In March 1980, Lester Brown wrote a paper for his Worldwatch Institute titled “Food or Fuel: New Competition for the World’s Cropland.” Let’s just say it turned out to be a bit premature. “I was so far ahead of the curve no one even knows that exists,” Brown says. (It is still on sale for $9.95, though.)
Now, of course, food vs. fuel is a certified Big Issue. But former tomato farmer Brown, who now runs the Earth Policy Institute, has other concerns. Mainly about the water supply. “It looks like we may hit peak water before we hit peak oil,” he says.
There are two giant fossil aquifers–that is, ancient underground aquifers of water that can’t be replenished by rainwater–on the planet: The Ogallala Aquifer under the High Plains of the U.S., and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain.
Both are being depleted, but the Ogallala, while certainly crucial to the states of Kansas and Nebraska in particular, isn’t make or break for the U.S. food supply: Brown says only 20% of the U.S. grain harvest comes from irrigated land. In China that figure is 80%, and the bulk of it comes from the North China Plain.
So basically, China is in for a big grain supply shock. And if China is in for a big grain supply shock, we’re all in for a grain supply shock. Especially since lots of other countries face similar issues. Saudi Arabia, for example, became concerned in the 1970s that its oil embargo might be countered with a grain embargo. So it began tapping a fossil aquifer to become self-sufficient in wheat production. Now the aquifer is just about tapped out, and the country announced in January that it will soon begin importing all its wheat.
Hmmm, Les, got any good news? You betcha, he said. Nobody’s gonna be able to build any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
This discussion took place over lunch Tuesday at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. We shared a dozen oysters–six Hog Islands from California, six Malpeques from Prince Edward Island, all excellent. And Lester told me that oysters used to be so abundant in the Chesapeake Bay that farmers would feed them to their hogs.
The photo was taken with my Blackberry. I was wondering why it was so fuzzy; then I took a look at the lens. Coated with dust. Maybe I just need to start carrying a real camera around.