India se queda sin agua

India atraviesa una dura sequía por el Monzón más débil de los últimos cinco años. Pero su problema con el agua es en realidad estructural. Su subsuelo se seca. Una vez más un embudo malthusiano que pende sobre la alimentación de casi 1.000 millones de personas.
El riego no es una solución para la producción de alimentos, sino solo una postergación del problema. Y si es mal usado, es agravar los problemas.

Space Images Forewarn of Indian Groundwater Crisis, Study Says

By Jason Gale
Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Orbiting satellites measuring the gravitational pull of water below the earth’s surface confirm what authorities in India suspected for more than 20 years: groundwater is shrinking in some of the nation’s driest areas.
Water equal to the maximum held by Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in the U.S., was depleted from underground supplies of three northwest Indian states between August 2002 and October 2008, scientists said in the journal Nature yesterday.
The findings suggest that pumping water from wells for irrigation is damaging India’s resources more than the government has estimated. Without measures to curb demand, dwindling groundwater supplies may cause drinking-water shortages and erode crop production in a region inhabited by 114 million people, the authors said.
“That part of northern India is really experiencing rapid groundwater decline that’s mostly human-driven,” said co-author Jay Famiglietti, associate professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, in a telephone interview yesterday. “What they are doing is not sustainable.”
About a fifth of water used globally comes from under the ground, the Stockholm International Water Institute has said. Withdrawals are predicted to increase 50 percent by 2025 in developing countries, and 18 percent in developed countries, according to the policy group based in the Swedish capital.
India’s area of irrigation almost tripled to 33.1 million hectares (82 million acres) from 1970 to 1999, the authors said, spurred by the so-called Green Revolution that began in the 1960s to bolster production of wheat, rice and other staples.
River Contamination
Surface water supplies are also strained. Three-quarters of the country’s rivers, lakes and dams are contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent, according to a report by the Ministry of Urban Development in September.
Groundwater stocks in Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana states are being lowered at an average rate of about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) a year, Famiglietti and colleagues said. The depletion is equal to about 17.7 cubic kilometers (4.7 trillion gallons) of water a year, exceeding the estimate of 13.2 cubic kilometers by the Ministry of Water Resources, the researchers said.
More than a quarter of the land area in the three states is irrigated accounting for about 95 percent of the groundwater consumed, they said. Levels of subsurface water also appeared to be declining in western Uttar Pradesh. That state, along with Punjab and Haryana are India’s largest wheat-producing states.
Monsoon Forecast
This year’s monsoon may be the weakest in five years, the India Meteorological Department said this week. That’s exacerbating demand for watering crops and prompted some governments to divert electricity to farms to pump water, said Sunita Narain, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, who was not part of the study.
India’s government established a Central Ground Water Authority in 1986 to regulate pumping from aquifers. Groundwater hasn’t been developed evenly across India, and exploitation has led to a drop in water levels and seawater intrusion in some areas, the Ministry of Water Resources said on its Web site. Of 5,723 sites assessed, 839 are “over-exploited,” 226 are “critical” and 550 are “semi-critical.”
“I don’t think that the water issues are going to get the attention they deserve until we reach crisis mode,” Famiglietti said. “In that part of India, they are certainly reaching crisis mode.”
Pumping costs are being ratcheted up by the falling water table and the need to drill deeper wells, said Steven Gorelick, professor of earth sciences at California’s Stanford University.
Cost of Pumping
“The problem of declining groundwater levels will become self-limiting at some point,” Gorelick said in an e-mail yesterday. “Use will curtail when it is simply too costly to pump the water to the surface from great depths, or when the quality of deeper and deeper groundwater is no longer suitable.”
Famiglietti and colleagues used hydrological modeling and data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), twin satellites launched in March 2002, to quantify groundwater losses over more than six years.
“What is remarkable about this study is that such small declines in groundwater levels can be detected using remote sensing based on Grace satellite data,” said Gorelick. “The approach is like trying to track new construction of urban skyscrapers by sequentially measuring the average elevation of an entire city.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in Tokyo at j.gale@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: August 12, 2009 13:00 EDT

