Asia faces water catastrophe: scientists

Asia faces water catastrophe: scientists

Agence France-Presse, Paris

Farmers are driving Asian countries toward an environmental
catastrophe, using tube wells that are sucking groundwater
reserves dry, New Scientist says.

Tens of millions of these wells have been drilled over the
past decade, many of them beyond any official control, and
powerful electric pumps are being used to haul up the water at a
rate that far outstrips replenishment by rainfall, the British
weekly says in next Saturday's issue.

The extraction is providing many countries with a lavish
harvest in thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa, but
the boom is bound to be shortlived, it says.

Indeed, water tables are falling so dramatically that within a
short time, some landscapes could become arid or even be
transformed into desert, it says, quoting scientists at a
worldwide water conference.

In the case of India, smallholder farmers have driven 21
million tube wells into their fields and the number is increasing
by a million wells per year.

"Nobody knows where the tube wells are or who owns them. There
is no way anyone can control what happens to them," Tushaar Shah,
head of the International Water Management Institute's
groundwater station, based in Gujarat, said.

"When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of
rural India."

Half of the country's traditional hand-dug wells have already
run dry, as have millions of shallower tube wells, causing some
despairing farmers to commit suicide, he said.

In China's north plain, that country's breadbasket, 30 cubic
kilometers (1.059 trillion cubic feet) more water are being
extracted each year by farmers than are being replaced by the
rain, New Scientist said.

Groundwater is used to produce 40 percent of the country's
grain.

In June, the state paper China Daily admitted that the nation
"may be plunged into a water crisis" by 2030 when its population
is scheduled to peak at 1.6 billion.

The tube-well revolution, whose technology is adapted from the
oil industry, has also swept water-stressed countries like
Pakistan and Vietnam, where precious underground reserves are
likewise being depleted, New Scientist says.

"Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past
decade to one million, and water tables are plunging in the
Pakistani state of Punjab, which produces 90 percent of the
country's food."

The scientists spoke at the Stockholm Water Symposium, a
conference held in the Swedish capital last week.