USAID and Monsanto in India

The debate over the safety and utility of genetically modified seeds is only one part of the issue.  This article suggests that rent-seeking behavior is now completely out of control on a global scale.

Criminalising Dissent in India against GMOs and Monsanto

by Colin Todhunter

Global Research

June 20, 2014

Before being voted out of office this year, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration sanctioned open-field trials of 200 GM food crops in India. Monsanto’s shares rocketed as a result (1). This decision prompted Rajesh Krishnan of the Coalition for a GM Free India to state that government was against the interest of citizens, farmers and the welfare of the nation. Instead, it has decided to work hand in glove with the multinational GM seed industry that stands to gain immensely from the numerous open field trails of GM crops.

Filmmaker Mahesh Batt called Minister Moily, who sanctioned the decision, a “corporate mole” and the Coalition for a GM Free India and Greenpeace condemned Moily’s action as “unscientific, anti-people and reeking of vested interests.”

Moily’s decision was set against the backdrop of the Supreme Court appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) recommending a ten-year moratorium on GM organism approvals till scientifically robust protocols, independent and competent institutions to assess risks and a strong regulatory system were developed. It recommended an indefinite stoppage of all open field trials of GM crops. The Committee insisted that the government bring in independence, scientific expertise, transparency, rigour and participative democracy into GMO regulation and policy.

Environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues points out the risks and drawbacks of GMOs by stating that there is increasing evidence of the health and environment risks from these crops; GM yields are significantly lower than yields from non-GM crops; and pesticide use, the great ‘industry’ claim on these GM crops, instead of coming down, has gone up exponentially. Rodrigues argues that in India, notwithstanding the hype of the industry, the regulators and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Bt cotton yield is levelling off to levels barely higher than they were before the introduction of Bt (2).

Rodrigues wants to know where is the advantage and why are we experimenting given all the attendant risks. We have hard evidence from every UN study and particularly the World Bank-funded International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge and Science for Development Report, which India signed in 2008. She adds:

“The IAASTD was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed. The report states we must look to small-holder, traditional farming (not GMOs) to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable. Governments must invest in these systems. This is the clear evidence.”  [...]

Plenty more -- plenty -- in the report.  

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A look back at the Snowden Effect

Snowden effect: young people now care about privacy

CyberTruth 
Byron Acohido, USA TODAY 

November 13, 2013

Results of a Harris Poll released this morning show four out of five people have changed the privacy settings of their social media accounts, and most have made changes in the last six months.

What's more, the poll, commissioned by anti-malware vendor ESET, reveals clear evidence that, contrary to what some believe, young people actually do care about the privacy of their online personas.

The ESET poll is that latest proof point of what could, at the end of the day, take hold as a tectonic societal shift: the return of privacy as a social norm. Call it the Edward Snowden effect.

[...]

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Stop bad water management! Drive a Prius!

I'm discovering it's hard to find a news report or editorial on water shortages in the Middle East that doesn't veer into a discussion about climate change.  If the hot air merely contributed to global warming I'd be philosophical. But governments and international organizations that have bought into initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint have taken up a straw man argument that goes like this:

A. There's a water shortage.

B. Drought caused the shortage.

C. Climate change caused the drought.

D. Therefore, we must address climate change.

E.  Thusly, we must reduce the use of fossil fuels.

  

What does that very dangerous chain of reasoning have to do with people in say, Syria, knowing so little about water management that the water table falls below the reach of their well-digging drills?  What does it have to do with not including the evaporation rate in discussions about rainfall statistics? 

I could list hundreds more examples but why bother?  Climate changers look at every plea for sane water management as stealing thunder from the important issues. 

Meanwhile even the most simple tactics for conserving water go ignored.  Which is to say climate changers are helping set billions of people and their livestock on a course to die horrible deaths for no good reason. 

But look on the bright side: billions fewer, right there is a reduction in the carbon footprint.

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Questionable ethics of America's legal marijuana sales model

Beau Kilmer, the co-director of RAND Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center, nailed it in an editorial published in the New York Times in January 2014:

Legalizing the large-scale commercial production, distribution and sale of marijuana, Colorado and Washington states have created an unprecedented situation. Contrary to many people’s assumptions, not even the Netherlands has gone this far. ...  Instead of starting with an approach that lent itself more easily to public health protections, voters in Colorado and Washington jumped right to a market model similar to alcohol.

For some strange reason American marijuana legalization advocates don't like to talk about Portugal, even though the country decriminalized marijuana more than a decade ago.  Maybe the reluctance has to do with the fact that the country never actually legalized marijuana use. Instead, the government treats marijuana use, and the use of other banned chemical substances, as a disease.

So while Portuguese citizens can still be arrested for use of the banned substances, they aren't referred to the criminal justice system. Each person's case is studied by a panel of legal experts, psychologists, and social workers. Then a treatment program tailored to the individual is developed.

In this way the country halved drug addiction in the population within the space of a decade. 

Of course Portugal is a tiny country with a tiny population -- little more than a million people -- whereas just one small state in the USA, Delaware, has a population size that approaches Portugal's.  This means the United States has a drug addiction problem that dwarfs Portugal's. Just the number of documented heroin addicts in the USA is more than the entire population of Portugal.
  
Yet there's no question that Portugal took a public health approach to dealing with substance abuse and that it's paid off.  And they did it while decriminalizing use of the substances -- a vaunted goal of Americans who advocate marijuana legalization at the state and federal levels of government.

Whatever public health programs the marijuana-licensing American states have adopted to deal with addiction to marijuana are ad hoc affairs, tacked on after marijuana became legalized in the states -- after marijuana became legally available through a large number of outlets, after Colorado and Washington states officially acknowledged that marijuana was addictive for a large number of users.

And these states jumped straight to a marijuana retail distribution model that didn't actually occur with alcohol until fairly recently in the USA, which was to make marijuana available through many sales outlets.  I think by about 2012 there were more "medical" marijuana dispensaries in Denver, the capital city of Colorado, than Starbucks coffee shops.

But looking at the alcohol sales model in the USA, for decades after alcohol prohibition ended alcohol was only available in special sales outlets.  Today in the USA beer and wine can be bought at convenience and grocery stores and 'big box' retail stores that sell groceries.  Yet American law enforcement officials trace the rise in teenage alcohol abuse to the product's wide availability and see marijuana use among young people following the same trajectory.

So if the rationale for legalizing marijuana in the USA is chiefly compassion, the people who've translated this impulse into a business model have had a strange way of helping those Americans who are most vulnerable to the downsides of using mind-altering drugs.
    
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"Did dinosaurs create the flowers in the fields?"

That was John Batchelor's startling question to paleontologist and dinosaur expert Anthony J. Martin during their discussion one Friday night toward the end of January about Martin's book, Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by their Trace Fossils, which clearly had enchanted Batchelor.
 
I've never had any interest in dinosaurs -- it was more than a decade after it premiered that I took time to watch "Jurassic Park."  But Martin sounded such a happy man, so happy to be spending his life studying dinosaurs, in spite of myself I listened to the interview.

Finally, though, I said, "All right, enough about dinosaurs." 

I was just about to switch off the radio when Batchelor popped out with that question.  So then I had to wait through the station break to learn whether dinosaurs had created the flowers in the fields. I'm glad I mustered the patience.  In ways I could never have imagined dinosaurs have shaped our world. 

Someday, on a dreary snowy day when I'm suffering from cabin fever, I will search for the podcast of the interview and listen again.  Come to think of it, I'll buy the book and tuck it away for a gloomy day. 

********

The Two Immutable Laws

One is the first law of large-scale systems design, as Guru David explained it to me several decades ago: The more a system is utilized, the faster it will break down.  Thus, the paradoxical fact that the very success of a system sows its failure. 

People who design large-scale transport systems such as bridges are very much aware of the law. So they build as many fail-safes into the design as they can in the attempt to ward off a sudden, catastrophic failure of the system.

The other law was explained to me decades ago by a World Bank economist. 

When I asked if the World Bank ran the world he replied that no, it was the IMF that ran the world; the World Bank fixed the world.  But when I then asked how he'd characterize the Bank he replied that it was juggernaut. Sensing a paradox I asked how he squared an engine of destruction with the world's Mr Fixit.

He replied, "Because it's not possible to fix anything in this world without breaking something, somewhere down the line."