Corn, Soybeans Decline as Cool, Wet Weather Boosts U.S. Yields

By Jeff Wilson
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Corn fell, capping a seventh straight weekly decline, and soybeans dropped on expectations that cool weather and rain will boost yields in the U.S., tempering the effects of planting delays.
The Midwest will be mostly cool and wet over the next 10 days, with little stress on plants, John Dee, president of Global Weather Monitoring in Mohawk, Michigan, said today in a report. Warmer weather beginning Aug. 5 should help corn and soybeans develop, said Allen Motew, a meteorologist for QT Weather in Chicago. The U.S. is the largest grower and exporter of both crops.
“With the cool temperatures and rain somewhere every second or third day, the weather has been stress-free for the crops,” said Dan Cekander, a Newedge USA LLC senior grain analyst in Chicago. “Warmer weather in August would be beneficial for pushing the crops toward maturity,” boosting production, he said.
Corn futures for December delivery fell 11.5 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $3.2725 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, capping a weekly drop of 1.3 percent. The price has declined 20 percent this year, reaching a seven-month low of $3.1475 on July 22.
Soybean futures for November delivery fell 17 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $9.15 a bushel. The most-active contract fell 0.9 percent this week and 6.6 percent this year.
Farm Survey
Prices climbed yesterday on speculation that a U.S. farm survey next month will show fewer acres were planted with corn than the government estimated in June, Cekander said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said July 22 it will survey growers to measure the impact of cold, wet weather on Midwest planting, increasing speculation that grain output may be lower than forecast.
The USDA may cut projections for corn by 500,000 acres and raise soybeans acreage by 200,000, Cekander said. Poor weather led farmers in parts of southern Illinois and Indiana to abandon fields for the season, Cekander said.
Recent condition ratings for both crops were the best since 2004, according to the USDA. About 67 percent of soybeans were rated good or excellent as of July 19, up from 66 percent a week earlier, the department said this week. An estimated 71 percent of corn got top ratings, unchanged from a week earlier.
“Higher corn yields can offset a drop in acres,” Cekander said. “If you don’t stress the crops in August and there is an extended growing season for soybeans to reach maturity, yields can be high.”
Corn is the biggest U.S. crop, valued at $47.4 billion in 2008, with soybeans second at $27.4 billion, government figures show.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Wilson in Chicago at jwilson29@bloomberg.net Last Updated: July 24, 2009 15:58 EDT

Niño atípico trae lluvias a Australia

CANBERRA (Dow Jones)--A developing El Nino climate episode is showing
peculiar signs, including what is a temporarily strongly positive Southern
Oscillation Index, and good signs for rainfall, Grant Beard, a climatologist at
the government's Bureau of Meteorology, said Thursday.
"A lot of warmer-than-average water around Northern Australian such as we
have at the moment is a good sign for rainfall," Beard said by telephone.
El Nino is also usually associated with sustained strong negative values for
the Bureau's Southern Oscillation Index, but the SOI has risen in recent weeks.
The SOI stood at +8.9 in the 30 days ended July 14, rising strongly from the
lowest 30-day value in June of -12, the bureau's figures show.
El Nino refers to the extensive warming of the central and eastern Pacific
and cooling in the western Pacific. It generally leads to a major shift in
weather patterns across the Pacific and in Australia and usually - but not
always - is associated with below average rainfall in eastern and southern
Australia, potentially withering winter crops such as wheat and barley.
Climatologist Beard said the rise in the SOI is peculiar, but he still
expects it to fall sometime soon given what the bureau's prediction models are
saying with the warming of the equatorial Pacific.
"It's a temporary fluctuation," Beard said.
Some previous El Nino events have also seen SOI values rise but not to the
current level, and seen reasonable rainfall over southern Australia, such as in
1991, he said.
"All these events are different and this one in terms of that sort of thing
is behaving strangely" and different from El Nino events in 2002 and 2006, he
said.
"It may be one of those ones that deliver a mixed bag of rainfall outcomes,"
he said. "Every El Nino is different and some do see reasonable rainfall
outcomes."
The Indian Ocean Dipole, or IOD, also has remained in a negative mode for two
weeks, he said.
A negative IOD period is characterized by warmer-than-normal water in the
tropical eastern Indian Ocean. A positive mode for the IOD was previously
identified as a key influence for a drought in 2007 that wrecked winter crops,
including wheat, in southeast Australia, as it can hinder the formation of the
northwest cloudbands that are an important source of winter/spring rainfall in
southeast Australia.
But that isn't the case now.
"It's quite warmer than average right across the equatorial Pacific and even
across the waters north of Australia," Beard said. "There's a very wide band of
warmer-than-average water."
The high SOI is probably linked to these warmer-than-average waters, he said.
"This could be just a temporary blip, a month ago it was fairly solidly
negative," he said.
Most official and private forecasts for Australian wheat production this year
ending March 31, 2010, are in a range of 22 million to 23 million metric tons.
Australia produced 21.4 million tons of wheat last crop year ended March 31.
After annual domestic demand of almost 7 million tons is met, the balance is
available for export, making Australia a major supplier to the global trade.
An El Nino in 2006 cut the nation's wheat output to 10 million tons.