Source: What does California have in common with a decades-old Saudi Arabian water mystery?
An interesting and worrying comparison on the misuse of water in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and misuse of water in California today.
Saudi Arabia:
The government announced next year’s wheat harvest will be the country’s last. The Saudis are drinking desalinated water from the ocean — a process too expensive to use for irrigating farmland.
Agricultural production is in a free fall. The country has less than half the farmland it did in the mid-1990s, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Its fling as a major food exporter was nothing but a brief mirage in its long history. Instead, the government announced that to feed its 30 million people, it will rely almost entirely on crops imported from other countries.
California:
For the past two years, stories similar to Saudi Arabia’s have been bubbling up in the Central Valley, which produces about 10 percent of America’s agriculture. Wells are going dry, farmers are forced to chase water ever deeper underground, and the ground is sinking.
[…]
Some California aquifers have been so depleted by irrigated farmland that the state is now pumping water that trickled down more than 20,000 years ago. Rainwater won’t recharge these ancient aquifers. When it’s gone, it’s gone — at least for the next 800 generations or so.
Recent Comments