The World Bank, he added, had produced proof that this observation was an immutable law.  He was speaking the truth. If the Bank collected reports on every one of the projects it's funded, and published them as a series of volumes, this would be humanity's Book of Bitter Wisdom.

The smartest people at the World Bank are very much aware of what could be termed the Fixit Law.  This is because they've studied hundreds of Bank project reports covering a boggling array of situations. And so they counsel governments that seek development loans from the Bank: break down the big complicated projects into simple little projects.  This way, when a project inevitably generates problems you didn't factor into your calculations, at least you'll have a shot at limiting the damage.

So if one removed human nature from the picture and allowed designers of large-scale systems and the smartest people at the World Bank to run governments, this world could be as close to paradise as it's possible to get on Earth.   

The catch is that just as human nature has never seen a law it doesn't try to outwit, so it hasn't made an attempt to outwit an immutable law that it hasn't screwed up. This explains the many pages of a contract between municipal governments and firms they hire to build big structures, like a bridge.  All the legal language from the construction company's side boils down to saying, 'If you don't conduct timely inspections and repairs for this structure once we've built it, first of all you're going straight to hell and secondly we're not liable.'

Yet no attorney, no sane person, would think to factor in the possibility that, say, some asshole in a governor's political organization would decide to get revenge on a politician by bringing traffic on one of the world's key transport arteries to a crawl, creating the mother of all gridlocks. This actually happened.  Reference Bridgegate.

This suggests there could be a third immutable law in existence, but I don't want to attempt to figure out how it might be worded.

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The Wells of Beirut

"Throughout history, countless songs and poems have celebrated Lebanon’s sweeping and picturesque landscape: snow-capped mountains overlooking a pristine Mediterranean, wandering rivers dividing bustling cities and towns, and mounds of colorful fruits and vegetables on fertile spring-fed lands."
-- From Water in Lebanon:  Matching Myth With Reality

Given its huge water problems these days Lebanon has been saved from a fate worse than death by the collapse of its offshore oil and gas dreams because offshore drilling takes a lot of water the Lebanese can't afford at this juncture in their history.  Yet there's nothing like the prospect of fast wealth to addle the human brain.  Those people thought they were going to get rich.

Same with the Cypriots, by the way, which helps explain why the Cyprus government took leave of its senses and made huge loans to Greece with money it didn't have. Reality finally intervened.  France's Total came up dry in its explorations off the Cyprus coast, in a block that's right next to Lebanon's, and also the price of oil and gas took a dive.  This led to hand wringing among energy experts in those countries but drill down into Lebanon's water problems to see that instead of mourning the loss of a pipe dream Lebanese should be thanking their lucky stars.

However, the World Bank was miffed.  Lebanon's government, also counting their chickens before they were hatched, signed onto a comprehensive Bank plan to solve a chunk of the country's water problems.  After the offshore oil and gas dreams went up in smoke: cancel the plan!  Those plans cost real money and a lot of manpower to put together.  To blow off steam the Bank told the unvarnished truth. From a news report last year at Al-Hayat:

The [Lebanese] government looked into several promising projects to provide a sustainable water supply for the capital and develop the water network.
[...]
Yet these were all vain attempts. According to a World Bank study, the [project failed due to] the concerned authorities’ lack of administrative competence, their negative competitiveness and their overlapping responsibilities and interests — especially between water departments and the Council for Development and Reconstruction.

If the criticism sounds familiar to American readers, reference California's hydropolitics, which were aired in great detail as the catastrophic drought deepened in the state last year. Change the names and locales to find striking parallels not only between California's water crisis and Lebanon's but between all present water crises the world over.

So we've seen this movie before: A region with inadequate water infrastructure and lousy water management gets hit with a big drought. Then there's an uproar about fixing the problems. Then it pelts rain or the snowpack for that year is good and everybody goes back to worrying about something else. Until the great casino in the sky stops favoring human procrastination.

That's what happened last year in Lebanon. On August 24, 2014, Al-Hayat reported on a severe drought in progress in the country (see the Al-Hayat link above). Less than two months later Lebanon's Daily Star headlined a report Rainy week douses Lebanon drought fears.

The same kind of bureaucratic foot dragging and infighting found in California hydropolitics, and the same astounding ignorance, has made Lebanon increasingly dependent on the weather's moods. The difference is that the United States is a huge and wealthy country; other U.S. states can absorb those Californians fleeing a drought that just won't go away. Lebanon, according to Al-Hayat "the fourth richest country in water resources in the Middle East and North Africa," is a tiny country of 4 million people that now hosts many Syrian refugees.
 
Last year, by the time the number of refugees passed the 1 million mark, the country was plunged into a drought -- a severe drought of the kind not seen since 1932.  This meant 27 percent of the Syrian refugees were without potable water, therefore forced to drink unfiltered water -- and tensions rose between drought-stricken Lebanese farmers and the refugees.

Ironically the refugee crisis finally focused Lebanese and the international aid community's attention on the country's water management issues.  An international organization called ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development) announced in an undated Internet press release that it was constructing

10 reservoirs in the district of Mont Lebanon, home to over 200,000 thousand refugees, over the course of 2014. Through the support of UNHCR, these reservoirs have been designed to meet the water supply gaps in vulnerable communities, ensuring that both Syrian refugee and Lebanese families have sufficient access to safe drinking water.

But in a chilling parallel to California's situation, the widespread digging of private wells in Beirut  is generating huge problems.  According to another missive from someone at the World Bank (see above link for Matching Myth With Reality):

Over 20,000 illegal groundwater wells have also been dug across the Greater Beirut and Mount Lebanon area alone. It is where over half of the Lebanese population lives, works, and endures the dramatic winter floods, polluted sea waters, and either poor quality or highly expensive water

Why polluted?  The usual: untreated industrial and human waste dumped off the coast, etc.  But the worst news for the present is that the unrestricted and unmetered well-digging carries the most severe penalties, as those who followed the California water crisis know. From an August 24, 2014, report by Sophie Cousins for Al Jazeera English headlined Lebanon skeptical of 'save water' effort:

Aside from the [water] awareness campaign, the [energy and water] ministry also has said it would dig more state-owned wells and erect more dams "where possible". The new wells are expected to produce between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic metres of water per day.

But Lebanese water resources expert Claude Tabbal, who has worked on water projects in partnership with the United Nations, said that digging new wells was not the answer to the water shortage.

"Digging more wells is particularly dangerous [in coastal places] like Beirut and all other cities on the coast because the practise and over-exploitation of wells leads to the abstraction of [an] excessive amount of water, putting pressure on the aquifer and leading to seawater intrusion and the degradation of the quality of water," he told Al Jazeera.

"This is confirmed by the elevated total dissolved solids and chloride levels in well water samples. Today, everybody in Beirut is complaining about the salty taste of water [from] the tanks."

This reality is evident in the seaside suburb of Hamra, one of the commercial hubs of Beirut. "Hamra has had water shortages throughout the summer, but at my house we haven't because we had a well underneath," said an AUB student who lives in Hamra, who did not want to be named.

"If you don’t have a well underneath your apartment block then you’re [out of luck]; If you run out of water, you order a roof tank. But our groundwater is so salty because we’re now hitting the seawater. It’s gross," the student said.

Nadim Farajalla [associate professor of environmental hydrology at the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the American University of Beirut (AUB)] said this was occurring because wells are being pumped at a higher rate than the recharge rate from snowmelt and other filtration in coastal aquifers allows, meaning that seawater is entering the wells. [...]

What happens if the recharge rate collapses from a sustained lack of rain and snowfall?  The same thing that happens to estuaries when they're overwhelmed by seawater.  The same thing that happens to a well when its water level drops to a certain point.  The water becomes so toxic it can't be drunk by man or beast or crops.
  
The doomsday scenario hasn't descended on Lebanon; the country is home to at least 15 aquifers and several rivers, and as a long as the snow and rain keep returning Lebanese can avoid the worst. This doesn't mean they can avoid the next to worst.
     
Nowhere in the dozen reports I looked at on Lebanon's water issues did I find mention of land subsidence in and around Beirut or anywhere in Lebanon, but it must be happening in Beirut given all the wells dug there and the city's burgeoning population.  The big question would be the rate at which the land is sinking. 

Land subsidence occurs when "large amounts of groundwater have been excessively withdrawn from an aquifer," generally by overzealous well digging. An aquifer, to refresh memories, is "an underground layer of permeable rock, sediment, or soil that yields water."

