Rio Grande is now
two rivers. The main U.S. arm, rushing
out of the Rockies, gives out 600 miles
from the Gulf of Mexico. Its bed is
then dry for nearly 200 miles until it is
replenished from Mexico. Agriculture
did this.
I went to India, where British colonial
engineers a century ago built the largest
network of irrigation canals in the
world to grow food and cotton for the
empire. But today there is no water
for many of those canals, because the
rivers are dry for most of the year. Vir-
tually the only water in India outside
the short monsoon season is underground.
Farmers have not sat back. Indian
farmers are some of the most innovative
in the world. In the past decade,
more than 20 million of them have
bought drills to tap that water, and
cheap Yamaha pumps to bring it to the
surface and water their crops.
Thanks to this water, India, which
40 years ago was a center of famine,
feeds itself today, but at great cost. I
visited villages where water tables
were, until recently, only a few yards
from the surface, but which are now
hundreds of yards down. Farmers are
taking from underground 24 cubic
miles of water more every year than
the rains replace.
It’s hard to imagine a number like
that, but Britain uses about 15 cubic
kilometres of water a year for absolutely
everything. So imagine that
times six or seven. That’s not the total
amount being pumped by the farmers,
that’s the amount being pumped
that is not being replaced by the
monsoon rains.
India’s green revolution is living on
borrowed water and borrowed time.
The crash will come, not everywhere
at the same time, but inexorably nonetheless.
And dozens of other countries
are going the same way as the rivers
run dry. For the fi rst time in its history,
China—the world’s most populous
country—can no longer feed itself, for
lack of water.
Water shortages are bringing lifethreatening
confl icts, not least in
the Middle East. I visited Palestinian
towns and villages on the West
62 VIRGINIA SEMINARY JOURNAL AUGUST 2007