U.S. Water News Online
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Experts at an international water conference warned that demand from a fast growing world population was reducing rivers to a trickle and threatening agriculture.
``Water scarcity is probably the most underestimated emerging issue today,'' Worldwatch Institute President Lester Brown told more than 800 delegates in his opening address at the 10th annual Stockholm Water Symposium.
Brown called for a push in water conservation efforts comparable to land conservation efforts earlier this century.
``Water has been an abundant resources and an essentially free resource so we take it for granted,'' he said. ``We now know we can't do that anymore.''
The head of the Washington-based research group pointed to aquifer depletion and drained rivers as the main problems facing future generations and said the world could not afford to ignore the symptoms.
He cited the Colorado River in the United States, the Nile River in Africa, and the Ganges River in South Asia as among those that often run dry before they reach the sea.
He also warned of political instability, saying minor rioting had broken out in China when the government tried to fix leakage in a dam along the Yellow River to channel the water to the interior. The leakage was being used by farmers in the east coast province of Shandong.
``It's a case study in the competition that develops when water runs low,'' Brown said.
Speakers at the weeklong conference, organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, also said more water was being wasted on inefficient methods of growing feed grain -- with 70 percent of water worldwide going toward irrigation.
Suggestions varied from the simplistic, such as greater use of low-pressure sprinklers, to wholesale change of a society's eating habits. One proposal called for reducing irrigation-intensive crops like grains by encouraging people to eat poultry and fish, which consume less grain than pork and beef.
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