Few of us think about and understand the precarious relationship between water, population and economic development. We have been managing our water supply like Enron ran its accounting systems. Let me explain.

There is as much water now as when time began, you can’t make more and you cant throw it away – water just is. It is unique, as it exists in nature in all its three states, a solid, a liquid and a vapour.  It is one of the few substances on earth that is endlessly recycled; indeed the drop of water in your morning coffee could have beaten in the heart of a whale or formed the sweat of a slave.

At the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1801 there were just 10 million people in England, by 1900 there were over 30 million and today we are more than 60 million people – all immeasurably wealthier today than 200 years ago and using more water per person. Yet there is no more water now than then. Our rainfall patterns fluctuate and always have done – what has really changed is us?

The water we use in our homes for personal use is relatively small. Everything we make and consume, however, is in fact condensed water. It takes 30,000 litres of water to make your mobile phone, 10,000 litres of water to make a pair of jeans and over 20,000 litres of water to make a kilo of beef.  Whilst much of this virtual water is imported – our sheer numbers combined with our domestic manufacturing and agricultural growth mean that we have placed huge strains on the water systems of our country.

Mother nature stores rain water in our mountains, streams, farmland soils, lakes, and aquifers. Mankind has added its own storage systems such as dams - but these pale to insignificance compared to those of our natural ecosystems.

Our underground aquifers are the largest yet most hidden of our water storage systems. They feed our streams and wells all year round. The south and east of England have massive chalk aquifers - we now extract water from these aquifers at a faster rate than they are replenished by rainfall - pumped onto our lands in the form of irrigation or delivered to our cities and industries. A wet summer or a rainy period will not rapidly replenish these – it is this unsustainable use of a fixed natural resource than can lead to the seemingly paradoxical – a hosepipe bans whilst it is raining.

What we are in fact doing in using nature’s capital – its stored water. In reality we have to draw on this hidden capital because our current use of water exceeds our current supply (rainfall).  The last organisation to confuse balance sheet and income items was Enron. They ended up in trouble. We are in danger of doing the same.

We need to get busy making some hard choices. We need to treat water as the scarce resource it really is – not only in agriculture but also in industry and our personal and particularly virtual consumption. We need to reduce our waste of water for pleasure and move to water-wise gardening and civic spaces. Our leading companies are already understanding that water is no longer free and managing this increasingly scarce and expensive resource like any other.

Without water we cannot grow our economies – let alone maintain our industries and businesses. Without growth we risk unhappiness and civil unrest. During the industrial revolution the rich have become overweight whilst the poor go hungry. In this sustainability revolution will we continue to water our lawns whilst the poor suffer as we take their water to make our consumer goods and food?

If we do not make better choices in the 21st century than we have in our past, we risk nothing less than the collapse of civilisation.  

Lets get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew

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The AgriProtein team is thrilled to have been recognised internationally - winning the Best Earth Saving Idea means a great deal to  all our stakeholders. Nutrient recycling will become  an important industry  over the next decades. Working together we can become more sustainable, save our seas and ensure that we have enough , for all , for ever.
Jason Drew
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There has been considerable discussion on International Aid programmes and whether they should be cut back in the face of tough economic times and budget constraints.  As a staunch capitalist and environmental entrepreneur one would expect me to be against this generosity. After all for centuries we have used capitalism to allocate hunger starvation and death – why let charity interrupt that otherwise efficient process? It is perhaps because charity begins at home that we should massively expand our foreign aid. Let me explain.

I firmly believe that our international aid budget should be increased by 15% compound per annum and that this money should come from our military budget. Bread not bullets?  Have I gone soft? No, it’s just about value for money.

However, we should not be wasting as much of our international aid as we do at the moment but let capitalism and the markets work for us in creating sustainable solutions for those afflicted parts of the world.

Lets start with short-term food aid. In the past our food agencies have bought trucks and food in the west and shipped these to rural food scarce areas. Much of the aid, however, is stolen en-route.

The aid agencies should be buying grain and food stuffs wherever it is needed from local intermediaries and businesses.  Doing this would help strengthen local supply systems and create employment and wealth in drought and famine stricken areas.  

Agencies should then be paying a premium for locally grown food. They could facilitate this by providing advances of inputs to farmers such as seed and fertilizer. This should be in the form of vouchers to be redeemed at local agricultural stores. This would promote local farming and self sufficiency, creating employment not the poverty hopelessness and migration that the current systems promote.

Few of us understand or think about how massively interconnected the world is.  International aid helps preserve our comfortable way of life, protects our cities from riots and our economies from further energy price shocks.

