Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Colorado’s San Luis Valley is pinched by two mountain ranges, the San Juan peaks to the west and the Sangre de Cristo, seen here, to the east. The valley is the highest agricultural region in the United States.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — At an average altitude of 2,350 meters (7,700 feet), Colorado’s San Luis Valley is the nation’s highest agricultural region and one of its top potato producers. Almost by definition, water dictates the patterns of life and land.

With it, valley farmers have turned this sunny, high-desert rift between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges into one of the most densely irrigated expanses of farmland on the planet. Soon, though, a confrontation between rising global commodity prices, which are pushing production to meet demand, and shrinking water supplies, largely linked to climate change, could cause a number of growers here to do without.

Like heavily irrigated areas in California’s Central Valley, in India’s northern regions, and in the North China Plain, the San Luis Valley has a groundwater supply problem. Since government-subsidized electricity arrived in the 1950s, farmers here have readily pumped from the two aquifer systems that soak up snowmelt like a sponge. Now, those decades of withdrawals have combined with recently lower-than-average river flows to affect water-rights holders along the Rio Grande River, which cuts through the valley before eventually becoming the Texas-Mexico border.

Simply put, the San Luis Valley no longer has enough water to support the abundant farm production that is becoming increasingly supercharged by rising prices for the crops grown here.

There may be a way out. Water officials in the region’s six counties are working with the federal government on a voluntary plan that would pay farmers to take land out of production. If things turn out as planned, up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of the valley’s roughly 240,000 irrigated hectares (600,000 acres) will not be farmed.

Though it is still being negotiated, the plan has a significant obstacle: the explosive rise in food prices, which are making the sums offered by the water-conservation program less enticing. Prices for the valley’s mainstay — potatoes — have increased 25 percent in the last five years. Wheat, alfalfa, and barley prices have done even better, more or less doubling over the same period.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

“Industrialized agriculture is destroying this place,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Standing in the pastures on his 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) ranch in Saguache County, Whitten explains the district’s land-fallowing plan, in which up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) will be taken out of production to protect one of the valley’s aquifers.

“The commodity markets are going to drive this,” said Steve Vandiver, the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, in an interview with Circle of Blue. “If prices stay high, it’s going to be harder to get farmers to sign up.”

If the voluntary program does not work, Vandiver went on to say, the result would be worst for farmers. The state, he said, would then step in — like it did in not long ago in the nearby South Platte Basin — and force well owners to shut down, without compensation.

“We’re trying to keep that from happening here,” he said. “We’re trying to provide a soft landing.”

Living On A Borrowed Resource
Viewed from above, the San Luis Valley is a punch card of tightly packed center-pivot sprinklers that can pump four cubic meters (1,000 gallons) of water per minute. Settlers started farming the valley in the 1850s, and, by 1903, all of the available surface water had been claimed. Because the valley receives so little rain — just 75 millimeters (three inches) more in a year than what Las Vegas receives — everything is irrigated.

Years ago, farmers relied on groundwater only to finish off the last weeks of the irrigation season, when surface flows were dwindling. But for the last two decades, surface flows in the Rio Grande have declined in comparison with the historical average, said Mike Gibson, the manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. To make up for the shortage, farmers have pumped groundwater to take up the slack.

Climate change plays a role in the new river patterns, Gibson told Circle of Blue. Wind storms from the deserts in Arizona and New Mexico are more frequent, and they drop dust on the mountain snowpack, which is the primary water source for the valley’s rivers. The warming effect of the dust, combined with higher temperatures, means that the spring melt has moved several weeks earlier in the year. With a longer dry period in the summer, more groundwater is required to balance the changes in the river.

New reservoirs to store the altered flows are prohibited under a compact between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, Gibson told Circle of Blue, but existing reservoirs are being renovated to maximize their storage capacity.

Vandiver told Circle of Blue that the valley is millions of cubic meters shy of sustainable water levels in the aquifer systems. Each year roughly 615 million cubic meters (500,000 acre-feet) are pumped to produce the bounty of alfalfa, barley, potatoes, and leafy greens that contributes nearly 40 percent of the valley’s economy.

The water district banned new wells in the deep aquifer in 1972 and in the shallow aquifer in 1981 — but the over-pumping persists. The district is still developing groundwater models to determine how much of the annual deficit needs to be paid back.

“We have a huge economy here, based on a resource that doesn’t exist,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897, and he believes that, at the current rate, the agriculture-based economy and the water won’t last for much longer.

Project Fallow: Earning Money To Not Grow
The valley’s water agencies are working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Services Agency to approve an incentive program that would pay farmers to leave their land fallow. The incentive is authorized by the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), which was enacted by Congress in 1997 to improve water conservation, wildlife habitat, and soils.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

The southwest windows in the Whitten kitchen face the San Juan Mountains. On the counter are Siberian tomatoes, a variety well adapted to the valley’s short growing season.

The Farm Services Agency runs water conservation CREPs in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. The agency spent $US 164 million on CREP payments nationwide during the 2010 fiscal year.

The Republican River Basin is the only CREP program currently in Colorado, and it began in 2006 with a goal of fallowing 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres). But high crop prices have proven to be an impediment in Colorado and in other states — as of October, the program had enrolled less than 60 percent of that target acreage.