So it's not only that aquifer water becomes brackish and even toxic if it can't be recharged or replaced fast enough; it's also that the land over the aquifer starts sinking -- and the more pumping, the faster the land sinks. That's why California's San Joaquin Valley now has huge infrastructure problems -- roads, irrigation pipes, canals, buildings, you name it.  The structures are built on land that's been sinking so fast and so much (about a foot a year during the past few years) that it's useless to do repairs on the infrastructure because as soon as they're done, the land has sunk again.

I note that Nadim Farajalla, the associate professor at AUB who spoke to Al-Jazeera, did mention subsidence in passing in a presentation (PDF) to a climate change conference in 2012, saying that land subsidence is a key problem for the northern coastline of the Nile Delta. 

Moving along -- subsidence and undrinkable groundwater are just the windup. Here's the punchline. From a July 28, 2014, Inter Press Service report headlined Drought and Misuse Behind Lebanon's Water Scarcity:

Sheik Osama Chehab, in charge of the Osman Bin Affan Mosque [in Beirut], explains that 20 years ago water could be found three metres under the ground surface.

“Yesterday,” he told IPS, “we dug 120 metres and did not find a drop.”

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Will All-Night Pizza Deliveries Continue in Cairo During Armageddon?

We have it on authority from Islamic State guys who talked with The Atlantic's Graeme Wood over Viennese coffee and pastry that the final battle between good and evil will be fought in Jerusalem or a town in Syria or maybe somewhere else. The details will probably jell the closer we get to the big battle.  But with regard to the end of the world, at least in the Middle East, some of the biggest questions right now are whether Armageddon will interfere with Foreign Direct Investment in Egypt and pizza deliveries in Cairo. 
 
The questions point to a vise which has become readily apparent only in the past couple years, I think, as it's started to tighten.  While Egypt isn't the only country that's caught it's an important case, so I'll summarize the two sides of the vise:  
  
FDI and Water Stress

The new administration in Egypt is trying to woo direct foreign investment. The problem is that the investors aren't interested in backing bingo parlor startups or any other business that isn't a water hog.

Traditional World Bank-IMF thinking, which is accepted by mainstream economists, is that to develop, the poorer countries need to diversify their sources of foreign exchange. In Egypt this means less dependence on tourism and fees for international ship traffic through the Suez Canal.

Yet alternatives invariably translate to a greater strain on the country's water resources, which are already so strained that in 2012 the Global Post seriously asked whether the country would run out of water by 2025.

The World Bank is now very much aware of the problem in water stressed developing countries, and that's probably true for all the major development banks. If they didn't get it before, the data coming from GRACE during the past couple years has been the reality check.

For at least two decades a great deal of focus was on creating sustainable energy sources in the developing countries: how could they put development on a strong industrial base without sustainable energy? But as it happened everywhere else in the world, including the United States, not enough attention was put on creating sustainable water sources.  That's because everyone was wildly overestimating the world's groundwater resources -- estimates built on nothing but blind guesses. The GRACE satellite system has removed the guesswork, but this kicks the struts out from under all traditional economic prescriptions for developing countries -- for development, period.

In theory a way around the problem is for governments in the developing countries to demand that foreign companies setting up shop contribute to helping build up or repair the country's water infrastructures. And insure that their water use in the country is sustainable.

But right now the theory is running into the fact that economists, development specialists, etc., are having to go back to square one and refigure in the face of water realities. Eventually, water shortage crises will force an entirely new concept of development and FDI on governments, investors, and global corporations, but fast diminishing water resources won't wait for these people to get their heads together.

Energy Subsidies and Water Stress

During his 2014 presidential campaign Abdel Fattah el-Sisi exhorted Egyptians to start working harder and get up at 5 AM. 

5 AM? In the morning? I think Cairenes are just getting to bed at 4 AM.  Cairo is the city that never sleeps; it's been like that for a long time but not like this era, in which sleeplessness is served by a huge variety of businesses that use a lot of (heavily subsidized electricity, fuel, and water). It's routine for the many
government employees in Cairo, who can afford to arrive fashionably late for work, to eat the evening meal around midnight or later. And many Cairenes actually do work hard running restaurants and coffee houses, and making pizza deliveries across the city at all hours that were ordered via cell phones.

But when el-Sisi became President last year one of his first acts was to cut back on the government's massive fuel subsidies.  This was met with cheers in many quarters including the IAEA.  It's dawned on people involved with energy conservation issues that it makes no sense to call for cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions while governments subsidize increasingly profligate use of fossil fuels.

The original rationale for the subsidies was to provide the poorest with basic fuel needs.  The catch turned out to be that the measure of "poorest" and "basic" kept expanding over the decades. And it turned out that the well-off in Egypt were the biggest beneficiaries of the subsidies.  (The situation has been the same in virtually all developing countries with heavily subsidized fuel.)

Yet there's a hidden downside to cutting back on fuel subsidies.  There is no question that the subsidies exacerbated the fast rate of water depletion in countries across the MENA, as Shanta Devarajan, writing at a World Bank blog, emphasized in November 2014 (Corrosive Subsidies in MENA).  So, on paper, this is the perfect time to cut back of fuel subsidies because the price of oil and its byproducts have more-or-less permanently retreated from their highs. 

But cutting back means that even with lower oil prices, it can become more expensive to look for water.  Why?  Because as water sources become scarcer, drilling has to be done at increasingly deep depths. With every foot down, the price for drilling gets increasingly expensive.  This is what killed many farms in Mexico during the catastrophic drought in the country in 2012.  Farmers couldn't afford to drill down to the water.
  
That's not the trickiest part of the fuel subsidy vise.  As more people obtained disposable income in the latter part of the 20th Century thanks greatly to increased global trade, they took up lifestyles that fuel subsidies were never meant to address. The same with electricity and water subsidies.

Again, this situation isn't limited to Egypt; it's across the board.  People have been upgrading their lifestyles and the disposable income in increasing numbers. So it's not just bad water management or the big population numbers that worst against stretching water resources to serve the larger numbers.  It's the growing percentage of people who can buy things that even half a century ago very few could afford -- or things which didn't even exist in that era -- and buy them in larger and larger amounts.  All those things are also 'virtual' water.
  
In Cairo the ways in which the subsidies came to be used -- say, to open a restaurant or start a fast food delivery service -- led to a galloping increase in the use of fuel, water, and electricity.  This in turn led to more and more people basing their way of life on runaway use of water and virtual water for nonessentials, many of which need to be rapidly replaced, further skyrocketing the use of water.

The climate and water resources of say, the American northeast mean that the huge population in New York City can still get away with an all-night lifestyle and with buying more and more highly disposable stuff, whereas Egypt's climate and water resources don't allow Cairenes to do the same.
 
So while the basic reasoning behind cutting back on fuel subsidies is sound, this isn't addressing the central issue for the world's most water-stressed countries, including Egypt. The 2012 Global Post report mentioned that Egyptians still have plenty of drinking water, and quoted an observer who noted that Egyptians "see the Nile flowing and think everything's fine" with the country's water supply. (The same for the many Californians who said that the state actually had plenty of water so why the hysteria about a drought?)

So what else is new about human nature?  Generally there's only one shot at explaining really complicated issues to the public before a disaster has to do the explaining. That's because if we don't understand an explanation the first time around or conclude it's an exaggeration, we tend to discount the attempted clarifications that follow.

The Bill Collector Arriveth

So is President Sisi's approach  the best? Cut out the long-winded explanations; just tell people to get to bed early so they can get up at a smart hour for doing things in a desert climate. The stumbling block to common sense is that Cairo's nightlife is now integrated with a large number of jobs.  The same can be said for the daytime life in desert cities across the Middle East, which imitates lifestyles in big cities, such as London and New York, which aren't located in a desert climate.
 
To wrap it up, megapopulations across the Middle East want a way of life they thought they could afford through oil and gas wealth (and in Egypt's case, control of a key trade route).  Now they're going to learn that they can't afford the water bills for that way of life. 

The problem is that the water bill collector is already at the door. From Shanta Devarajan's post:

At 500 cubic meters per capita per annum of renewable water, MENA is the most water scarce region in the world.  Renewable water resource availability is below 30 cubic meters per capita per annum in Kuwait, UAE and Qatar, followed by Yemen.  Only a few countries in MENA, such as Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, have more than 1,000 cubic meters per capita. Renewable water availability has also been declining over time, with a rate of decrease of 35 percent over the last decade. For some countries, such as UAE and Qatar, the rate of decrease has been as high as 75 percent.

