[LINK] seventh most popular NYTimes article today

[Ivan Trundle]

Not quite Link-related, but nonetheless I'll join in...

On 13/11/2006, at 3:30 PM, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> Jan Whitaker wrote:
>> At 01:26 PM 12/11/2006, Craig Sanders wrote:
>>> similarly, if we stopped growing (and worse, subsidising)
>>> water-intensive crops like cotton and rice in desert areas, there
>>> wouldn't BE a water shortage. (rice! in the desert!  FFS!)
>> Exactly. In Phoenix, Arizona, which is in the middle of a desert,  
>> much of the public understood and didn't put in Eastern US plants.  
>> And there was a shift required in the economy there. Would you  
>> believe that TWO of the main economic mainstays of the state were  
>> Cotton and Citrus? Both were high irrigation users. And the cotton  
>> was pretty bad to boot. Citrus was nice, but wasn't a logical crop  
>> for the area at all.
>> The other two Cs were Copper and Cattle, in case you were  
>> wondering. At least there wasn't the dreaded R....
> <snip>
> you should visit the MIA (around Leeton and griffith, NSW) some  
> time....there are rice motifs on the buildings and open irrigation  
> channels....
>
> instead of landclearing and destroying the environment further we  
> could all do ourselves a favour and eat Kangaroo....which seems  
> extraordinarily difficult to buy in Australia.

Maybe kangaroos could be our salvation. We don't often take into  
account the true environmental costs of these things.

Whilst cotton and rice have always been targeted as farcical to grow  
in Australia, few have done the sums on beef production (or other  
processes that consume water). It is well-known from Canadian studies  
(where it is wetter, generally) that it takes 130 litres of water to  
produce 1kg of beef (about the amount consumed when taking a shower).  
And that it takes almost 5700 litres to produce a keg of beer. The  
NSW Dept of Agriculture has tried to determine the Australian  
requirements for livestock (saltbush cattle, 70-140 litres per day;  
sheep, much less http://www.agric.nsw.gov.au/reader/1414).

And if you come from a different point of view (that of vegetarians  
et al), the meat industry accounts for half of all US water  
consumption. Or so they lead you to believe (2500 gallons per pound  
of beef, vs 25 gallons per pound of wheat - and then there is water  
contamination issues as well).