Under the San Luis Valley plan, farmers would sign a 15-year contract to take land out of production. They would receive an annual payment per acre, based on local land rates. Valley water officials are asking the federal government for an annual average of $US 370 per hectare ($US 150 per acre).

In addition, the local government must provide at least 20 percent of the program cost. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District is meeting this requirement by levying a “pumping fee” between $US 35 and $US 60 per 1,000 cubic meters ($US 45 and $US 75 per acre-foot) on farmers who pump groundwater in excess of their surface water right. The fees are charged to irrigators in Subdistrict No. 1, a patch of land north of the Rio Grande, where the aquifer is most depleted and where the fallowing would occur. A smaller administrative fee is also charged to all irrigated land.

“If CREP doesn’t occur,” Vandiver said, “we will have to do the best we can with the money that the subdistrict collects.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Officials in the San Luis Valley’s six counties are working with energy companies to develop solar power on exhausted farmland. SunPower’s 17-megawatt photovoltaic array in Alamosa County, shown here, was the largest in Colorado when it began generating power in December 2010.

Valley officials hope the plan will be approved in time for this year’s irrigation season, but they cannot foresee how its effects will ripple through the community.

“We don’t know what the economic and social impacts will be from taking tens of thousands of acres out of agricultural production,” Gibson said.

And if the goals of the management plan are not met, the state is waiting in the wings to enforce the limits with mandatory restrictions. The state engineer, who oversees water rights, will present draft rules to the state supreme court this year.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

George Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897. If we’re going to continue agriculture in the Mountain West, he says, ranchers and farmers will have to consider the proper animals and plants for a drier future.

So, in essence, those farming in the depleted section of the aquifer have to ask themselves this question: If we pass up the land-fallowing deal and continue reaping jackpot harvests, can we find the surface water offsets that the state could require?

Karla Shriver, who for 26 years has grown potatoes on 400 hectares (1,000 acres) south of the Rio Grande, is someone who believes more people will take the payments rather than leave it to chance. She told Circle of Blue that, looking long term, the CREP money may be the best offer that farmers could get.

“We can’t maintain high prices forever,” Shriver said. “It’s all cyclical.”

The Sun and the Water
Because the area gets an average 340 days of sunshine per year, the San Luis Valley is at the center of solar power development in the Western U.S. The Bureau of Land Management has put four parcels of land it manages on the “fast-track” for regulatory approval, and several investor-owned companies are already operating in the valley.

If hectares of silicon panels were to replace irrigated crops on worn-out land, this solar industrialization could also help the water problem. But solar jobs are not farm jobs, and valley residents have pushed back against large solar projects. Besides, farming has been not just a way of life, but life itself here for the last 150 years.

“Agriculture is our economy in the valley,” said Vandiver, of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “If it goes away, we have nothing left.”

Part of the reporting for this story was done while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Photo courtesy Doc Searls via Flickr

San Luis Valley from the air.

Photo © Aubrey Ann Parker/Circle of Blue

Panama is one of the fastest-growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, largely thanks to a new free-trade agreement with the U.S. and an ongoing $US 5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal. Slated for completion in 2014, the expansion will double the canal's capacity, which will reduce emissions, and the new system will recycle 60 percent of the water in each transit, along with an overall decrease of 7 percent less water than is used by the existing locks.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

Food
The food crisis in the Horn of Africa will continue this year, according to a famine early warning system funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Though the famine early warning system has global forecasts, the Horn of Africa is the only emergency spot forecasted in the near term.

In response, the United Nations, which said in a statement that the situation is “expected to get worse”, has called for more than $US 2.3 billion in aid to help Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti to cope with refugee settlement and the short-term effects of the drought. At the same time, the executive director for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that a million children in Africa’s Sahel region are at risk of malnutrition in 2012 because of poor harvests caused by insufficient rain.

Health
Global health leaders are hopeful that 2012 is the year that Guinea worm, a water-borne parasite, will be eradicated. Infections have fallen from 3.5 million in 1986 to 1,056 during the first 10 months of 2011. Following small pox, Guinea worm would be the second-ever human disease to be eradicated. Polio, another water-borne disease, is next in line. Advocates anticipate a polio-free world in 2013.

Energy
Thanks to the payroll tax cut compromise, U.S. President Barack Obama has 60 days to approve or deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The 2,700-kilometer (1,700-mile) oil conduit from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas would have an initial capacity of 700,000 barrels per day. The president’s decision should come by the end of February.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will make several final decisions this year that could have consequences for water resources, and the agency will start the rule-making process for several new regulations. In the spring, the EPA will decide what pollution controls are necessary for the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant that provides nearly all the electricity to move Arizona’s annual share of the Colorado River, 3.5 billion cubic meters (912 billion gallons).

The EPA will also submit a draft rule, expected to be released in January, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants.

By the end of 2012, preliminary results from the EPA’s investigation into drinking water contamination from hydraulic fracturing will be available. Already this year, Ohio has suspended operations at five deep wells used to dispose of fracking-related fluids, citing concerns of a possible link between well activity and nearly a dozen quakes in the area.