Many parts of our world are facing enormous environmental devastation and this is now beginning to directly and materially affect us all, here and now. We are also running some monumental risks as humanity continues its battle against nature – a fight we are sure to loose in the end. International aid is the best way to mitigate these effects on us.

The three key ecosystems that produce food - our water, land and seas – are rapidly degrading. This, combined with our exploding population, is leading to food price rises across the world as I write. The last food price surge occurred in 2008 and led to riots in over thirty countries. As our environment degrades further and food supply tightens yet further – rising food prices sparked revolts across the Middle East and North Africa driving oil and therefore fuel prices higher across the world.  

As the drought in the Horn of Africa worsens and Somalia disintegrates, its population is beginning to migrate.  The pirates that now rule parts of its coastline are not only taking ships for ransom but also kidnapping tourists from nearby Kenya. Nearly 10,000 people a month are crossing its borders into Kenya.  Tented camps built for 90,000 refugees now house over 500,000 people. Kenya can hardly support its own population and faces its own challenges.

With the burden of migration and collapse of Somalia, Kenya itself might in time fail.  In our interconnected global world, state failure may become contagious as environmental refugees migrate to survive.

Why does this affect us?  Many of our green vegetables are grown in Kenya.  How long before the hungry masses form the camps strip the fields of the green beans due for our supermarket shelves in London? Once fields are stripped farmers will not replant quickly if at all. Food supply reduces, food insecurity increases  and therefore prices increase yet again – exacerbating the cycle.

Food insecurity, driven by environmental degradation, is changing our present and will determine our future. The economic migrations we have seen over the last fifty years will be small compared to the environmental migration of the next decades. Unless we increase our international aid and focus it on fixing the eco-systems on which people depend, we will see further food and oil price shocks and environmental migration on an unprecedented scale.

In order to help the poorest in the UK and preserve the comfortable lives of the rest of us, we need to mend and increase our international aid programmes. It is charity that will give us security at home – not guns.   

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew

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_ The industrial revolution and modern capitalism were powered by water, the sustainability revolution we are entering will depend on it. Water will define our future as clearly as it has our past.  How we manage this scarce resource, the choices we make and those that are made for us as a result of our actions will define the 21st century for individuals, businesses and nations alike. Let me explain.

Since man first grew cereal crops rather than hunting and gathering, water has shaped and defined human civilization. Our first settled villages and their farmed crops were on flat fertile land near rivers – some of these have now become our modern cities like  London, Mumbai and Shanghai and our farmed land has moved upstream.

There is as much water now as when time began, you cant make more and you cant throw it away – water just is.  It is one of the few substances on earth that is endlessly recycled. Indeed the drop of water in your morning coffee could have been in the heart of a whale or the sweat of a slave.

When the industrial revolution kicked off there were 1 billion people depending on that water – today there are 7 billion.   Just as we have mined the earth for ancient sunlight in the form of coal and oil so we have drained our aquifers for water to drive manufacturing and our industrial farms.

It takes 30,000 litres of water to make a mobile phone, 10,000 litres to make a pair of jeans but it is in agriculture that most of our water is condensed for human use. A kilo of grain takes 1000 litres of water to grow and a kilo of beef takes up to 24 kilos of grain to produce or up to 24,000 litres of water.   Today nearly one billion of us live off food grown using unsustainable water sources.

Take the Ogallala aquifer in the United States.  Having emptied the Colorado river which now no longer reaches the sea, farmers are now busy emptying the massive aquifer on which the rich farmlands of the American mid-west sit.  Farmers extract more water from that aquifer each year than has fallen on the plains above it as rain since the time of Christ.  The Aquifer is so large that if it were emptied on to the 50 land based states it would cover them one and a half feet deep in water.  The Ogallala lies on a slope in the ground, at the point the aquifer is nearest the surface sits a town called Happy. Happy closed in march 2011 as there was no more water underneath their farmlands to pump out for irrigation. It will empty in time, as all the other aquifers we are using unsustainably, devastating food production in the breadbasket of the US.

The current turmoil in the Yemen is driven as much by water as politics.  Sana’a sits on top of an aquifer, which has supplied its growing population with water until it started to run dry last year. Saan’a is likely to be the first capital city in modern living history to have closed because of a lack of water. 

One hundred cities in northern China already ration water – Beijing’s future as China’s capital has been under review as its growth has outstripped its water resources.  Twenty-four countries in Africa will not have enough water to meet their needs by 2025 as their populations continue to grow.

Governments unable to build water infrastructure are privatising water utilities around the world. Countries seeking development loans from the World Bank are nudged firmly down this route. There is an increasing concentration of supply; with just three French companies now controlling 70% of the worlds privatised water market. There have been public backlashes at this corporate exploitation of a vital and once free natural resource.

