There was a news story today that said that Canadian farmers were going to be planting more lentils and peas this year because the price of these crops has doubled in the past year. It has doubled because they are staples in India and India has had two years of drought. There have been a lot of serious droughts in the past few years. Serious droughts and aquifers being depleted of water. Our agricultural regions of are being damaged. We need to produce more on less land, which means we need to irrigate and that means in turn that we need to take the water from the aquifers. One might say that if there were less people we would not have this problem.
There are too many people. But I am not advocating forced sterilization, nor am I saying that what we need to do to limit the population of the planet. There should not be an IQ test to determine who lives, because there is already an IQ test that will do that; we will figure out what to do or we will die. What I will do is draw you a picture of what is is happening and why and what we could do to stop it from getting worse.
Droughts are normal. They have existed for all of history and they are natural. Most droughts are caused by the variable weather patterns. The weather has always been this way so the question is it worse now or not. The answer is that whether the droughts are worse now or then is not the real issue, but rather that the food supply is so tight that any disruption causes world wide effects and in the future it will only get worse.
One of the reasons for drought is deforestation. It has been estimated that half of all the rain to fall in a tropical rainforest came from the moisture that the forest respired. This means for every parcel of rainforest we remove, less rain will fall in those areas. The Amazon, India, Indonesia, Africa and South Asia are all the major rainforests in the world. Most of the people living in these places are subsistence farmers. For them cutting down the forests creates more land to farm, but doing so decreases the amounts of crops the land produces, because less water falls as rain. Deforestation also decreases aquifer recharge too. The roots of trees provide bigger holes far water the pass from the surface and the roots bore deeper into the ground than grasses do, so when the water does enter the ground it will go deeper down under a forest as it will under a grass land. Pavement is even worse. There are other reasons why forests are better than no forests other than drought protection like biodiversity, but droughts are the topic of today.
Climate change is another cause of droughts. Big surprise right, that I would not bring this into the discussion. Climate change is bringing about a world of more or less of what it is today. That is, more water here, less water over there, hotter here, cooler over there. It is not as simple as just a global temperature rise, would that it were so easy. Yes there is a temperature increase, but the effects of the temperature increase are complex. Warmer air can hold more water than drier air, which means areas that are already dry now will get drier. Wetter air means that places where it rains more now will get more rain later and everywhere where is rains will get even more rain. Meaning that there will be heavier rainfalls over less rain days as climate change progresses. Droughts will be longer and when the drought breaks, there will be more rain than the land can hold and there will be flooding and erosion. We see this happening in the world today. Several years of drought in Australia broken with record breaking floods, California suffering from wildfires brought on by years of drought then inundated by mudslides when the rains returned.
The effects of the droughts are pretty obvious. I grew up with stories of the great Dust Bowls of the nineteen-thirties, when the droughts dried out the top layer of the soil, the best part of the soil, and blew it away and off the land, creating a choking hazard and reducing the productivity of the farmland for decades to come. That is one dramatic effect of drought, but there are others and they are more dramatic and traumatic too.
Climate change as I stated previously is a boon for some and a bust for others. For Canada it is a boon. Warmer temperatures increase the growing season and rather than less rain, we are forecasted to get more rain on average. As a result over the past few years Canadian farmers have been getting bumper crops of much of what they grow and they have been able to sell the gross excess for a lot more than usual, because the prices have been high. High prices means one thing only, because food is a commodity and in a free market this means that there are greater supply problems in the world than there is too much production. Back to that news report, drought in India doubles the price of peas and lentils, making them more profitable to grow for Canadian farmers. I fully support high food prices and farmers making money, but in this case it means that there is a shortage of food world wide. The shortage is caused by drought and aquifer depletion.
Aquifers are that store of freshwater that exists in the ground. It is like a giant bank that we can tap and use when there is no other water. It is hard to get to so we only use it when we have no other option. Ideally we should use it slower than the speed that it refills, that way it will always be there. Alternatively, we could use it a lot in times of drought and then let it recharge in times of plenty. But we have not been doing that, we have been using it in times of plenty to make more plenty and in some cases we have been using it through long droughts and not letting them recharge; we have been depleting them. What happens when the are gone, for some of them, they are gone. For others they will take centuries to recharge.
Higher prices for food means shortages of food in some areas and this means starvation. Starving people means that people will move. We have seen this before. In the nineteen-eighties there was a large famine in Africa, specifically Ethiopia. The Famine was caused by drought. People did not stay where they were, they fled and they migrated. They first moved from the drought affected area to the unaffected areas. Then they moved to different countries. Currently there is a refugee crisis in the world focused primarily on the Syrians, but including many other countries from Africa. The primary mover in the counties where these refugees are from is drought. Indeed, it has been mentioned that the primary cause of the unrest in Syria before the Civil War started was hunger caused by years of drought.
Which leads to the ultimate affect of drought, war. The Syrian Civil War, the Ethiopian Civil War. The unrest and conflict in Yemen. These are all minor conflict in the world caused by drought. There are entire regions that are drought vulnerable that only require a spark when there is no water to drown the flames for more war to break out. Sub Saharan Africa, already strongholds of Boka Horum and other radical extremist groups with drought they would receive thousands of new recruits and more war and more migration. More migration would cause people to stop people at boarders and this will raise tensions as people feel that they are being kept out. People will risk everything to get in, thousands will die—just like they are already crossing between Turkey and Greece, Libya and Sicily. That is just the low hanging fruit. What about India, home to a billion people, more farmers than any other country in the world. Most of them subsistence farmers. When the current drought stretches from two years to five. Think of the war that would be fought then. Right now there is a war in Syria after five million people were displaced. How big will the war be when it is half a billion displaced people and the countries they is fighting in are nuclear powers. It is not a huge stretch. Pakistan and India have been at war several times in the last fifty years, they are both nuclear powers and they have both had years of drought.
Prevention is the best strategy, it is the most inexpensive too. Don't cut the forests down, use perennial crops that do not disturb the soil and increase soil water retention, but is it too late? Most of the areas with forest still intact are areas that rely on wood for cooking and heating. The crops that are grown most places have higher yields and require fertilizers and are annual crops. The perennial crops of the past are treated as inferior. Lastly, stop climate change while seeming to be on the foremost of everyone's thoughts, still seems to be on the bottom of everyone's actions. We need to reverse this, put climate change to the back of our thoughts by putting action on climate change to the front of our actions. Because it is cheaper. It is cheaper in human life and dollars and cents.
Here is an expensive alternative to prevention: Desalination of ocean water and pumping the water into irrigation. Right now we irrigate with surface water and ground water, but increasingly both sources are disappearing. The aquifers are going dry and the rivers are not making it to the oceans anymore. Where there is still excess water it is thousands of kilometers from the regions that need to the water. If we do not prevent the droughts we will have to build massive power plants just to clean water to pour on the ground to grow crops. We will have to do this or face massive wars. Correction, we will have to do this and face massive wars to avoid extinction. Can you imagine the Gulf Coast of the United States, the oil rigs and refineries replaced with solar and wind power plants to run desalination plants to pump water water north to irrigate crops in the Midwest and Texas, Arizona and California. Equally large or larger plants doing the same all over the mid latitudes, India, Australia, Amazonia, Africa and Europe. Pipelines stretching from the Black Sea to the east pumping cleaned ocean water to fields in Russia.
The cure is more expensive than prevention, but we are not doing a good job at seeing what is staring us in the face.
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