Governments could determine the fate of several large dams on major rivers this year: the Grand Inga on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the Xayaburi on the Mekong River in Laos; the Mphanda Nkuwa on the Zambezi River in Mozambique; and a cascade of dams on the Nu River in China.

Barring any delays, two World Bank-funded studies on Tajikistan’s proposed Rogun Dam will be completed by the end of the year. The studies are a prerequisite for possible World Bank financing for the project. One study assesses the dam’s technical and economic merits; the other looks at potential environmental and social effects. At 336 meters (1102 feet), Rogun would be the world’s tallest dam, trumping the Nurek Dam, also in Tajikistan.

Policy
In Australia, water management officials are expected to release the final versionof the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, a controversial policy that will reduce the amount of water withdrawn from the basin’s rivers.

During the first half of the year, the U.S. EPA will hold public meetings to formulate a draft version of its new “integrated planning” policy, which will reduce the cost of complying with water quality violations. In October 2011, the agency’s acting assistant administrator for water used a three-page memo to introduce the concept.

March 31 is the target deadline for the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to decide whether or not to approve a plan for removal of four dams in the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California. The Klamath agreements also include projects for environmental restoration, fisheries, water conservation, and tribal programs.

The Chinese government is expected to release its latest Five-Year Plan for the energy sector. The plan is expected to guide the country’s next phase of hydropower development.

Law
On January 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about landowner rights and government power. The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, began when the EPA claimed an Idaho couple was building their home on a wetland — in violation of the Clean Water Act — and threatened fines of $US 32,500 per day until the couple complied. The Supreme Court will decide whether the EPA violated due process laws. If so, the agency may have to seek permission from a judge before using compliance orders, its most common enforcement tool.

The Nevada state engineer will decide by March whether to grant groundwater rights in four rural valleys to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the wholesale provider for the Las Vegas area.

In August the International Court of Arbitration will submit its final decision on India’s Kishanganga hydroelectric project, a point of contention between India and Pakistan since construction began five years ago. In the fall of 2011, the court issued an interim decision that ordered India to halt construction of works that would permanently affect the river’s flow.

This could be the year that the International Maritime Organization’s convention on ballast water management is approved. The convention would reduce the risk of invasive aquatic species by requiring cargo ships to manage the water they use to balance their loads. For the convention to enter into force, it must be ratified by countries representing 35 percent of the world’s merchant shipping tonnage. To date, the convention is 9 percentage points below that threshold.

Meetings
The sixth edition of the water-sector’s largest gathering, the World Water Forum, will take place March 12 through 17 in Marseille, France. The fourth World Water Development Report will be released that week.

In June, sustainable development advocates will come together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, a landmark conference that produced agreements on climate change and biological diversity. This iteration will focus on the green economy and poverty.

Arts
Several water-themed documentaries will be released in 2012. The global water crisis is the subject of Last Call at the Oasis, while actor and director Robert Redford narrates The River Red, a film that considers a new “water ethic” for the Western United States. Hidden history is the topic of Under the City, in which filmmakers go underground to explore rivers buried by urban development in London and New York City, among others.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has turned his lens on the mining and oil industries, is now working on a series about water, which will be completed in 2013.

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Walton can be reached at brett@circleofblue.org.

Stats via FAO — Graphic © Aubrey Ann Parker / Circle of Blue

Flooding has damaged about 12.5 percent of the total national cropped area in Thailand, 12 percent in Cambodia, 7.5 percent in Laos, 6 percent in the Philippines, and 0.4 percent in Vietnam, according to the report.

The intense monsoon rains, typhoons, and tropical storms in Southeast Asia over the last two months may cause “serious food shortages” in the region, the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report last week.

The recent floods have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions of others, as well as battered housing, infrastructure, and agriculture in several countries. Although flood waters have begun receding in some areas, the difficulties in delivering food assistance have raised concerns about food shortages in the affected communities. Additionally, as shown in the graphic above, domestic crops have been damaged in several countries.

Thailand, in particular, is experiencing the worst flooding in 50 years, with two-thirds of the country inundated and 356 recorded deaths. Along with the heavy rains, water flowing from the North has swollen rivers and canals, damaged infrastructure, disrupted business, and caused food and water shortages in a number of Bangkok’s districts. This is bad news for the Thai capital, as it makes up more than 40 percent of the nation’s economy, Bloomberg reported.

The agricultural and manufacturing industries are struggling as well. According to Reuters, 6.4 million metric tons (7 million tons) of paddy may be lost from Thailand’s main 2011-2012 rice crop, which could slash total production to only 16.3 million metric tons (18 million tons). Meanwhile, Thailand’s car-manufacturing industry — which is the biggest in Southeast Asia — is losing 6,000 cars per day of output. The Thai government plans to set aside $US 3.2 billion to revive the industrial sector, with help from international financial institutions.

Sources: Bloomberg, FAO, Reuters

The soaring prices of global commodities, the international sanctions imposed over nuclear and missile programs, the nation’s own collapsing command economy, and this year’s natural disasters have all pushed North Korea to the brink of a hunger crisis, according to Alternet’s special report from a recent visit to the country.

