India is drying up

India is now the world's third-largest grain producer after China and the United States. The adoption of higher-yielding crop varieties and the spread of irrigation have led to this remarkable tripling of output since the early 1960s. Today, food security is India's No. 1 challenge, as it was half a century ago, even though the country now produces close to 240 million tons of grain compared with the 95 million tons needed in 1965. Unfortunately, a growing share of the water that irrigates three-fifths of India 's grain harvest is coming from wells that are starting to go dry. This sets the stage for a major disruption in food supplies for India 's growing population.

In recent years about 27 million wells have been drilled, chasing water tables downward in every Indian state. Even the typically conservative World Bank warned in 2005 that 15 percent of India's food was being produced by over-pumping groundwater. Over-pumping aquifers is hard to stop, in part because it is invisible, only apparent once a well goes dry.The situation has not improved, meaning that about 190 million Indians are being fed using water that cannot be sustained. This means that the dietary foundation for about 190 million people could disappear with little warning.

India's grain is further threatened by global warming. Glaciers serve as reservoirs feeding Asia's major rivers during the dry season. As Himalayan and Tibetan glaciers shrink, they provide more meltwater in the near term, but there will be far less in the future. To complicate matters, the monsoon patterns are changing too, making these annual deluges more difficult to predict.

 43 percent of children under age 5 are underweight. A survey for Save the Children found that children in one out of four families experience "foodless days"—days where they do not eat at all. Almost half subsist on just one staple food, thus missing vital nutrients that come in a diversified diet.  Two-thirds of the population still live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. And the population is growing by nearly 30 million every two years, equal to adding another Canada to the number of people to feed. Within 20 years, India's population is expected to hit 1.5 billion, surpassing China.

To feed all those mouths, the government needs to go beyond the revamped food distribution program laid out in the Food Security Act signed into law in September. Averting a sudden and devastating collapse of the food bubble will require efforts to address the underlying threats to India's food system. It also means rethinking energy and transportation policies to reduce India's contribution to climate change. It is incredibly shortsighted to be building coal-fired power plants in a country where climate change threatens to worsen water shortages.

 Traditional water harvesting—capturing the excess water that comes during monsoons in small ponds—can help create a buffer. Farmers can also reduce water use by using more-efficient irrigation techniques and by growing less thirsty crops—for example, more wheat and less rice.

Nearly one billion people go hungry yet there is more than enough food for all. Food production and distribution are not inherently destructive. Agriculture can also be sustainable yet  our global food system is highly fossil fuel dependent and a primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It is also rapidly degrading the soil, water, forest, genetic diversity and other resources that are vital to agricultural productivity, human health and all life. The idea that a capitalist food system will somehow nourish us all has proven imaginary. We are reaching record highs in global hunger yet having record grain harvests along with record breaking profits for big agribusiness and its investors are reaping the financial benefits of an commercial food system. But the hungry and our progressively polluted, warming-up and drying-up world are paying the price of those profits.

Adapted from here