Two part series on India's accelerating agricultural crisis

I: India's Farming 'Revolution' Heading For Collapse
II: 'Green Revolution' Trapping India's Farmers In Debt

by Daniel Zwerdling
All Things Considered
US National Public Radio
April 13/14, 2009

Enlarge Sandeep Singh says he has been forced to deepen his well, because the groundwater under his fields has been sinking as much as 3 feet every year.

Part I: India's Farming 'Revolution' Heading For Collapse (Listen to program here ...)

Farmers in the village of Chotia Khurd in northern India don't realize it, but they symbolize a growing problem that could become a global crisis.

They gathered on a recent morning in a stone-paved courtyard — a circle of Sikhs with brightly colored turbans and big, bushy beards — to explain why the famed "bread basket" of India is heading toward collapse.

Their comparatively small region, Punjab, grows far more wheat and rice for India than any other region. But now these farmers are running out of groundwater.

Two part series on India's accelerating agricultural crisis

VOL 20 ,NO 16   Thursday, January 15, 2009

Source Article here .

Made it
by Savvy Soumya Misra

Enabavi, a village of 52 families, is abuzz. It is hosting farmers from the nearby Kallem village who have come here for tips on profitable agriculture. Those who missed the excitement of the Green Revolution in the 1960s can get a glimpse of it here—there is the air of collective achievement, and farmers from neighbouring villages are here because they do not want to lose out. There is one big difference from the 1960s, though: farmers are teaching and learning ways of increasing productivity without applying synthetic chemicals. Agriculture is a happy story in Enabavi.

World's Highest Drug Levels Entering India stream

AP – A man covers his nose to keep out the stench from the polluted Iska Vagu stream in Patancheru.

PATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn't just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Ecologists Warn the Planet Is Running Short of Water

by Leo Lewis
January 22, 2009
Times Online (UK)

A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind's expanding "water footprint" could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.

A dummy stands near a makeshift tent at a shanty town in the desert of Canete January 21, 2009. Reliable water supplies are difficult to find for the impoverished people living on the sandy desert fringes of Peru's capital, Lima. Clean drinking water is an unattainable luxury for a third of Peru's city dwellers. (Reuters/Mariana Bazo/Peru)

The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term "peak ecological water" - the point where, like the concept of "peak oil", the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.

The world is in danger of running out of "sustainably managed water", according to Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.

Humans - via agriculture, industry and other demands - use about half of the world's renewable and accessible fresh water. But even at those levels, billions of people live without the most basic water services, Dr Gleick said.

A key element to tackling the crisis, say experts, is to increase the public understanding of the individual water content of everyday items.

Land Rental Deal Collapses After Backlash Against 'Colonialism'

One of the world's largest land deals, a scheme to lease African farmland to rich countries to grow their own crops, has collapsed amid accusations of 'neo-colonialism'.

by Julian Ryall and Mike Pflanz
The Telegraph/UK
January 15, 2009

TOKYO and NAIROBI - Madagascar was poised to sign a 99-year agreement to rent 1.3 million hectares of land to South Korea's Daewoo Logistics Corporation to plant maize and palm oil for export.

Madagascar was poised to sign a 99-year agreement to rent 1.3 million hectares of land to South Korea's Daewoo Logistics Corporation. (Photo: Getty Images)

Food-importing countries with little arable land, mainly in Asia and the Middle East, are increasingly looking overseas to secure food supplies after the prices of staple foods rocketed last year.

But the practice has drawn criticism that it harks back to colonial-era "plantation agriculture" where rich outsiders force subsistence farmers off fertile land to grow export crops.

Now the Daewoo plan, the largest in Africa covering an area of roughly half of Madagascar's current arable land, has been put on hold after the Malagasy people protested that it would make them a "South Korean colony".

Economists appraise Bhutan's happiness model

Don Duncan, Chronicle Foreign Service

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Rich Countries Launch Great Land
Grab to Safeguard Food Supply

 by Nirupam Bajpai
The Hindu: Business Line
Jan 12, 2007

The human development costs of the crisis are immense, with the poor being hit the hardest. They are the first to be affected by water-borne diseases; there has been little improvement in child mortality rates, and education is a low priority for the girls, who spend most of the day collecting and transporting water. Even if they do manage to get to the school, they are more than likely to drop out, as most schools do not have toilets for girls.

by Anthony Mirhaydari
MSN Money
July 14 2008

Soft-drink companies are bracing for a slowdown in what has been a surefire moneymaker: Selling filtered tap water, straight up or with flavor and nutrients as "enhanced water" beverages. But the companies still offer opportunity for investors.

Not only are people shying away from water costing the equivalent of $12 a gallon when gasoline is over $4 a gallon, but environmental sensitivity to those ugly, non-biodegradable plastic bottles is on the rise as well. A recent survey by venerable Morgan Stanley beverage analyst William Pecoriello found 16% of consumers are reducing bottled water consumption due to environmental concerns. This is up from just 5% last year. Of these, 34% are reusing their plastic water bottles more often while 23% are just going with tap water instead.

It's no wonder this trend is emerging: A recent report by the Swiss Gas and Water Association finds that bottled water has 100 times the environmental impact of tap water. The Sierra Club notes that bottled water produces 1.5 million tons of plastic waste each year -- the vast majority of which ends up in our landfills and oceans.