Though their visit was tightly controlled by government officials, the AlterNet team got rare access to collective farms, orphanages, hospitals, rural clinics, schools, and nurseries. They reported evidence of alarming malnutrition, damaged crops, dire healthcare, and limited access to clean water, but also signs of some promise for the coming rice harvest. One journalist cautioned in a first-person account of the visit that the report’s findings may not be statistically representative.

This year’s harsh winter wiped out 65 percent of the barley, winter wheat, and potato crops in the South Hwanghae Province, which typically feeds two-thirds of the country’s population, the governing People’s Committee was reported as saying.

In March, the World Food Programme (WFP) estimated that 6 million North Koreans needed food assistance and that one-third of children under the age of five were chronically malnourished or stunted. In April, the WFP launched an emergency operation, citing reasons such as “bitter winter which hit crop production, a decline in bilateral and humanitarian assistance, and only limited international purchases of staple foods.”

Between late June and early August, torrential rains, successive floods, and two typhoons had inundated southwestern and central provinces, especially South Hwanghae. Earlier this month, international media outlets published photos that suggested damage to North Korea’s maize crops and that depicted children with signs of severe malnutrition, such as skin infections and patchy hair.

Appeals for International Aid Prove Difficult
North Korea’s attempts to solicit massive food aid have mostly fallen on deaf ears, with the United States and South Korea — the two biggest donors before sanctions were imposed in 2008 — saying they would not restart aid until they are certain that the military-led communist regime will not divert the aid for its own uses, nor until progress is made on disarmament talks.

Meanwhile, frustrated with North Korea’s severe restrictions on the movement of foreigners, the United Nations has announced it would only send aid to areas where it was allowed access, according to AFP. So far this year, only 30 percent of a U.N. food-aid target for North Korea has been met, Reuters reported.

Though North Korea has eased some of the restrictions in the face of the looming famine, humanitarian support is still only 10 percent of what it was a decade ago. The country is now one of the world’s most chronically under-funded humanitarian emergencies, Hiroyuki Konuma — the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Asia representative — told AFP.

As the U.N. presses for more freedom for aid agencies, U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos is scheduled to visit North Korea next week, AFP reported. Reuters also noted that there have been conflicting reports out of North Korea as to how bad the situation really is, and this is another major reason for Amos’s visit.

Source: AFP, AlterNet, Capital Weekly, Reuters, TIME

Image courtesy United Nations

A malnourished child waits for emergency medical assistance from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an active regional peacekeeping mission operated by the African Union with the approval of the United Nations. Somalia is the country worst affected by a severe drought that has ravaged large swaths of the Horn of Africa, leaving an estimated 11 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.
Vulnerability to diseases is also of grave concern – according to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, hundreds of Somali children are dying from a combination of acute malnutrition and measles.

More than half of Somalia’s population is now suffering from lack of food as famine spreads to the Bay region of the country, where food production has fallen 82 percent, according to Voice of America. The famine — officially declared in July — is due in part to a La Niña-induced drought that first hit the Horn of Africa in 2010 and has continued into 2011.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon consisting of El Niño and La Niña cycles, and, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), although ENSO is naturally occurring, a warming climate may contribute to an increase in the frequency and intensity of El Niño cycles. This cycle is being classified as a moderate-to-strong La Niña, following 2009’s especially intense El Niño year.

La Niña is characterized by colder-than-normal water surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, causing heavy rains in Australia, Southeast Asia, and South America, while causing drought conditions in eastern Africa.

While drought still prevails in the region, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported that there should be near normal rainfall in the Horn of Africa by the end of this year. Though there is still the possibility of another La Niña, it is expected to be weaker than the current cycle. Either way — whether next year there is no La Niña, or just a weakened one — drought conditions will likely ease in the coming months, according to Voice of America.

The weakening of the drought, however, does not necessarily spell the end of the famine.

Food — if it becomes available — is difficult to distribute, and this is the challenge facing aid organizations, which have not lacked supplies as much as the means to get those supplies to people in need. Additionally, Somalia is still in a state of conflict, which will have a great influence on the future of its food supplies. The country’s government, though internationally recognized, is weak and opposed by a number of groups, including the Islamist al-Shabaab, which controls much of the country that has been hit hardest by the famine, the Guardian reported.

The political instability — and resulting inefficiency — also contributed to creating the crisis in the first place, WMO climate expert Rupa Kumar Kolli told Voice of America. Kolli said that meteorologists predicted the drought well in advance and warned policy makers in the affected countries, but they got little response because weather and climate information is often not taken seriously.

“Famines are man-made, whereas droughts are natural parts of the system,” Kolli said.

Government policies encouraging agricultural practices that better utilize water resources will be key to future food security in the Horn of Africa’s arid regions. According to Jeff Hill, director for policy at USAid, this means investing in pastoral livestock farmers, the Guardian reported.

“Livestock provides more food security than growing crops in many arid and semi-arid areas,” Hill said.

Unlike crops, livestock can be moved to water during the dry season’ but, currently, farmers often cannot move their herds freely, sometimes due to cultural and international borders, as was the case earlier this year in a dispute between two ethnic groups on either side of the Ethiopia-Kenya border. If they were allowed to follow the water, rural farmers could become more resistant to drought and famine.

