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For Want of a Drink
1.
When the word water appears in print nowadays, crisis is rarely far behind. Water, it
is
said,
is
the
new
oil:
a
resource
long
squandered,
now
growing
expensive
and
soon
to
be
overwhelmed by insatiable
demand. Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing,
reservoirs drying
up
and
rivers
no longer flowing
to
the sea.
Climate change
threatens to
make
the
problem
worse.
Everyone
must
use
less
water
if
famine,
pestilence
and
mass
migration
are
not
to
sweep the globe.
2.
language
is often overblown, and the remedies sometimes
ill-conceived, but the basic
message is
not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places,
and will grow scarcer. Bringing
supply
and
demand
into
equilibrium
will
be
painful,
and
political
disputes
may
increase
in
number
and
intensify
in
their
capacity
to
cause
trouble.
To
carry
on
with
present
practice
would indeed be to invite disaster.
? The difficulties start
with the sheer number of people using the stuff.
When, 60 years
ago,
the
world's
population
was
about
2.5
billion,
worries
about
water
supply
affected
relatively few people. Both drought and
hunger existed, as they have throughout history,
but
most people could be fed without
irrigated farming. Then the green revolution,in an
inspired
combination
of
new
crop
breeds,
fertilizers
and
water,
made
possible
a
huge
rise
in
the
population. The number of people on
Earth rose to 6 billion in 2000, nearly 7 billion
today,
and is heading for 9 billion in
2050. The area under irrigation has doubled and
the amount of
water drawn for farming
has tripled. The proportion of people living in
countries chronically
short of water is
set to rise from 8% at the turn of the 21st
century to 45% by 2050.
s' increasing
demand for water is caused not only by the growing
number of mouths
to be fed but also by
people's desire for better-tasting, more
interesting food. Unfortunately, it
takes nearly twice as much water to
grow a kilo of peanuts as a kilo of soybeans,
nearly four
times
as
much
water
to
produce
a
kilo
of
beef
as
a
kilo
of
chicken.
With
2
billion
people
around the
world about to enter the middle class, the agricultural demands on water would
increase even if the
population stood still.
ry,
too,
needs
water.
It
takes
about
22%
of
the
world's
withdrawals.
Domestic
activities take the other 8%. Together,
the demands of these two categories quadrupled in
the
second half of the 20th century,
growing twice as fast as those of
farming.
g that demand is a
difficult task. One reason is that the supply of
water is finite. The
world will have no
more of it in 2025 or 2050 than it has today, or
when it lapped at the sides
of Noah's
Ark. This is because the law of conservation of
mass says, broadly, that however
you
use it, you cannot destroy the stuff. Neither can
you readily make it. If some of it seems
to come from the skies, that is because
it has evaporated from the Earth's surface,
condensed
and returned.
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