Groundwater in Rural Development : Facing the Challenges of Supply and Resource Sustainability
2008
Foster, Stephen | Chilton, John | Moench, Marcus | Cardy, Franklin | Schiffler, Manuel
Some 200 million people lived on Planet Earth at the start of the modern era. That number rose to 2.5 billion by 1950. At mid-2008, the population is now 7.0 billion and is expected to reach 9.0 billion by 2040. It thus took 1,950 years for the global population to grow ten-fold but only an additional 58 years to nearly triple. And throughout this period the global availability of water resources has remained more or less constant. Growing ever more food to feed rising populations will be possible only with increasingly large amounts of water being used for agricultural irrigation, even allowing for further advances in plant genetics. Groundwater widely developed by private initiative but often stimulated by 'soft loan' finance, guaranteed crop prices, and rural energy subsidies will be a very important source of irrigation water. At the same time groundwater will continue to be the predominant source of household water for the rural population in developing nations.
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