Sources: Guardian; Voice of America

While landowners took to Australia’s streets in mid-August to demand greater protection against the potentially lucrative coal seam gas industry, opposition groups in South Africa were mustering strength against shale gas exploration that, they say, could threaten the nationally significant Karoo region.

Australia and South Africa are among an increasing number of countries around the world that are reckoning with the prospects of developing unconventional fuels to bring revenue, to diversify energy sources, and to reduce carbon emissions.

But the rapid expansion of the unconventional fuels industry, along with the large volumes of water needed to unlock gas from underground coal beds and shale rock formations, have raised concerns over the potential damage to underground water aquifers, human health, food production, and the environment. These industries are also creating competition over land and water rights, which could spill over into political and social disputes.

Dewatering Australia: Coal Seam Gas v. Agriculture
In recent weeks, Australian farmers have locked gates on properties and organized protests against coal seam gas and coal mining companies trying to tap underground resources in prime agricultural lands.

The protesters, many of them farmers, worry that coal seam gas — also known as coalbed methane (CBM) extraction, which withdraws pre-existing water from the coal seam, thus reducing the pressure and allowing the methane gas to separate from the solid coal and to flow to the surface — might pollute the water resources for drinking and farming. They are demanding a moratorium on CSG drilling, until the health and environmental impacts of the process can be assessed further. The CSG “dewatering” process typically takes two years.

Around 2,000 yellow signs bearing “Lock the Gate” slogans were hung on farm gates throughout Queensland and New South Wales in mid-August, encouraging land owners to stand up to the energy companies, Sky News reported.

Protesters also gathered at a recent mining conference in Sydney on August 18, according to ABC News.

The recent events follow months of wrangling between farmers and miners over energy production, traditionally a very influential sector in Australia. The tensions also sparked political controversy earlier this month, when the Greens Party called for new laws to give stronger rights to farmers, enabling them to keep coal seam exploration rigs off their land, Reuters reported.

According to Australian legislation, the rights to below-ground deposits belong to the government, instead of to individual landowners, meaning that citizens have a hard time keeping energy companies off their property.

Meanwhile, Australia’s CSG industry — a major source for the country’s growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector – plans to build roughly $US 70 billion worth of LNG projects in Queensland state over the next seven years; a scenario that is also estimated to create thousands of new jobs each year. Exploration is also advancing in neighboring New South Wales, according to Reuters.

Fracking South Africa’s Karoo Region: Shale Gas Exploration in the Desert
Similarly, South Africa has been gauging the extensive risks associated with the potentially big economic benefits of proposed shale gas drilling in its Karoo region, a semi-desert area known for its stark beauty and indigenous plants; a region that is also believed to hold substantial deposits of shale gas.

Earlier in August, Yale Environment 360 reported that opposition to natural gas drilling is growing among farmers, landowners, and environmentalists in the country, amid concerns that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – the process of injecting water, chemicals, and sand at high pressure into rock formations to free up the oil and natural gas trapped inside – will deplete and pollute the Karoo’s scarce water supplies.

The worry is that the poverty-stricken region will become the arid twin of the Niger Delta’s swampy mangroves, where foreign oil companies and long years of conflict have contaminated the Nigerian land and water.

In July, protesters chanted outside the Shale Gas South Africa Conference in Johannesburg, where Shell South Africa – just one in a score of companies eyeing shale gas in Karoo — was to discuss its fracking plans for the region.

Earlier this year, in February, South African farmers and environmentalists voiced a public concern over plans to look for shale gas. Then, in May, the South African government said it would conduct a comprehensive feasibility study of hydraulic fracturing before it decides on the shale gas applications in its Karoo region, and the government imposed a moratorium on the use of the fracking technique until that time. This announcement came on the heels of a number of policy decisions in China, Europe, and the United States that have set diverse agendas for shale gas drilling around the world.

Source: Australia Broadcasting Corporation News, Sky News, Toowoomba Chronicle, Yale Environment 360, Reuters

Click through the interactive infographic below to learn more about the growth cycle of wild rice, as well as how it plays an important role in the food web.

Infographic © Kelly Shea, Mark Townsend / Circle of Blue

Click image to open interactive infographic or click here for the HTML version of Wild Rice: A Keystone Species.

Infographic by Kelly Shea and Mark Townsend, Traverse City-based designers for Circle of Blue and recent graduates of Ball State University’s journalism graphics program. They can be reached at kelly@circleofblue.org and mark@circleofblue.org.

This graphic was made to accompany Circle of Blue reporter Codi Yeager’s report, Where Food Grows on Water: Environmental and Human-made Threats to Wisconsin’s Wild Rice.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Wild rice on the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin is in the ‘floating leaf’ stage, with a single shoot lying on the water’s surface. This is considered one of the most critical and dangerous stages in the rice’s life cycle, as the stalks are very susceptible to heavy rains and flooding events that can either uproot the plants or drown them.

By Codi Yeager
Circle of Blue

SANBORN, Wisconsin — In early June, green tendrils of wild rice rise from the Bad River’s soft bottom to take their first breaths of cool Wisconsin air. It is morning, just hours after a storm bent the big pines off the Lake Superior coast and beat the extensive beds of infant wild rice that grow here.

