Look at the first four countries on this list...
...with groundwater supplies increasingly in trouble world over, (U.S. included), it will not be very long before there are catastrophic issues about how the world is going to feed itself in the near future.
In India, groundwater-based irrigation systems are experiencing difficulties in different parts of the country as shallow aquifer levels are getting out of reach due to fast depletion of the groundwater table. Shallow tube-wells (STWs) now cannot draw water for about 46 percent irrigated cropland during dry season thanks to current level of groundwater declination.
In China's north plain, that country's breadbasket, 30 cubic kilometers (1.059 trillion cubic feet) more water are being extracted each year by farmers than are being replaced by the rain. Groundwater is used to produce 40 percent of the country's grain. The state paper China Daily admitted the nation "may be plunged into a water crisis" in less than 20 years, when its population is scheduled to peak at 1.6 billion.
The tube-well revolution, whose technology is adapted from the oil industry, has also swept water-stressed countries like Pakistan and Vietnam, where precious underground reserves are likewise being depleted. "Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past decade to one million, and water tables are plunging in the Pakistani state of Punjab, which produces 90 percent of the country's food.
Tube wells are sucking groundwater reserves dry, driving Asian countries towards environmental catastrophe.
Arsenic poisoning is another additional and major calamity resulting from tube wells.
Tens of millions of these wells have been drilled over the past decade, many of them beyond any official control, and powerful electric pumps are being used to haul up the water at a rate that far outstrips replenishment by rainfall. The extraction is providing many countries with a lavish harvest in thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa, but the boom is bound to be cruelly short-lived, and the rebound soon to come extremely harsh.
Water tables are falling so dramatically within a short time, some landscapes could become arid or even be transformed into desert. In the case of India, smallholder farmers have driven 21 million tube wells into their fields and the number is increasing by a million wells per year. Nobody knows where the tube wells are or who owns them. There is no way anyone can control what happens to them.
Half of the India's traditional hand-dug wells have already run dry, as have millions of shallower tube wells, causing some despairing farmers to commit suicide.
When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural countrysides.
List of countries of the world ordered by irrigated land
