Conversation with Mother
(Page 5 of 11)
September/October 1986
By Lester Brown
In fact, if we looked at nothing but the basic social indicators in China — life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy — we'd have to classify China today, not as part of the Third World, but as a part of the industrial world.
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MOTHER: So if Africa is a tragedy in the making, China is a success story.
BROWN: Close to it. Of course, the Chinese aren't extraordinarily affluent, but in terms of social indicators, China is doing quite well. Its per capita grain production has increased by nearly half over the last decade, which means that China could experience two poor harvests in a row and not suffer any serious consequences. And since-unlike most of Africa-it's blessed with abundant rainfall, China may well build further on the gains made in the last decade, if it continues to follow its current food production and population policies.
What most people don't realize is that a 3% annual rate of population growth, which is seemingly innocuous, brings about a 20 fold increase in people in a century. There aren't many countries in the world whose environmental support systems could withstand that sort of population pressure. Africa has had about a third of a century of population growth of around 3%, and already its life support systems are beginning to deteriorate.
What we're headed for is an oil shock in the early 1990s that will be far more severe than any experience to date.
MOTHER: Some say our next world crisis will be a water crisis.
BROWN: In looking at the world as a whole, we now see more and more areas where the demand for water is beginning to outstrip the supply. For example, in the Sunbelt states there's growing competition between cities and farmers. Because urban dwellers can afford to pay much more per gallon of water than farmers can, farmers invariably lose in this sort of confrontation. As a result, we see a decline in irrigation in states like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and, recently, in California as well.
Texas and Florida have each lost about a fifth of their irrigated area just in the last six years or so. In Florida, some of the water currently is being diverted to urban and industrial uses. Furthermore, largely because of the depletion of the Ogallala acquifer, there's a lot of land in irrigation in southern Nebraska, western Kansas, northern Texas, and the eastern parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma that won't be under irrigation 20 years from now.
We're not the only country, of course, with water shortages. Mexico is faced with even more severe problems. In the southern portions of the USSR, the lack of water is a severe constraint on food production. Recently, the Soviets announced that they were abandoning long-standing plans to divert northward-flowing rivers southward into the Central Asian Republic, apparently because of a shortage of capital.
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