Lisa and Peter David, plant biologists who have dedicated a significant portion of their careers to understanding and protecting wild rice, stand in the wind with arms crossed, surveying this year’s new plants.

The Bad River’s rice beds, which later this summer will look like green prairies, perform much as they have for centuries. They provide a stable, supplemental food source for the Anishinaabe people, who hold wild rice as sacred. The rice is also a source of food for wildlife, as well as a habitat for many fish, making it a keystone species for this region’s water-rich landscape.

How much longer that will be the case is not clear, say the Davids. In recent years, climate change has produced stronger storms and more erratic weather. For a plant that grows best in water that is 30 to 90 centimeters (one to three feet) deep, the big changes in water depth caused by heavy rains and floods can drown young rice plants, or pull them out by their roots.

“If lake levels change — getting either higher or lower from where they are — we will probably see some rice beds that will cease to exist,” Peter David says.

The wild rice faces many challenges, both environmental and human-made. First there is the fungal brown spot disease, along with various invasive species such as Eurasian water milfoil and curly-leaf pondweed, which have damaged rice beds in lakes and estuaries throughout Wisconsin; but these can all be controlled.

Infographic © Kelly Shea, Mark Townsend / Circle of Blue

Click image to open interactive infographic or click here for the HTML version of Wild Rice: A Keystone Species.

To the south, where there is more industry, water management practices can cause erratic water levels for energy production, logging, and recreation. These competing human uses, however, have the potential to become the foundation for negotiating solutions to water level problems, which could inadvertently help the rice. But tribal members here worry about pollution, as industry moves northward with a proposal to build a taconite, or low-grade iron ore, mine near the headwaters of the Bad River. And the effects of climate change are like a bad infection, making all of this worse.

Climate Compounds Coastal Rice Problems
The preponderance of scientific evidence — much of it amassed in the land grant research universities of the Great Lakes states — indicate the warming planet could lead to even lower water levels in the Great Lakes. Though, to what extent the levels could change is hard to pinpoint, explained Brent Lofgren, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Our expectations are in a state of flux,” Lofgren said. “One thing that has been observed is a drop in lake levels that was pretty sudden in 1998, and, though there have been fluctuations since then, they have stayed low compared to mean levels. The tricky thing is attributing the changes to greenhouse gases.”

Even a small change in water levels for a plant that prefers water 30 to 90 centimeters (12 to 36 inches) deep can disrupt plant growth and reduce the rice population on a river or in a lake. That is what the Davids, and the Ojibwe nations, who employ them, are working to prevent.

The husband and wife scientific team serve as biologists at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), a natural resource management agency of 11 Ojibwe nations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that is based in Odanah, Wisconsin.

“It is pretty hard to overstate the significance that this plant has,” Peter David says. “Climate change has us really concerned about what that might mean for the rice. Increased heavy rainfall events, flooding that could lead to the plants being uprooted or drowning; it is all a big concern.”

Drowning Due to Storms and Dams
The rice is most vulnerable in June, when it is in the aptly named “floating leaf stage,” a critical time in the growth cycle. The rice grows out from its roots in the very soft bottom sediments, but, during this stage, the rice becomes very buoyant, floating along the surface. Since the root systems aren’t fully developed at this point, if there are high winds or high waves, it is possible that the plants could be uprooted and pulled out of the sediment.

Additionally, during this stage, the rice undergoes a physiological change. Previously, when the rice was wholly submerged under the water, it was exchanging gases with the water column, but, now, it begins to exchange gases with the air. If the rice is then resubmerged — like in a flooding event, for example — the plant could actually drown.

June 7, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

A calm Lake Superior morning in Munising, Michigan. In 2007, lake levels were about two-thirds of a meter (two feet) lower than the normal average, negatively impacting wild rice, which typically grows in knee-deep water.

A similar outcome occurs when water levels are intentionally manipulated, and there is no shortage of dams that do just that in Wisconsin.

“The rice beds have definitely declined from historic levels,” Peter David says. “Out of all the rice beds that we’ve lost, most have been due to changes in hydrology. If you look at the Wisconsin River system, it is just dam after dam after dam. In some places dams are operated, there can be a five- or six-foot [two-meter] change in water level over the growing season, and that is more than the rice can tolerate.”

The Davids acknowledge that dams are not inherently incompatible with wild rice, which actually likes some variation in water levels. Properly managed dams can mimic this natural fluctuation and can prove to be good growing regions. Most dams, however, are used to manage water levels so they are suitable for power generation or recreation, instead of for rice habitat.

“People generally like their lake levels high, so they can boat, they can swim, they can get to the open water,” Lisa David explains. “But that water level is too deep for rice.”

This was the situation that the Chippewa people of Lac Vieux Desert, a lake which straddles the Michigan-Wisconsin border, faced when the lake was dammed — first for a logging operation and later for power generation.

“When the dam was built at the outflow of Lac Vieux Desert, which is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, it raised water levels and destroyed the rice beds that were there,” Roger LaBine, a Lac Vieux Desert tribal member, said in an interview with Circle of Blue.

In 2002, in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners, the people of Lac Vieux Desert secured a court federal order that required the water levels to be lowered for a test period of 10 years. The order allowed one of the largest wild rice restoration projects in Michigan to begin, and there will be an evaluation of the rice bed in 2012, when the issue, once again, goes before a federal court.

