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Groundwater and Agriculture
As a country dubbed “the land of many waters”, arguing whether we should build bigger dams to generate electricity and worrying about increased rainfall inhibiting sugar production, it might sound quite anomalous to learn that there is a serious crisis looming in the world over freshwater supplies. Freshwater is used for human consumption, agricultural and industrial production.
The world has an estimated 11 trillion cubic metres of freshwater at its disposal, but even though in Guyana we obtain much of our drinking water from deep bore wells, because we do not use these for agriculture at this time, it might also surprise us to learn that most freshwater is found underground in aquifers.
Groundwater aquifers actually contain over 95% of freshwater, while rain, rivers, and lakes make up the remaining 5%. Most of these aquifers were formed billions of years ago and were practically untapped until the modern age in which the industrial revolution facilitated an unprecedented expansion of agriculture to feed the Malthusian population explosion.
The agricultural sector is by far the largest consumer of freshwater resources and accounts for 70% global consumption, mainly for irrigation. Irrigation became an integral part of modern civilisation because of new drills and machines facilitating access to groundwater aquifers.
Once farmers were freed from relying on rain to water their crops, highly efficient commercial farming, first in the industrial nations such as the US and then into developing nations such as China and India, became increasingly common. This innovation also underpinned the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased crop production throughout the third world in the 1960s. Unfortunately, water is being drawn from many of these aquifers faster than it is being replaced.
Nations that are deserts such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen turned to agriculture through exploiting aquifers and it should not surprise us that they will be the first to deplete those supplies and will have to return to massive importation of foodstuff. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), if current water consumption trends continue, by 2025 the agricultural sector will experience serious water shortages. The IFPRI estimates that crop losses due to water scarcity could be as high as 350 million metric tons per year, slightly more than the entire crop yield of the U.S. The precipitant to the imminent crisis in agriculture is the dramatic drop in aquifer levels in the western U.S., northern Iran, north-central China, India, Mexico, Australia, and numerous other locations.
For Guyana there is a silver lining to this dark cloud of disappearing water: with our abundant rainfall, we have the opportunity to get ourselves into a state of readiness to supply foodstuff to those countries such as China and India that will be hardest hit by aquifer depletion. We are already proficient in the production of rice which will be needed by those countries and we call upon the authorities to immediately initiate a plan to take our production of this grain to 1 million tonnes by 2025.
We have already spoken out against the present practice of converting irrigated and drained abandoned sugar fields into housing developments. This is almost a criminal act, not only for frittering away the infrastructure that was built literally by the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors, but also because we are ignoring our own warnings on the threat to our coast by rising sea levels.
As we retreat from sugar due to labour shortages, we can ease into rice production, which is already highly mechanised.
We have a historical precedent for this move in Essequibo where all sugar lands went through that conversion. But the suggestion to increase our rice production only scratches our potential in the area of food security for countries like China and India that will increasingly move out of agriculture. They know that 1,000 tons of water will produce 1 ton of rice, which is worth $500 but in the industrial sector, will generate $14,000 worth of goods. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out where they deploy their limited water.
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