Even more troubling, the ratio of water withdrawn to availability is highest in MENA, amounting on average to just below 400 percent. In other regions they range from 6 to 54 percent. Countries such as Egypt and Jordan are reaching the 100 percent threshold. Lebanon, Morocco and Algeria are the only countries where water withdrawal is less than 50 per cent of availability.

Yet even that grim prognosis doesn't convey the extent of the crisis.  The countries with more than 1,000 cubic meters of water per capita that Devarajan named -- Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon -- have big water stress issues.  Yet these would be small chips next to the specter of millions of refugees from water disaster regions in MENA piling into those countries. 

*********  

Middle East: The Rate of Doom's Approach, Strawberries in the Sand, Weaponized Water

 From a February 2013 report by Alton Parrish for Before It's News (Middle East Running Out Of Water Faster And Faster):

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea.

The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites [GRACE], and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water – nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea.

The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it – about 60 percent – to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.
[...]
They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India.

“This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the scientists report in a paper to be published online Feb. 15 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
[...]

From Erin Cunningham's April 2012 article for Global Post (Could Egypt run out of water by 2025?):

[...]  But now, to ease over-crowding near the [Nile] river, Egypt’s government is encouraging its swollen population to move away from the Nile and into the desert — which makes up 95 percent of its area. About half of Egypt’s 80 million people live in the fertile Nile Delta north of Cairo.

The government is offering tracts of sandy wasteland at low-cost if settlers pledge to irrigate the barren parcels.

The Egyptian government has managed to boost its tillable land over the last 50 years by one-quarter, using canals to bring Nile water to the desert. But most of those plots were snatched up by commercial mega-farms that churn out cash crops — like strawberries — for export rather than local consumption. In the end, these green desert farms did little to ease the scarcity of food in Egypt.

“The policy for 60 years has been to expand the cultivated surface of Egypt, getting people out of the valley and into the desert,” [Richard Tutwiler,  director of the Desert Development Center at the American University in Cairo] said. “But it’s a different environment out there. The drainage issues are different. And the irrigation, it needs more power. It involves a much higher capital investment that poor farmers just don’t have.”

Blooming the desert requires funds to build modern irrigation systems capable of pumping water, with energy-fueled, pressurized pipes, out of the Nile Valley.

While it helps alleviate pressure on the Nile Delta, experts say the desert irrigation program only reduces Egypt’s ability to conserve water.

“Think about Egypt as kind of a valley. Gravity suggests if you put too much water on your field in upper [southern] Egypt, it trickles back into the Nile, and you can put it back on a field in lower [northern] Egypt,” said Tutwiler, describing the flood irrigation system that originates at the Aswan Dam in the south.

“But if you take the water out of the valley and put it in the desert, it doesn’t go back into the Nile. It’s lost in the sand.”

The article mentions that the canals lose as much 3 billion cubic meters of Nile water each year to "evaporation under Egypt’s hot, desert sun." So it's not just a matter of replacing irrigation canals with drip tape to ward off evaporation because the canals are also used to transport water from one site to others at considerable distance.

From a July 2014 report by John Vidal for the Guardian (Water supply key to outcome of conflicts in Iraq and Syria, experts warn):

The outcome of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts may rest on who controls the region’s dwindling water supplies, say security analysts in London and Baghdad.

Rivers, canals, dams, sewage and desalination plants are now all military targets in the semi-arid region that regularly experiences extreme water shortages, says Michael Stephen, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in Qatar, speaking from Baghdad.

“Control of water supplies gives strategic control over both cities and countryside. We are seeing a battle for control of water. Water is now the major strategic objective of all groups in Iraq. It’s life or death. If you control water in Iraq you have a grip on Baghdad, and you can cause major problems.Water is essential in this conflict,” he said.

Isis [Islamic State] Islamic rebels now control most of the key upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, the two great rivers that flow from Turkey in the north to the Gulf in the south and on which all Iraq and much of Syria depends for food, water and industry.

“Rebel forces are targeting water installations to cut off supplies to the largely Shia south of Iraq,” says Matthew Machowski, a Middle East security researcher at the UK houses of parliament and Queen Mary University of London.

“It is already being used as an instrument of war by all sides. One could claim that controlling water resources in Iraq is even more important than controlling the oil refineries, especially in summer. Control of the water supply is fundamentally important. Cut it off and you create great sanitation and health crises,” he said. [...]

As to whether all Islamic State's invasion plans are specifically predicated on gaining control of water sources, I don't know and the Guardian report doesn't indicate although some passages are suggestive of the idea. 

********

The Well

Writing for The Atlantic Graeme Wood explained that the Islamic State is motivated by the desire to restore the Islamic caliphate but is guided by an old End Times prophecy -- their interpretation of the prophecy.  "There are but a few days left," according to the spokesman, as quoted by Wood.

Not that few days. The Islamic State counts their present leader as the eighth caliph and claim there will be 12 or maybe Wood wrote 14 caliphs before the world comes to an end.  But by an interesting irony the world actually is coming to an end -- their world, if one considers their world to be the Middle East.  It's coming to an end quite soon. 

And while the prophesied wars might be part of the end times in that region, the most prosaic of conditions, water shortages, will launch the apocalypse in the Middle East.

How soon is quite soon?  From readings about water issues I started last year, my guess would be that after two more years, shortages will be severe enough in parts of the Middle East and possibly North Africa to set in motion a chain reaction that is itself the result of many cumulative effects.

Is there any way to stave off this scenario or neutralize it?  Not that I can see. There are too many factors converging on the basic water stresses in the region to hope that prioritized responses will stop their escalation.  So while most of the factors have a solution(s) when looked at in problematical terms, the interactions of all these created a kind of microclimate or ecology of disaster, if you will.

In folk terms, it's a tangled ball of yarn.

You can pull parts of various skeins out of the ball to see the materials and colors in the tangle, but it wasn't a 'created' ball.  It just happened, through many events that mindlessly, blindly, tangled together into a ball.  There is no way to fix the tangle, not without taking the ball apart.

For this reason it's a waste of time to attempt to fix blame.  Sure, you can go down a list of contributing factors and find many that are blameworthy. But only in retrospect in many cases.  The people in the Middle East have been living on borrowed time always -- ever since the climate in the region changed to arid and semi-arid.  Now time's up.

If they'd had the GRACE satellite system a half century ago, to tell them exactly how much groundwater they had left and the exact rate it was being used up, would that have made it possible to stave off the end?  No. That's because a half century ago they couldn't imagine the present population explosion and many other factors that didn't exist back then, but which arose apart from each other then combined to put intolerable strains on the water systems in the region.

Realize they're not just running out of water in the Middle East; they're running out at an increasingly fast rate. 

Here's just one way among many that this plays out: They've had population explosions before in that region, but they didn't have large government sanitation and hygiene programs until fairly recently, and which use water and of course save many lives and extend life spans, which also uses up water.

In other words, successive generations keep finding more ways to use increasingly large amounts of the water at an increasingly fast rate and extend their life spans.  That last is great from the human viewpoint, but water isn't human. Neither is reality.

The people of those lands who put reality first managed to hack it out for a long time in an unforgiving climate. Remember the scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Sherif Ali shoots to death the Arab who drinks from a well that doesn't belong to the Arab's tribe? Lawrence was furious, telling Ali that the man was his friend.
 
Sherif Ali replied, "He was nothing. The well is everything."  
  
********

A Message for Indian Readers

1.  The country that shifts to a focus on water security now, even if this means scaling back on development and trade, will come out on top in global trade and internal economic security by the turn of this decade.

2.  If this focus on water is confined to only a few regions in India, then you're going to see the same basic problem that Mumbai faced with millions of job-seekers from all over India converging on the city. However, it's going to be even worse when these internal refugees are fleeing severe water scarcity. And internal refugees will be competing with huge waves of refugees from S.W. Asia and maybe parts of Central Asia who'll be fleeing water scarcity within about two years. The waves could include people from parts of Pakistan. There will be no way to keep all those refugees out of India -- although I hope the Indian military is war-gaming that scenario.

3.  Add to this an increasing problem worldwide that's even struck here in the USA, as California agribusiness shifted some agriculture from the state's worst-hit drought regions.  Seemed to work at first, as crops were shifted to fertile parts of Oregon and Texas. Then farmers in those parts began running out of water.  This happened within about only two years -- from water abundance to drought.  Turned out the farmers didn't know how little groundwater they had left.

