Interesting article by Lester ...

Interesting article by Lester Brown related to the subject: Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry? Plan B Updates July 09, 2013 Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry? Adapted from ‘The real threat to our future is peak water’ by Lester R. Brown, published in the Observer on July 6, 2013. Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (W.W. Norton, 2012). a text piece from the article: " Peak oil has generated headlines in recent years, but the real threat to our future is peak water. There are substitutes for oil, but not for water. We can produce food without oil, but not without water. We drink on average four liters of water per day, in one form or another, but the food we eat each day requires 2,000 liters of water to produce, or 500 times as much. Getting enough water to drink is relatively easy, but finding enough to produce the ever-growing quantities of grain the world consumes is another matter. Grain consumed directly supplies nearly half of our calories. That consumed indirectly as meat, milk, and eggs supplies a large part of the remainder. Today roughly 40 percent of the world grain harvest comes from irrigated land. It thus comes as no surprise that irrigation expansion has played a central role in tripling the world grain harvest over the last six decades. During the last half of the twentieth century, the world’s irrigated area expanded from close to 250 million acres (100 million hectares) in 1950 to roughly 700 million in 2000. This near tripling of world irrigation within 50 years was historically unique. But since then the growth in irrigation has come to a near standstill, expanding only 10 percent between 2000 and 2010. In looking at water and our future, we face many questions and few answers. Could the world be facing peak water? Or has it already peaked?" To access the full interesing article, visit: http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2013/update115