Food Supply Notes

End of Sumer Corn, Fairfax City Farmers Market 2010

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While the course on World Food Supply: A Famine in Our Future will not be offered at OLLI, I have continued to collect materials and read about the subject. The other day the Guardian from the UK had a disturbing article Food Prices May Rise Up to 20%, Warns UN. A combination of factors, most of them related to climate, have resulted in poor grain harvests in various places. We have already noted here the effects of drought on Russian grain production, long-term drought in Africa and the devastation of agricultural land in Pakistan as a consequence of flooding. Crops in parts of North America were good, but increased demand for maize (corn) and other food crops for bio-fuels adds a great deal of uncertainty to price predictions. Added together, those factors lead to a decline in the world's supply of basic food and feed grains and promise to drive prices up. The increase in food prices in Africa and some of the poorer parts of Asia are all but certain to lead to increased hunger, though for the moment starvation and famine would appear to be over the horizon. It is quite worrisome, and it will be more so should the 2011 growing season in the Southern Hemisphere, including the grain producing areas of South America and Australia, produce poor yields.

On a loosley related issue, I am a great fan of bargain bins and used book sales. The other day I was at a local branch of one of the huge bookstore chains and happened on remaindered copy of a volume which I find fascinating, an encyclopedia of the world's food plants Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants (Washington, DC: National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-0372-5 for the North American edition of a book that was originally published in Australia). With the National Geographic's (should really be called the National Photographic!) signature color photography, the book is an excellent guide to the what, where, and why of world food plants and great fun to thumb through or to use as a reference to look up some unusual food plant or another.

Related articles

• The Global Warming Effects in Africa (brighthub.com)
• Global Food Outlook is Worrisome (scienceblogs.com)
• Rising Corn Prices Bring Fears of an Upswing in Food Costs (nytimes.com)

Pakistan Flooding

Pakistan late Summer 2010

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

For a variety of reasons I have been a little obsessed with the floods of the 2010 summer monsoon season in Pakistan. My original idea had been to use Pakistan, a country very much in the news, as a central case study in the water resources course with the idea that the country is chronically short of water and subject to political pressures internally and from India related to water supply and use. Then a few months before the course began Pakistan was hit with excess rainfall and flooding of catastrophic levels. I decided it was wisest to severeky curtail the use of Pakistan as a case. Should I teach the course again, I will have the prospective of time to examine the issue of 2010's flooding, its potential links to global climate change, and the meaning of it to a country usually suffering from drought, or worried about a lack of water. Meanwhile, NASA's Earth Observatory has posted a fine view of the flooded area from space and a brief, but as almost always concise and informative description of that photo in "Flooding in Pakistan," well worth a look!

Treaties and Compacts

Boundary Waters of Canada and the United States

Source: International Joint Commission

On Wednesday the question was raised "What is the difference between a treaty and a compact?" I did not have a good answer at the time, and having devoted some research effort to the issue since, I still have not found a difference of consequence for most purposes, though there appears to be one of usage in the United States. In the dictionaries I have consulted, including paper ones on my shelves and online ones, there is virtually no difference in definition of the two terms, both being defined as agreements between individuals or states to resolve conflicts.

In the US the word "Compact" seems to be mostly used for agreements between states as in the "Great Lakes--St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact is a legally binding interstate compact among the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The compact details how the states manage the use of the Great Lakes Basin's water supply and builds on the 1985 Great Lakes Charter and its 2001 Annex. The compact is the means by which the states implement the governors' commitments under the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement that also includes the Premiers of Ontario and Quebec." (quoted from Wikipedia entry). Of course there is an international component as two Canadian Provinces are also involved, though neither the US Federal Government nor the Government of Canada appear to be direct parties to the Compact.

