Report Predicts Worldwide Water Shortages in 1990s

A collision between increasing populations and wasteful irrigation practices will produce shortages of water and food in some of the world’s most populous countries during the 1990s, the Worldwatch Institute warned in a report released Saturday.

Although the situation in the United States is less dire, the inexorable growth of Western states and their increasing demands on limited water resources will force more of the nation’s richest croplands out of production, the institute reported.

The earliest and most dramatic impact of worldwide pressure on water supplies may be felt in Egypt, according to the institute, a nonprofit research organization that studies world environmental and economic problems.

It noted that virtually all productive land in Egypt is irrigated, the population is growing at a rate of a million people every eight months, and the country is the last in line to draw water from the Nile River.

The outlook for China, India, Mexico, Israel and Jordan is somewhat less stark, but nevertheless foreboding, the institute reported.

At least 10 countries in North and East Africa “are likely to experience severe water stress by 2000,” the report states. “Egypt, already near its limits, could lose vital supplies from the Nile as upper basin countries develop the river’s headwaters.”

In much of the Third World, food security is destined to replace military security as the most pressing priority of many nations, Worldwatch Director Lester R. Brown said at a press conference.

The institute’s study was headed by Sandra Postel, a Worldwatch vice president and senior researcher who attributed looming shortages to short-sighted policies, technical obsolescence and rising costs, in addition to the pressure of growing populations.

In China, Postel said, the water tables beneath Beijing are dropping as much as 2 meters per year, and farmers in the arid region of the country may lose 30% to 40% of their irrigation water to critical municipal and industrial demands.

In India, thousands of villages already face shortages, and large sections of metropolitan New Delhi have water for only a few hours a day, while around Mexico City, land is subsiding because of ground-water depletion.

In Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, where streams, aquifers and all other water supplies that are renewed by rainfall will be in use by 1995, “shortages are imminent,” Postel said.

On a per-capita basis, the amount of irrigated land has been declining worldwide since 1978, and in some countries, such as Mexico, there have been outright reductions in the total area under irrigation.

Although many countries, such as China and India, rely on irrigation for more than half of their food production, lending for irrigation by the major international donors has declined sharply over the last decade, Worldwatch reported.

Lending to 23 countries in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Japanese Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund fell more than 60% after adjusting for inflation between 1977 and 1987, the report said.

The cost of bringing new land under irrigation is soaring--reaching as much as $4,000 per acre in Mexico--and more than half of the world’s irrigation systems are in need of upgrading to remain in good working order, the group said.

Although the United States will not experience the potential catastrophe facing much of the Third World, the report found trends in the United States moving in the same direction and policies hardly more efficient than those where critical shortages loom.

Rapidly expanding Western cities, facing future water deficits, are increasingly buying up perpetual water rights in a practice known as “water ranching.” In Pima County, Ariz., around Tucson, irrigated agriculture is expected to disappear by the year 2020, the institute reported.

Meanwhile, some 4 million hectares--about 10 million acres--of U.S. agricultural land is being irrigated at unsustainable rates “and will eventually come out of irrigated production” unless farmers reduce pumping to no more than the rate at which rainfall recharges aquifers, Postel said.

Water subsidies by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation have subsidized farmers who grow hay and pasture while more valuable water priorities go wanting. And the artificially low cost of water used to irrigate croplands such as California’s San Joaquin Valley causes inefficient use of scarce water resources.

“Farmers benefiting from the huge Central Valley Project in California have repaid only 5% of the project’s costs over the last 40 years--$50 million out of $931 million,” Postel said. “This free ride in large part explains why so few Western farmers invest in efficiency improvements.”

The institute report was completed before the Interior Department’s decision Nov. 29 to renew 28 Central Valley water contracts for another 40 years. The contracts provide for a 300% increase in the price paid by valley farmers for irrigation water while ensuring that they will continue to receive ample supplies well into the next century.

The 28 contract renewals were regarded as a harbinger of Bush Administration policy on hundreds of contracts due to expire over the next several years. Although some contract terms could be modified in response to findings of an environmental impact statement, the amount of water allocated to agricultural interests will not be reduced.

Among significant water policy initiatives around the world, Postel cited the conservation initiatives of Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District as an example worthy of wide emulation.

By financing conservation projects in the Imperial Irrigation District, the Metropolitan Water District is getting enough water for 800,000 Southern Californians without the need for taking cropland out of production or selling irrigation water rights.

Postel said that approach is “at the other extreme” from the strategy in Arizona, where water ranching by cities has already destined thousands of acres of prime agricultural land to revert to desert.