So this could be called 'rolling artificial droughts' or man-made droughts.  Rolling from one nearby region to another. But this sets up conditions for a chain reaction of artificial droughts that engulf more and more land. 
Meanwhile, the people affected by these rolling droughts flee to other regions within the country. But because of modern transportation these internal diasporas can happen very quickly -- and thus, quickly overwhelming the infrastructures in the region that sees the refugees.

4.  These chain reactions can occur more quickly in this era than modern governments are capable of dealing with.

5.  Every aspect of water security should come under close review in every Indian state, including cleaning up water polluted by industrial and agricultural chemical runoffs. I don't know whether governments in all those states or the national government have the capacity for this kind of review or whether any such review done earlier needs updating.

So this could be a crowdsourcing project.
 
6. As to China -- I can't even try to estimate how long they've got left, although I do know from news reports last year that they're facing severe and entrenched water crises in several regions. I also know they waste oceans of water.  So I'd leave them and their river-source bullying to heaven and the Indian military.

I'd focus on asking what you as a private citizen can do to protect and amplify every single drop of water available to India -- even if you can only help publicize the urgency of the situation or do research on water issues for a small region in the country.  But there has to be a tremendous amount of data mining so that financial and human resources applied to solutions are used in the most efficient ways.

Make your start at figuring out how you can best help, and I think help will come to you in this regard.  Why now?  I don't write the scripts; I just say the lines.

*******

Surgery

Last of three surgical procedures this month on Friday.  There will be more procedures, different ones, later this year.  Three different conditions in my right leg, all connected and contributing to each other.  I'll live but there's been a lot of pain since January.  Less pain now, after the procedure on Friday.  At the end of it all I hope to walk normally again after more than a year of being crippled. 

I hid it from people, even my doctor, until I couldn't walk anymore without hanging onto something don't you dare laugh Pundita it's not a damn bit funny.  It was actually two years I hid it. [laughing] Okay, maybe a little longer than that. It was a tactical triumph while it lasted.

What can I say?  Some people are just born hating disorder more than death, but if one doesn't die then eventually one has deal with a lot of disorder that piles up.   

Now where was I?  The marijuana industry.  But first I guess a few words about war. Here we go again.

********  

How to become a Marijuana Grow House Hazard Expert the Hard Way

The situation has only gotten worse since MSN first reported on it, as have the fires in grow houses.  An interesting point from the MSN report is that location is no bar to the dangers from the houses; that's because the indoor growers are making so much money from pot agriculture that they can afford to rent or buy in the very best neighborhoods. After turning a house into a danger zone then fixing it up just enough to fool the innocent buyer, they move to another house and repeat the performance.

There was one article, from years before the MSN one, about the dangers from grow houses that described situations so awful they were almost funny. The article was published in a police journal in Canada and featured anecdotes from police raids on the houses.  There didn't seem to be a licensed electrician among the growers, and their grasp of basic chemistry was tenuous; they got carbon monoxide confused with carbon dioxide as a way to stimulate plant growth. 

I'm sorry I didn't save the article but these two are enough to convey the gist:   

Move over, meth: Marijuana 'grow houses' an increasing menace
By Melinda Fulmer of MSN Real Estate
[January 2011]
A home that was used to grow pot can be a nightmare for a homebuyer, with problems ranging from mold to bad wiring.
When Mikey and Zeina Kostelny found their first home in the suburbs of Altadena, Calif., it appeared to be a buyer's dream, complete with fresh paint, carpet and fixtures.

But that dream quickly dissolved into nightmare after the sale closed in late 2008 as the couple began to discover problems hidden behind its glossy finishes — from mold to gas leaks to bad wiring — all stemming, they believe, from its undisclosed past as a marijuana grow house.

"After we moved in, we smelled fresh paint and then another smell," Zeina Kostelny says. An inspection later revealed dangerous Stachybotrys mold throughout much of the house, forcing them to move and foot the tab for more than $42,000 in remediation and repair. Months later, an electrical fire pushed them into an apartment again.

The tsunami of vacant, bank-owned properties in many parts of the country has helped fuel a surge in indoor marijuana production, turning once-empty homes like the Kostelnys' into high-dollar and high-risk pot farms that spell trouble for prospective buyers and neighbors.

"In the last several years, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of grow houses," says Covina, Calif., Police Chief Kim Raney, who has overseen several busts. "It's almost a perfect environment, because you have had a housing market that's upside down, people losing their houses to foreclosure and people trying to find ways to make their mortgage," he says.

Pot house 101

A total of 4,666 marijuana grow houses were busted in the U.S. in 2009, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — just a tiny fraction of the number in operation, experts say.

Most grow houses go unnoticed or unreported, for fear of retaliation from the gangs — many of them Asian — that run them, according to the DEA.

And the houses are often in places you'd hardly suspect, such as gated Florida communities and upscale Georgia neighborhoods — even Beverly Hills, California.

How can growers afford such high rent? It's easy. With only 50 plants in a house, and at least three growing cycles a year, growers can easily net as much as $300,000 a year from sales to dispensaries and buds sold on the black market, says Ron Brooks, president of the National Narcotic Officer's Associations' Coalition.

"Marijuana is so lucrative as a crop," he says, and it carries less prison-time risk than other drugs.

Of course, it's not just the grower taking on risk. Once marijuana-growing operations move into your neighborhood, they bring more danger and more damage than vagrants, thieves or taggers could ever do.

"You've got fire hazards and properties that aren't being well-maintained," Brooks says. "No one's living there, or maybe someone's there who's armed and guarding the house."

The damage they do

Indeed, police say, indoor growing may sound benign, with row after row of bushy pot plants sprouting up under ultraviolet lights, but these operations can devastate properties.

Most grow houses wind up having extensive mold damage because of the irrigation and moisture needed for the plants, says Dennis Rommelfanger, a home inspector with U.S. Inspect in Huntington Beach, Calif., who has seen several of these houses.

Mold is an expensive problem to deal with. It is also one of the hardest problems to accurately assess, Rommelfanger says, especially if the surfaces have been painted over, as they were in the Kostelnys' home.

"We do use moisture meters," he says.

But the reading has to be 20% moisture or higher for him to advise deferring a sale, and he says a home can have mold damage with a lower moisture reading than that.

What's your home worth?

Big-time marijuana growers also cut holes in the ceiling to provide ventilation to their plants and run water lines. Many change the ductwork and rewire the house to accommodate the hot grow lights and other equipment such as humidifiers and dehumidifiers.

And most growers snake wires up to the power line to bypass the electric meter, not only because their work is electricity-intensive, but because high meter readings can tip police off to their whereabouts.

One Pennsylvania real-estate investor, Steve Babiak, commenting on real-estate investor site BiggerPockets.com, recalled a house where growers had cut holes in the foundation to hook up jumper cables to bypass the electric meter.
[...]
[END MSN REPORT]

Fire District Officials Announce New Training for Fighting Fires at Marijuana Grow Houses
Bay City News Service via Patch
February 21, 2014

Contra Costa fire officials are also encouraging residents to report homes showing signs of marijuana growing operation.

As the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District responds to a growing number of fires at marijuana grow houses, the district is turning to new strategies to keep firefighters and community members safe from the unique dangers posed by these fires.

Firefighters risk their lives on a regular basis, Contra Costa Fire Protection District investigator Vic Massenkoff said, but a blaze at a large-scale pot growing operation pose some of the greatest hazards for fire personnel.

District officials this week announced new training procedures for fighting fires at major residential marijuana grows. Firefighters are being educated on how to spot the signs of a grow operation and to fight blazes at grow houses defensively, or outside of the home, rather than heading inside, where the risks to firefighters are often too great.

The fire district is also instructing firefighters to wait until PG&E personnel have turned off power at the house before going inside.

"There's no material possession that's worth the life of our firefighters," Contra Costa fire Capt. Robert Marshall said.

The emphasis during these firefights is also on preventing the blaze from spreading to neighboring homes, fire officials said.

Over the past few years, the fire district has battled about 35 fires at large pot grow operations, fire officials said. Large-scale grows are popping up in communities throughout the Bay Area and statewide, in addition to the nine cities and unincorporated areas of Contra Costa County covered by the fire district.