Treaty, on the other hand, seems to be used in the US to mean an agreement between the Federal Government and a foreign country (or countries). One example is the longstanding Boundary Waters Treaty between the United States and Great Britain (acting for Canada) signed in 1909 and ratified the next year. Creating an International Joint Commission of the two national states, the treaty is an agreement to provide mechanisms for resolution of disputes over the rather numerous water issues that arise between them. A great number of streams cross the boundary, including two huge ones in the West, the Columbia and the Yukon. The Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River Basin is a large share of the boundary waters and the most important watershed for the economies of the Canada and the United States, and it is part of the zone covered by the treaty. The Compact noted above is apparently a response to the Treaty at the level of states and provinces which have great responsibilities for water issues in their respective countries.

This is a none too satisfactory response to the question raised, and the difference between treaties and compacts is one I shall devote some additional effort to leaning about once I have completed a series of projects which are more pressing at the moment.

Dams III - Dam Removal

Aerial view of Elwha River Dam, Washington State

Source: Elwha Watershed Information Resource

As they age, fill with silt, or water resource management priorities change, a large number of dams have been slated for removal. Most of those removed and proposed for removal have been smallish. The Elwha Dam, a decommissioned hydroelectric facility, inside the boundaries of Olympic National Park (the dam was built before the park was created) in the northwest corner of the continental United States is the largest dam to date to be put forth as a candidate for removal, and in September 2011 removal activity is scheduled to begin.

Removing a dam is very nearly as complicated as erecting one. Careful plans are necessary in order not to do great damage downstream. Fortunately the Elwha is a large river in flow but a short one, and the dam is only a few kilometers from its mouth into the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There is not much economic activity or infrastructure subject to damage downstream from the dam, making the removal problem a little less complex than it would be for most dams of comparable size.

Source: USGS

The blog "On Water" from the Water Resources Center Archive at the University of California, Berkeley (my graduate alma mater) is an extremely valuable resource for materials on water issues. Its primary focus is water in California and nearby western states, buts its coverage goes well outside the limits of that state and region. On 28 October it published a listing of links to sources on dam removal.

Related articles

• Elwha Project Expected to Blast Open Nature's Door (kitsapsun.com)
• New Elwha channel part of dam removal project (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Dams II - Belo Monte Dam in Brasil

Belo Monte Dam Proposal

Source: International Rivers

Last session I mentioned recently learning of a huge dam, slated to be the third largest on earth, cleared to begin construction, but I could not remember which river or what country. It is the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in the State of Pará in Brasil. It is almost exclusively a hydroelectric project and will attempt to capture some of the energy of the Xingu, one of the world's longer and larger rivers by rate of flow and the final huge tributary of the Amazon before it enters the Atlantic. As I noted "dictators love dams," and the original proposal for the Belo Monte Dam dates to the military dictatorship that misgoverned Brasil a generation ago. Like many bad ideas, however, the proposal did not die when the dictatorship ended.

One of over a hundred proposed hydroelectric dams in the Amazon basin of Brasil, when and if constructed, the Belo Monte Dam will flood a vast area of biologically diverse tropical rain forest and displace a large number of first nations people. Its proposed construction has generated a huge controversy. Various organizations within Brasil (a source from Brasil in English) and outside like the non-profit International Rivers have protested the construction and are likely to continue doing so even though the dam project appears to have cleared the final legal hurdle. It will be a vastly expensive project, and one of the expenses is a requirement that the winning bidders pay the equivalent of almost a billion US dollars to create national parks, ecological reserves, and homes for the 20-40,000 people who will be displaced by flooding when the reservoir is filled. The director James Cameron and members cast of the cartoon Avatar have been among the most vocal opponents of the dam outside Brasil, and they have produced a film narrated by the actress Sigourney Weaver to raise awareness of their protest.

A few days ago Brasil elected a new president, its first female head of government. It is unlikely but possible that Dilma Roussef will repudiate the policy of her predecessor and patron, the immensely popular current president Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva and halt construction now that courts have granted legal approval. We shall have to wait and see.

