Asia Teeters Toward Food Crisis from Lack of Water

Just before dusk on the central plain of India's northern Punjab state Naresh Kumar, 22, crouches under drill and sprinkles mustard oil, turmeric, raw sugar and confections inside a 10-inch circle traced in the rich soil. Hands clasped and head bowed, he offers a short prayer to a Sufi saint asking for a bountiful supply of groundwater. He then cranks up his coughing and wheezing diesel engine, lines up the tube well drill over the offerings and releases a lever that brings an iron cylinder crashing into the earth, turning a parcel of India's fertile breadbasket into Swiss cheese.

"Business is growing by the year," says Kumar. "But we've placed about as many tube wells as we can in this area." As the water table in Punjab drops dangerously low farmers across the state are investing heavily -- and often going into debt -- to bore deeper wells and install more powerful pumps. On either side of Kumar's drill the calm beauty of emerald rice patties belies a quiet catastrophe brewing hundreds of feet beneath the surface. A prayer might be this region's best chance for survival.

India's groundwater woes are, in places, at crisis levels. But the problem is not confined to a few corners of the subcontinent; groundwater depletion is a major threat to food security and economic stability in China, the US, Mexico, Spain and parts of North Africa -- just to name a few. All of these regions are grappling with the problems inherent in extracting groundwater from deep below the earth's surface.

But the problem is most acute in India for two reasons: the country has long prided itself on being self-sufficient (not importing food) and because in this messy democracy free electricity is provided to farmers to win votes. Punjab, a wealthy state favored by the central government in New Delhi is just 1.5 percent of India's total landmass, but its annual output of rice and wheat contribute 50 percent of the grain the government purchases for its food distribution programs that feed over 400 million poor Indians. Experts are now saying that the 375-foot deep tube well and 7.5 horsepower pump Naresh Kumar's installs for a local sharecropper is at the eye of a storm that threatens India's food security, environmental health, and economic progress.

"We have depleted the ground water to such an extent that it is devastating the country," says Dr. Gurdev Hira, an expert on soil and water quality at the Punjab Agriculture University. Dr. Hira estimates that the energy used in subsidizing rice production alone costs the state of Punjab US $381 million a year.

Dr. Hira and other experts warn that if left unchecked this system will bleed state budgets, parch aquifers and run small farmers out of business. Though the pace of growth in its cities has put India in the limelight, over 60 percent of the economy is directly or indirectly engaged in agriculture with more than two out of three Indians living in the rural areas.

In China, the agricultural use of groundwater has skyrocketed, and the fall in water tables has created a potential environmental catastrophe. "The breadbasket of China -- north of the Yellow River -- have millions of people dependent on groundwater," says David Molden, Deputy Director General at the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka. With the water table dropping in many places across China at a rate approaching or exceeding 1.5 meters a year, "It's sitting there like a time bomb," says Molden.

Aside from India and China, the two other regions where groundwater depletion is at its worst is perhaps North Africa and the Middle East, where groundwater extraction depletes aquifers that are not annually recharged. In India the problem is exacerbated by the fact that farmers in three states -- Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh -- pay nothing for electricity -- throughout India farmers' electricity is either heavily subsidized or completely free. So farmers run their pump sets with abandon, which further depletes the water table. Any farmer with the cash or collateral invests in larger, heavy-duty, power-hungry pumps capable of withstanding the grid's voltage fluctuations and frequent brown-outs.