"It's an epidemic as far as how many homes are being converted to full marijuana growing operations," Massenkoff said.

The problem is so big that a 2011 study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Evan Mills found that some 8 percent of California's energy is consumed by indoor growing operations.  [Pundita note:  Mills conducted the study on his own time]

PG&E can usually spot customers housing a large marijuana grow when the electricity meter shows commercial-level electricity usage, used to power the grow lights, ventilation and humidity systems used to cultivate marijuana, Massenkoff said.

To avoid detection, large-scale growers typically re-wire a home's electrical system so that it bypasses the utility meter, fire officials said. But the rigged electrical systems often fail, sparking fires that can travel quickly through a home's walls and a phenomenon known as arcing, in which electricity travels back and forth between electrical wires and metal surfaces. This makes firefighters responding to a fire at a grow house much more vulnerable to electrocution.

Other hazards usually found at major pot growing operations include barred windows and doors and extra walls built to mask the operation, Massenkoff said.

On Jan. 24, Contra Costa fire crews found many of the typical red flags while fighting a two-alarm blaze at a home on Tampico Drive in Pittsburg that housed a major marijuana growing operation, the investigator said. The house was completely destroyed, and firefighters had to battle the blaze from outside after the home's roof collapsed -- an all-too-common occurrence in marijuana grow fires, Massenkoff said. That fire "was the straw that broke the camel's back," the fire investigator said.

While no fire personnel were injured in the blaze, he said, "the hazards to firefighters became very evident in this fire...we realized it was time to provide new direction to firefighters on how to deal with fires at these types of properties."

Massenkoff said large-scale marijuana grows are usually uncovered when a fire breaks out, but sometimes law enforcement agencies find out about them from suspicious neighbors.

Contra Costa fire officials are encouraging more residents to come forward when they spot the signs of a growing operation in their neighborhood. Fire officials say red flags include barred windows in neighborhoods where no other homes' windows have bars and windows that are shaded at all hours of the day.

Residents should also be wary of new residents who are never seen moving personal items into their home and have frequent visitors coming and going, district officials said. Massenkoff said fire officials are also hoping more criminals are prosecuted when a fire breaks out due to a large-scale marijuana growing operation.

Several suspects linked to grow house fires in Contra Costa County in recent years have been charged with recklessly causing a fire, he noted. However, in many cases, large-scale marijuana growers whose grow houses burn down are able to use their massive profits to quickly purchase or rent a new grow house, Massenkoff said.

Yearly profits from an average grow house in Contra Costa County total at least $1.5 million, he said.
[END REPORT]

The Arab Spring Curse

And the author isn't even talking about what's been going on in Yemen with the huge Somalian diaspora.  Drought is a big driver of the 130,000+ forced Somali displacements. The Yemenis are also running out of water. Sana'a is on track to be the first capital city that has to be abandoned because the water supply ran out.   

Meanwhile, across MENA the rains are avoiding the region, the aquifers are being pumped dry, and the dams are drying up.

Bottom line?  Mass deaths in the region by the end of this decade due to malnutrition and diseases from water scarcity, and armed conflicts over water resources.
 
Arab Spring a curse on environment
By Dr Mohamed Abdel Raouf
Special to Gulf News
September 23, 2014

The ecosystems and biodiversity are the real victims of military conflicts in many Mena countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya

About three years ago I wrote a policy briefing that was published by the Middle East Institute, titled "Middle East Revolutions: An Environmental Perspective". The key message was that environmental challenges and problems related to water, food, air, waste management etc as well as the unfair distribution of wealth derived from natural resources were the root causes of the uprisings in the Middle East.

I also warned that if the environmental problems are not solved, one could expect more waves of unrest across the region. I had hoped that the Arab Spring would lead to better environmental governance, and social equality. And that in turn would lead to prosperity, a better quality of life and contentment among citizens in the region.

Sadly, after nearly four years, the Arab Spring has turned out to be a real curse on environment and natural resources across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region. There is massive destruction of ecosystems and a severe depletion of the already scarce natural resources, as well as corruption and theft of natural assets and heritage.  Besides, fertile land is eroding. Soil, water and air pollution have become the norm; noise and garbage are everywhere.

It is really very ironic because Islamic teachings call for protection of natural resources and environmental stewardship. It is even considered a religious duty to protect the environment and natural resources. Failing to do so, as a Muslim, is considered to be a sin.

In Syria, for instance, one can see that the very low precipitations and drought are among the first modern events in which a climatic abnormality has resulted in mass migration. This has created what are called “environmental refugees” (water refugees in this case).

This has resulted in widespread deterioration of agricultural harvests and led to food insecurity and contributed to state instability. Currently, the environmental situation has deteriorated further not only because of low rains, but also because natural resources have been polluted and/or looted as a result of the military conflict in Syria.

The ecosystems — which are already fragile in the Mena region — and the biodiversity are the real victims of the military conflicts in many Mena countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Military operations lead to the destruction of soil, rendering it unsuitable for agriculture and for habitation. Whoever the ultimate ‘winner’ might be, the environment is the real victim, especially nowadays when humanity has many weapons of mass destruction.

Across Iraq and Syria many churches, mosques, museums and statues have either been destroyed or looted by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). In addition, Assyrian monuments in Syria are being ruined. That is apart from the destruction of statues of musicians, poets and thinkers because they represent a different ideology than that of Isil.

Sadly, all these treasures, many built more than 5,000 years ago, are being looted or destroyed. This is a loss not only for Iraq, Syria and the Arab region, but also for human heritage and civilisation.

Almost all Arab countries are suffering from water scarcity. In addition, the very poor water governance in the region has led to many disputes/ tensions between sectors and governorates and even between neighbouring countries.

Libya, for instance, was and is still suffering from water insecurity. And despite the fact that the Muammar Gaddafi regime initiated the “great artificial river project”, which depends on withdrawing water from the shared underground aquifer between Libya, Chad, Sudan and Egypt, the sustainability of the project is in deep doubt after the depletion of the available water in the reservoir.

After almost four years of Arab uprisings, it is very obvious that the economy still has the same brown colour, which proved to be a total failure in almost the entire Mena region. Unless the region adopts greener economic policies at least in some key sectors, like the energy sector, one can expect no improvement at all. Problems such as pollution, social inequalities and unemployment will continue and are even expected to increase, making these countries more vulnerable to socio-economic unrest.

However, one still hopes that the Arab Spring and the socio-political transformations in the region will represent a real opportunity for reforms and reconsideration of developmental priorities, notably social justice and job creation, as well as the adoption of green economy as a tool to achieve sustainable development.

Any government in the region, if it really wants to address and resolve the reasons behind the unrest and stabilise these societies, must solve the environmental issues first. Otherwise, the environmental problems and conflict over natural resources will be the catalysts for further instability and tensions in the Middle East.

Dr Mohamed Abdel Raouf is an independent environmental researcher.
[END ARTICLE]
********

How the Great Recession masked the marijuana farming disaster

By 2014, as the large scale of the ecological damage done by commercial pot farming was becoming evident, the rationalizations for legalizing commercial cultivation of 'recreational' marijuana had approached the point of absurdity.  See the howler (second report, below) penned by California Democratic politician Shawn Bagley as his solution to pot farming's contribution to California's water scarcity crisis and ecological degradation. His idea is so funny because it entirely overlooks that properly regulating and enforcing regulations on pot farming would eat up whatever revenue the state hoped to gain from legalization.
 
But track back to 2009, to another California Democrat's impassioned plea for said legalization, and it's easy to see why the American national press was in a dilemma about how much to report on environmental issues connected with pot farming.

The United States had entered a steep recession that had thrown many millions of Americans out of work. It seemed inhumane to target otherwise law-abiding citizens who were trying to keep body and soul together by growing illegal pot. It was so much easier to blame foreign interlopers for all the environmental damage done by the farming. (See the AP report in the previous Pundita post.)

And of course the water crisis in California and other Western states was years ahead on the timeline.

But note a glaring omission in the following TIME report. Nowhere is the topic of the commercial cultivation of marijuana mentioned. It's all about the great financial help that "decriminalization, regulation and taxation of marijuana" retail sales could bring to California residents suffering from the recession.

From the beginning, going all the way back to the 1990s, the omission was evident in pro-legalization arguments -- but only with hindsight. There simply was no planning, not ever, on how the United States would handle legal commercial marijuana farming.  The oversight turned out to be disastrous.
   