Related articles

• Sigourney Weaver Narrates New Google Earth Animation on Brazil's Controversial Belo Monte Dam for Amazon Watch and International Rivers (prnewswire.com)

Contamination

Smog Over Eastern China, September 2005

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

There are five great challenges that must be addressed in the near future if the world is to meet its water needs without war, famine, demographic collapse, and possible social collapse:

1) Climate Change
2) Population Growth
3) Increased Standards of Living
4) Water Management Institutions
5) Contamination

In some respects, contamination is the best known and studied of these challenges, for at least since the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s, individuals, institutions and governments have become aware of and sensitive to matters of contamination. In many nations large government departments like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US have been established in an attempt to halt further contamination of water bodies and, where possible (think Superfund in the US) to mitigate past contaminations. In the richer and longer developed nations of Europe and North America, those departments have had some success in both preventing additional contamination and cleaning-up at least parts of the worst cases of past contamination.

The recent rapid economic growth in China, with hugely increased demands for water because of industrial and agricultural uses, has pointed to the horrifying problem of contamination of its waters. The Friday 29 October 2010 issue of the right-wing Washington Post (WP), a paper where international coverage is normally non-existent or mediocre, contains an insightful article on the contamination of a large lake not far from Shanghai, Tai Lake. Near the mouth of the Yangtze, the lake is recipient of agricultural and human waste contaminants from upstream, with more contamination coming from areas near its shores resulting in an overload of contaminants, not least Nitrogen (N), in forms that promote the growth of algae. The lake is now nearly covered with toxic forms of the simple organisms making its waters foul smelling, largely useless for agricultural and industrial purposes, destructive of its fish once used for food, and generally making the water unsafe for human consumption. While I rarely recommend the WP as a useful information source, this article is worth a read.

Pakistan Flooding - the Aftermath

Flood waters on the Indus at Kotri, barrage 19 August 2010

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

The Pakistan floods came just after I collected material on the problems of water supply in that predominantly arid country. The plan was to discuss Pakistan's problems resulting from a growing demand for water in the face of a diminishing supply. Instead of suffering from the problems of drought, in 2010 Pakistan was inundated by record rainfall with the Indus and its various tributaries flooding much of its best agricultural land, washing away crops and soil in productive agricultural areas and drowning parts of several large urban places and countless towns and villages. The lives of millions were disrupted, and the wet season crops of 2010 will be a small fraction of the expected yields in some of the more productive farming areas as flooding washed soil and growing crops off the fields and devastated irrigation facilities.

The flooding has now subsided, and post-flood recovery in Pakistan is largely absent from the world's news media. Today's (30 October) Guardian newspaper from Britain has a fine piece on the problems of recovery by Mohamed Hanif "Forgotten but not gone." Even as in the recent past the US has promised Pakistan's military about $2 billion in military aid, it is contributing a vastly smaller amount for food aid and reconstruction of infrastructure damaged and destroyed in the flooding. Yesterday the BBC reported "Pakistan Flood Food Running Out." With crops far below usually production, the country will need food supplies to carry it through to the next harvest. In addition a huge amount of resources will be needed to reconstruct houses, warehouses, transportation facilities, irrigation canals, and the other elements of life the flooding destroyed.

Discussions of a world water crisis rightly emphasize problems of water supply, and in most of the countries where a water crisis looms, the availability of adequate quantities of water is the key issue. With global climate change, some regions will be faced with additional rainfall and others will suffer from irregular and occasionally excessive precipitation - likely to be the case in much of the Indian subcontinent. A not inconsiderable portion of the subtropics may face wild fluctuations in precipitation year to year. They may then have occasional years like 2010 in Pakistan with damaging and dangerous flooding followed by numerous years with precipitation inadequate to meet basic water needs.

Related articles

• Pakistan faces long-term damage to irrigation system (nature.com)
• Report: Aid shortage in Pakistan leaves flood victims in limbo (cnn.com)