“We got 10 years to grow 70 acres [28 hectares] on the lake, to prove that controlled water levels would allow the rice beds to be restored,” LaBine said. “Last year, we were at 87 acres [35 hectares], and we haven’t reseeded in three years. For the wild rice beds to remain present in the coming years, there has to be a continual water level that needs to be respected.”

Heavy Rains and Fungus: Signs of Climate Change?
Now, rice beds here and elsewhere in northern Wisconsin are subject to the new forces of a warming climate, with consequences potentially more ruinous than human-made dams.

Last year, unexpectedly heavy rains at the beginning and end of the ricing season wreaked havoc on the beds — tearing up young plants during the spring growth period and beating rice out of seed heads during the fall harvest. Along for the ride was fungal brown spot disease, whisking through thick rice stands on the warm, humid air.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Close to where the Bad River runs into Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, wild rice is in the ‘floating leaf’ stage, when a single thin shoot rests on the water’s surface. By harvest time in late August, the plants are a meter (three feet) tall, and harvesters must bend the stalks over their canoes to gently knock the rice from the seed heads.

It was one of the worst ricing seasons in the last 20 years. In a good year, more than 45 metric tons (100,000 pounds) of rice can be harvested from off-reservation waters in Wisconsin. Last year saw a meager 7 metric tons (15,000 pounds) of harvest.

“Brown spot disease has been around for a long time, but most years it doesn’t have that big of an impact,” Peter David says. “Last year, you could see the whole color of the beds change because of the infestation, and it really reduced seed production. These are the kinds of things that, yeah they’ve been happening for centuries, but it seems like they’ve been happening more often than they used to. Rice is not a plant that is designed to disperse across the landscape, so when you lose a bed someplace, it might take centuries for rice to recolonize that site. Some plants may be able to move their range more readily to adapt to climate change, but rice probably isn’t one of those.”

So, what if the rice is lost? The Davids tout its ecological importance — a feeding ground for ducks, geese, and swans, as well as a hatchery for fish and a home for mink and muskrat.

To the Anishinaabe people, it is that and more.

Historical Significance for Native American Tribes
“Manoomin: it is a conjunction of two words,” Joe Rose Sr. explains. Rose grew up on Bad River Reservation and is now the director and an associate professor of Native American Studies at nearby Northland College, an environmental liberal arts institution in Wisconsin, just a few miles from the Michigan border. Under his baseball cap, he has white hair and kind eyes. His hands move as he talks. “Mino means something good, and miin is a seed, or berry. We call it Manoomin: the wild rice.”

Sitting at an old conference table in the brick building shared by the tribal headquarters and GLIFWC, the rhythm of Rose’s words is like a quiet melody as he tells the story of his people — how they journeyed first East to the Atlantic Ocean and then followed the signs of the Great Spirit back West, until they found the place where food grows on water.

“[The rice] was declared sacred, because it was a part of the prophecy and played a very important role in the returning home of the Anishinaabe people,” he says.

Rose began harvesting wild rice when he was nine years old; his brother was seven. Wisconsin’s rice harvesting law is based on those traditional harvests, which protected the beds. Harvesters must use a boat no wider than 96 centimeters (38 inches) and no longer than five meters (17 feet). Motors are illegal, and boats are instead pushed through the beds using a wooden pole. Harvesters gather the tops of the plants and dislodge the kernels by whacking them with light wooden sticks.

“We went down to the Kakagon Sloughs all by ourselves,” Rose remembers of harvests with his younger brother. “My grandfather and my parents, they helped us get our equipment together and went to see us off. We’d go down, and there would be native elders down there, so we felt safe. By the time we were teenagers, by the time I was about 18 years old, we were making 300 pounds [135 kilograms] of clean rice a season…[now] the ricing isn’t nearly as good as it was back then.”

Rose has missed only one or two seasons since that first one, and he has seen changes come to the rice beds. He says water levels have a lot to do with it. In 2007, for instance, Lake Superior was about two-thirds of a meter (two feet) lower than the normal average, and that affected the Kakagon Sloughs, where Rose has continued to harvest, with rice growing up out of mudflats instead of knee-deep water.

“For the first time in history, the Bad River Tribal Council closed the ricing season,” Rose says. “And nobody went out.”

Codi Yeager is a journalism student at West Virginia University and a Traverse City-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach her at codi@circleofblue.org. Infographic by Kelly Shea and Mark Townsend, Traverse City-based designers for Circle of Blue and recent graduates of Ball State University’s journalism graphics program. They can be reached at kelly@circleofblue.org and mark@circleofblue.org.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Joe Rose Sr. grew up on the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin. Now the director and an associate professor of Native American Studies at nearby Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, Rose has been harvesting wild rice since he was nine years old.

The United Nations is struggling to keep up with the surge of hungry Somali refugees fleeing to Ethiopia and Kenya as a result of relentless drought and conflict in eastern Africa, the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) said.

Last week, several aid agencies increased warnings over a worsening humanitarian crisis in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti amid an unprecedented dry spell, chronic instability, and high food prices in the Horn of Africa.