Can Marijuana Help Rescue California's Economy?
By Alison Stateman in Los Angeles
TIME magazine
March 13, 2009
[See website for links in the report]

Could marijuana be the answer to the economic misery facing California?

Democratic state assemblyman Tom Ammiano thinks so. Ammiano introduced legislation last month that would legalize [recreational] pot and allow the state to regulate and tax its sale — a move that could mean billions of dollars for the cash-strapped state.

Pot is, after all, California's biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales, dwarfing the state's second largest agricultural commodity — milk and cream — which brings in $7.3 billion a year, according to the most recent USDA statistics.

The state's tax collectors estimate the bill would bring in about $1.3 billion a year in much needed revenue, offsetting some of the billions of dollars in service cuts and spending reductions outlined in the recently approved state budget.

"The state of California is in a very, very precipitous economic plight. It's in the toilet," says Ammiano.

"It looks very, very bleak, with layoffs and foreclosures, and schools closing or trying to operate four days a week. We have one of the highest rates of unemployment we've ever had. With any revenue ideas, people say you have to think outside the box, you have to be creative, and I feel that the issue of the decriminalization, regulation and taxation of marijuana fits that bill. It's not new, the idea has been around, and the political will may in fact be there to make something happen."
[...]
Ammiano may be right. A few days after he introduced the bill, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that states should be able to make their own rules for medical marijuana and that federal raids on pot dispensaries in California would cease. The move signaled a softening of the hard-line approach to medicinal pot use previous Administrations have taken.

The nomination of Gil Kerlikowske as the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy may also signal a softer federal line on marijuana. If he is confirmed as the so-called drug czar, Kerlikowske will take with him experience as police chief of Seattle, where he made it clear that going after people for possessing marijuana was not a priority for his force. (See a story about the grass-roots marijuana war in California.)

In 1996 California became one of the first states in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. Currently, $200 million in medical-marijuana sales are subject to sales tax. If passed, the Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act (AB 390) would give California control of pot in a manner similar to that of alcohol while prohibiting its purchase by citizens under age 21.

(The bill has been referred to the California state assembly's public safety and health committees; Ammiano says it could take up to a year before it comes to a vote for passage.)

State revenues would be derived from a $50-per-oz. levy on retail sales of marijuana and sales taxes.
By adopting the law, California could become a model for other states.

As Ammiano put it,  "How California goes, the country goes."

Despite the need for the projected revenue, opponents say legalizing pot would only add to social woes.

"The last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized," says John Lovell, lobbyist for the California Peace Officers' Association. "We have enough problems with alcohol and abuse of pharmaceutical products. Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?" Lovell says the easy availability of the drug would lead to a surge in its use, much as happened when alcohol was allowed to be sold in venues other than liquor stores in some states.

(Read why Dr. Sanjay Gupta is against decriminalizing pot.)

Joel W. Hay, professor of pharmaceutical economics at USC, also foresees harm if the bill passes. "Marijuana is a drug that clouds people's judgment. It affects their ability to concentrate and react, and it certainly has impacts on third parties," says Hay, who has written on the societal costs of drug abuse.

"It's one more drug that will add to the toll on society. All we have to do is look at the two legalized drugs, tobacco and alcohol, and look at the carnage that they've caused. [Marijuana] is a dangerous drug, and it causes bad outcomes for both the people who use it and for the people who are in their way at work or other activities."

He adds, "There are probably some responsible people who can handle marijuana, but there are lots of people who can't, and it has an enormous negative impact on them, their family and loved ones."

(See pictures of Mexico's drug wars.)

In response, retired Orange County Superior Court Judge James Gray, a longtime proponent of legalization, estimates that legalizing pot and thus ceasing to arrest, prosecute and imprison nonviolent offenders could save the state $1 billion a year.

"We couldn't make this drug any more available if we tried," he says. "Not only do we have those problems, along with glamorizing it by making it illegal, but we also have the crime and corruption that go along with it."

He adds, "Unfortunately, every society in the history of mankind has had some  form of mind-altering, sometimes addictive substances to use, to misuse, abuse or get addicted to. Get used to it. They're here to stay. So let's try to reduce those harms, and right now we couldn't do it worse if we tried."

(Read "An American Pastime: Smoking Pot." See a story discussing whether pot is good for you.)
[END TIME REPORT]

Legal Pot could help drought, environment, state coffers
By Shawn Bagley
The Merced Sun-Star
July 20, 2014
We are going through an unprecedented drought, but I don’t have to tell you that. You see it every time you see a brown patch that used to be green grass or dirt that should be your family’s crop. It’s disgusting, and politicians in Sacramento aren’t doing anything about it except bickering.

Whenever they get back from their vacation, our legislators will finally decide to send a water bond to the November ballot. It’ll likely include appropriations for conveyance, storage and restoration – renovations to our water infrastructure that should have been put into place years ago. But there is one industry that we can change today to ensure more water comes through for our families and farmers – marijuana.

Politicians are too afraid to even mention the issue. They don’t trust the people they represent to be smart enough to have a rational discussion about marijuana. They’re afraid of being labeled as “pro-legalization” or “pro-regulation.” Well, I’m pro-realization.

I realize that illegal marijuana growers are polluting and diverting water from vital creeks, streams and groundwater sources. I realize that our law enforcement agencies are stretched too thin and don’t have the resources to combat heavily armed cartels. And I realize it’s time to figure out a reasonable solution to this problem.

Just in the last month, more than 1,000 illegal marijuana plants were discovered in California. Cultivating those plants meant bulldozing mountain sides to create flat land and dumping tons of fertilizer near creeks and streams. Water was diverted into industrial-sized tanks and moved from one watershed to another; dirt from razed mountainsides was pushed into creek channels, and dammed the creeks; fertilizer seeped into those creeks, depleting water sources.

Sheriffs have seen their budgets diminished year after year, so going directly after these cartels at a fast enough pace to eliminate them isn’t really an option. They simply cannot keep up with the “prohibition style” culture that has risen up out of this black market. While law-abiding farmers are cut off from their water supplies, these marijuana farmers continue to steal water to stay in business.

It’s not fair to our Valley farmers that these illegal growers use unlimited water to grow their crop. It’s not fair that Valley farmers have to pay for permits to grow when illegal marijuana growers just grow wherever they want without any regard for how it affects you and me.

So let’s level the playing field by making marijuana growers follow the permitting rules that all farmers must follow. Let’s take marijuana from the black market to the free market. Moving marijuana into the free market will enable other free-market actors to help the state ensure they’re playing by the rules we all abide by. As the only “pro-realization” candidate running for state Senate, I promise to tackle this issue so the outcome will help our state, not hurt it. I’m not afraid of these tough issues, and I’m not afraid to say the status quo isn’t working.

Some say that legalizing marijuana is inevitable in California. I have studied how Colorado and Washington have passed and enforced their new laws regarding marijuana. We can learn from their mistakes and make sure marijuana doesn’t end up in the hands of children, and marijuana farmers will have to play by the same rules.

In 1996 voters passed Proposition 215, allowing for personal medical marijuana use. This proposition was poorly written and resulted in legal challenges and gave more questions than answers. This is why the Legislature must step up and author a comprehensive marijuana bill. One that ensures our community’s safety, environmental protections and an economic benefit to our state.

Bagley of Salinas is a Democratic candidate for the 12th Senate District against Republican Anthony Cannella of Ceres. [...]
[END SUN-STAR REPORT]
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Foreign Commercial Marijuana Farming in USA: Unintended Consequences of Anti-terrorism Measures

As so often happens a press outlet won't pick up every sentence from a report prepared by a 'wire' service such as the Associated Press. In 2008 Eoin O'Carroll, then the writer at Christian Science Monitor's Bright Green Blog, added an important sentence from an AP report that the San Jose Mercury News omitted from its publication of the same report (see below).

From O'Carroll's report (emphasis mine):

Following post-9/11 border-security measures, a number of Mexican drug cartels moved their grow sites inside the United States.  Federally managed land offered the best sites for remote, anonymous plots. According to the AP story, the biggest sites are in the Cascade Range, which extends from British Columbia to Northern California, and in federal lands in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

However, national coverage of marijuana cultivation in those three southern states is sparse. As to reporting on the amount and type of environmental damage done in those states by commercial pot growing, that seemed to be a verboten topic when I checked last summer.
 