On Sunday, the first of several UNHCR-charted cargo jets with emergency aid arrived in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, as part of the agency’s refugee efforts in Kenya and Ethiopia. UNHCR is among a number of aid organizations that have reported shortfalls in funding for their emergency programs in the Horn of Africa.

There are more than 430,000 Somali refugees in Kenya and Ethiopia alone, including 164,000 who have arrived since the beginning of the year, according to the U.N. Some 3,000 refugees from Somalia – now on the verge of famine — continue to arrive in Kenya daily.

Officials report that some of the refugees show signs of severe malnutrition, exhaustion, and dehydration, with some even dying during or shortly after the journey.

And the problem is exacerbated by the continuing civil strife in most of Somalia, as well as cross-border violence between pastoral communities in Ethiopia and Kenya, which is decreasing supplies, causing civilian casualties, and triggering massive displacement.

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called the dry spell — resulting from two consecutive poor rainy seasons — the worst drought the region has experienced in 50 years. The United Nations’ humanitarian news agency, IRIN, recently said that the devastating drought is likely the result of strong seasonal weather phenomenon in the region and is not tied to climate change.

Eastern Africa is also feeling the pressure of high food and fuel prices.

Last week, people in Nairobi protested against Kenya’s soaring inflation — at 14.5 percent in June – largely due to regional grain shortages, rising consumer demand, and weakening of the local currency.

Throughout the Horn of Africa, food prices are rising as a result of bad harvests and poor prospects for the upcoming crops. Grain export bans by Tanzania and Ethiopia to control domestic prices have placed additional pressure on prices in neighboring countries, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which monitors trends in staple food prices in countries that are vulnerable to food insecurity.

The price of maize on the wholesale market in Kenya has increased 160 percent since July 2010, following the failure of this year’s maize crops, and the retail price of red sorghum has risen 169 percent, the Financial Times reported. In southern Somalia, sorghum prices have jumped by 240 percent over last year’s prices.

Source: FEWS NET, IRIN, The New York Times, Reuters, UPI, United Nations, UN High Commissioner of Refugees

Photo via creative commons by Keelerchristy

Wheat fields, Brittany France.

By Codi Yeager
Circle of Blue

Yield projections are dropping as droughts continue to hit wheat crops in Europe and parts of the United States, while other regions are plagued with heavy rains that are delaying corn planting and threatening wheat with mold.

The European droughts started as early as February in Germany and France and are expected to continue until June, Reuters reported last week.

Germany and France are two of the top producers in the EU, which, as an entity, is the world’s largest wheat supplier, Bryan Purcell, a crop assessment analyst for Europe and North Africa with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, told Circle of Blue.

“The dry months have reduced initial wheat estimates, but currently May forecasts are above last year’s when we had weather issues” he said, referencing the 2010 droughts in Central Europe and Russia. “[The droughts] are definitely weighing down the crop, but the situation is not as dire.”

When compared to 2010 droughts, this year’s weather is having less severe effects. In fact, global wheat supplies in 2011 are expected to rise 19.4 million metric tons (21.4 million tons) over last year’s harvest, representing a 1 percent increase, according to the USDA’s latest World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report. This outpaces the increase in global demand of 7.6 million metric tons (8.4 million tons), though ending stocks for 2011 are projected to be at lower levels than last year, the report added.

Demand for grains has increased in recent years, primarily because of biofuel production, Purcell said. “We are also seeing more demand because of rising incomes in places like India and China.”

Extreme weather events as a result of global climate change could become more common in the future, taking a heavier toll on agriculture, the Houston Chronicle has reported. While this year’s droughts may not be catastrophic to global supply, the lack of rain could adversely affect the quality of the wheat harvested.

“France typically produces very high quality wheat, but, if the drought continues, it may be lower quality wheat than is needed for milling,” Purcell said. “Other countries might have to provide milling wheat because France couldn’t meet the standards.”

Still, the estimated quantity of wheat produced could continue to change, depending on weather conditions in the remaining run-up to the June and July harvests.

Farmers in the U.S. are also watching the weather closely, as some battle droughts and others fight unseasonal rain. Bloomberg reported that 44 percent of winter wheat fields in the country were rated either poor or very poor as of May 15.

Due to a lack of rain in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado—states that produce a large portion of the country’s hard red winter wheat—total winter wheat production in the U.S. is expected to decrease by 4 percent, according to the USDA’s WASDE report.

In the Ohio Valley, too much rain is causing farmers to worry about the winter wheat harvest, as well as the planting of corn crops.

“Farmers are watching their crops very closely,” said Natalie Lehner, communications director of the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association. “Some fields are very wet, while others are fine.”

As a preventative measure, many farmers are applying fungicide to their wheat. Some do so using airplanes because the fields are too muddy to access from the ground.

“Right now it is just preventative because the weather we are seeing is cool and wet instead of hot and wet,” Lehner said. “If it gets hot and wet, we could see mold, which is the biggest concern.”

The amount of rain is not normal, Lehner said, and farmers can expect a small hit in yields even if the weather changes. “We just have to wait and see,” she said.

Codi Yeager is a journalism student at West Virginia University and a Traverse City-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach her at codi@circleofblue.org.