Yet by odd coincidence the kind of environmental damage done by mountaintop removal coal strip mining in the Appalachian regions of those states is the same as widely reported with unregulated pot farming in California, if you discount the actual mountaintop removal: deforestation; dammed, diverted, polluted waterways and destroyed waterways with attendant destruction of endangered fish; soil pollution and erosion; poisoning of endangered wildlife from industrial chemicals.
   
California and those three other states are by no means the only ones that do large business in illicit commercial marijuana cultivation, even though California has gotten the lion's share of press attention.  Reporting on damage done to other U.S. states by commercial marijuana growing is like flashes of lightning illuminating a pitch dark landscape.
 
October 2008:
"What's going on on public lands is a crisis at every level," said Forest Service agent Ron Pugh. "These are America's most precious resources, and they are being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals."

The first documented marijuana cartels were discovered in Sequoia National Park in 1998. Then, officials say, tighter border controls after Sept. 11, 2001, forced industrial-scale growers to move their operations into the United States.

Mexican marijuana cartels sully U.S. forests, parks
By Tracie Cone
Associated Press via San Jose Mercury News
October 11, 2008

PORTERVILLE, Calif. — National forests and parks — long popular with Mexican marijuana-growing cartels — have become home to some of the most polluted pockets of wilderness in America because of the toxic chemicals needed to eke out lucrative harvests from rocky mountainsides, federal officials said.
Seven hundred grow sites were discovered on U.S. Forest Service land in California in 2007 and 2008 — and authorities say the 1,800-square-mile Sequoia National Forest is the hardest hit.

Weed and bug sprays, some long banned in the United States, have been smuggled to the marijuana farms. Plant growth hormones have been dumped into streams, and the water has been diverted for miles in PVC pipes.

Rat poison has been sprinkled over the landscape to keep animals away from tender plants. Many sites are strewn with the carcasses of deer and bears poached by workers during the five-month growing season that is now ending.

"What's going on on public lands is a crisis at every level," said Forest Service agent Ron Pugh. "These are
America's most precious resources, and they are being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals."

The first documented marijuana cartels were discovered in Sequoia National Park in 1998. Then, officials say, tighter border controls after Sept. 11, 2001, forced industrial-scale growers to move their operations into the United States.

Millions of dollars are spent every year to find and uproot marijuana-growing operations on state and federal lands, but federal officials say no money is budgeted to clean up the environmental mess left behind. They are encouraged that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who last year secured funding for eradication, has inquired about the pollution problems.

In the meantime, the only cleanup is done by volunteers. Tuesday, the non-profit High Sierra Trail Crew, plans to take 30 people deep into the Sequoia National Forest to carry out miles of drip irrigation pipe, tons of human garbage, volatile propane canisters, and bags and bottles of herbicides and pesticides.

"People light up a joint, and they have no idea the amount of environmental damage associated with it," said Cicely Muldoon, deputy regional director of the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service.
[END REPORT]

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Pot farming's disaster in slow motion: It's amazing how much damage lazy white guys can do.

A traditional garden on public lands, Pugh says, has one or two growers and fewer than fifty plants. The gardener, who lives locally, hikes in every other day or so, carrying water for his plants. Firearms are uncommon, and locations are predictable. “They’re within a quarter mile of a road,” Pugh explains, “and they’re rarely uphill. White guys are lazy

Much has changed since the following news report was published in October 2009. The meme that the report highlights, which is that the worst ecological damage in the USA from pot cultivation is done by Mexican crime syndicates, had collapsed by 2014.  This happened for three major reasons:

First, as the drought intensified in California, many local communities began fighting 'mom and pop' medical pot growers, who were diverting big amounts of water for their "grows," as they're called. And so the local press began reporting more and more on the situation.  From this, the public -- at least in California -- began to see that while the ecological damage done by the cartel growers was spectacular, the non-cartel growers were causing damage that was death by a thousand cuts.

No people were more surprised by this revelation than California's medical pot growers -- virtually all of whom big defenders of the ecology.  So at first the reaction was denial.  Yet it was a matter of one hand not knowing what the other was doing until the local news reports snowballed.

Second, the landmark study done by energy expert Evan Mills, first published in 2011. He did what no one else had done up to that point: analyzed the carbon footprint of commercial indoor marijuana cultivation.  His finding was that the footprint was huge.

Again, the initial reaction was denial -- and again, from the pot growers who prided themselves on being defenders of the ecology and supported draconian legislation to reduce the carbon footprint.  (I'll be returning to Mills's study in later posts.)

Third, by 2012 NBC News was reporting that the big pot operations (both cartel and non-cartel) were moving out of their traditional haunts in California's national parks and the heavily wooded far north of the state and into the state's farming heartland in the Central Valley -- where they were growing huge plots of marijuana virtually with impunity as the region's tiny, bucolic, underfunded police forces looked on helplessly. This is the same Central Valley that was heading into a catastrophic drought and water scarcity crisis.

All right, with those caveats in mind, I'll turn back the clock to 2009 to convey how much information was emerging, and how early, about the damage done by commercial marijuana farming in the United States. See the website for links to articles cited in the report.
    
Marijuana growers worsening California drought
By Eoin O'Carroll
Bright Green Blog
Christian Science Monitor
October 10, 2009

Officials in California's drought-plagued Mendocino County have noted that large-scale marijuana plots have drained rivers and streams

Large marijuana plots hidden deep in California's public lands have illegally diverted hundreds of millions of gallons of water, compounding shortages caused by the state's ongoing drought.

Public officials in Mendocino County, a region on California's north coast known for its lush redwood forests and potent cannabis, have witnessed rivers and creeks drained by the large-scale drug operations.
"They're using a whole lot of water." said Lt. Rusty Noe of the Mendocino County sheriff's office in a telephone interview with the Bright Green Blog.

Lt. Noe noted that police have seized more than 500,000 pot plants this season in Mendocino County alone. Each plant requires about one gallon of water per day. [A big underestimate by many accounts] California is entering the fourth year of a severe drought, with residents in some areas facing the first mandatory water restrictions in two decades and farms laying off thousands of workers.

"It's really affecting our water supply," said Noe of the illicit growing sites.

Noe also cited other environmental damage caused by the plantations, including the dumping of toxic chemicals (a subject we covered a year ago) and erosion of soil and underbrush.

"These camps are just unbelievable," said Noe, who noted that the problem is getting steadily worse each year.

"It is making a huge resource impact," Dennis Slota, a hydrologist with the Mendocino County Water Agency, told the Bright Green Blog over the phone. Mr. Slota said that he knew personally of two steelhead trout streams that are now dead from illegal water diversion.

Slota suggested that most of the environmental destruction is caused not by Mendocino's local pot growers, who have long taken advantage of the county's mild climate and tolerant views toward the drug, but by mostly Mexican crime syndicates that, in the 1990s, began planting large plots deep in the woods, which they would abandon after the October-November harvest.

His view was echoed by Ron Pugh, a US Forest Service special agent, who was quoted in the spring issue of Terrain, a Northern California environmental magazine.

Says Pugh about the sheer volume of grows, “This is not a hippie thing.”

He’s come prepared with a list of comparisons between a “hippie” grow and a DTO site -- one maintained by a drug trafficking organization.

A traditional garden on public lands, Pugh says, has one or two growers and fewer than fifty plants. The gardener, who lives locally, hikes in every other day or so, carrying water for his plants. Firearms are uncommon, and locations are predictable.

“They’re within a quarter mile of a road,” Pugh explains, “and they’re rarely uphill. White guys are lazy.”

The DTO sites, on the other hand, are as remote as the growers can get, often three miles from the nearest road. They contain an average of 6,600 plants, tended by an average of seven growers who live in tents the entire season, from May to October.

The growers are aided by scanners, radios, night-vision goggles, an arsenal of weapons, and truckloads of plastic pipe to divert area streams to their plants, sometimes from as far as a half-mile away. When they abandon the site in the fall, they leave behind mountains of trash, about as much trash as a small city dump.

Writing for Blue Living Ideas, a news website that covers water issues, Jennifer Lance notes that only 1 in 8 of those arrested in Mendocino this season for growing marijuana are from the county. She also notes that the county's district attorney is investigating at least one recently seized grow operation for "environmental crimes" and "water diversion," on top of drug crimes.

Update:  Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, DC advocacy group that seeks to remove criminal penalties for marijuana use, obviously has a different take. Read his comment here. [See website for link.]
[END REPORT]
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