Our modern corporations are defined by and use unimaginable amounts of water. I would argue that Coca Cola Corporation is not in the business of manufacturing soft drinks but rather the business procuring more clean water than almost any other enterprise on earth.  Intel Corporation has a water recycling programme that claims to have saved 10 billion litres of water per annum – imagine what their usage is if that is the saving!  

The finance world is also increasingly taking note of water and its usage. Ceres is a coalition of large investors and environmental groups that have targeted water risk as an issue that 21st century businesses will need to address to survive. Ceres runs a database for institutional investors highlighting which companies are best tackling water risk.  

Water risk is already affecting business at clothing maker Gap, which cut its 2011 profit forecast by 22 percent after drought reduced the cotton crop in Texas.

Food giants Kraft Foods, Sara Lee and Nestle all announced planned price rises to offset higher commodity prices caused by droughts, flooding and water related weather factors.

However we continue to waste water on a monumental scale both in open canal agriculture in the developing world, wasteful manufacturing processes as well as for pleasure.  In the US there are now 17,000 golf courses up from 4,000 in the 1950’s. It is estimated that there are 32 million acres of irrigated lawn in the US – more than three times the amount of irrigated corn fields. China is following the same development trend. Our children may well question our sanity in using our precious water to irrigate our lawns – then drilling for oil so that we can spend our weekends mowing them.

Since our early civilisations to the present day, our existence has been defined by persistent violence between our clans, tribes and now nations. Resources have often caused these – in the early ages this was around acquiring land, mineral and human resources.   Since the industrial revolution we have intensified this violence and included our own subjects in that violence.  Endless wars in the northern hemisphere have been combined with the violence of intense poverty - from the early industrial mills to the overseas factories that provide our consumer goods today.

The first modern war over water has already taken place. The seven-day war between Israel and Jordan to take the Golan Heights was as much about controlling the headwaters of the Jordan River as anything else. India and Pakistan have and will struggle with sharing the waters of the Indus on which they both depend. More than 260 river basins around the world are inter-national.  The Nile is shared by six countries, the most populous, Egypt, being downstream.  Within 15 years nearly 800 million people will share and need the waters of that mighty river. Five or more countries share thirteen key river systems – the waters of the Danube are shared by seventeen countries.

Our rivers will change their flow patterns as our glaciers and snow caps disappear, and as our aquifers run dry – the patterns of availability of water will alter at a time when humanity and its demand for water reaches their peaks.  Will new de-salination technology come to the rescue ?  Not in the timescaleswe have and the scale of the water issue we are all about to face

We need to get busy making some hard choices. We need to move to water wise agriculture which will require a transfer of technology and funding to developing nations. We need to reduce our waste of water for pleasure and move to waterwise gardening and civic spaces. Our leading companies are already understanding that water is no longer free and managing this increasingly scarce and expensive resource like any other – those companies that ignore their water footprint will fail their shareholders and employees as the sustainability revolution takes hold.  The real issue is what we decide to do with the poor – many of whom have limited access to water.  During the industrial revolution the rich have become overweight whilst the poor go hungry. In this sustainability revolution will we continue to water our lawns whilst the poor die of thirst as we take their water to make our consumer goods and food?

If we do not make better choices in the 21st century than we have in our past, we risk nothing less than the collapse of civilisation as the environmental migrations we will see will dwarf the economic migrations of the past. As we have seen in Yemen – people can put up with hunger and political repression– but not with a lack of water.

 Lets get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew

Author of The Protein Crunch – Civilisation on the brink

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Just because we can only do a little to make our planet better, it is not an excuse to do nothing. Similarly, just because we can do a little doesn't mean it has no value . However serious the prospects for civilisation as a whole, we still have an individual responsibility to do something constructive, to take the next step towards a sustainable society..
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_ Our global food system is falling to pieces and heading for disaster whilst our elected leaders focus on the only thing they really care about – getting re-elected.  Perhaps democracy is not suited to resolve our looming food crisis.  Let me explain.

As a former CEO of a listed business my focus was on making my quarterly numbers and keeping my job.  A politician has a much longer shelf life than the average CEO - during which they can deal with the odd inconvenient crisis and then address the business of getting re-elected and keeping their jobs.  What we really need is to admit that there is a crisis, which needs both long as well as short term solutions and find some leaders to – well lead us out of it.

We live in a world where one billion of us are overweight or obese and one billion of us are hungry or starving.  Many of the over fed are also undernourished due to the poor quality of food – literally stuffed and starved.  In the 1950’s the WHO picked up on an old proverb, and suggested we eat an apple a day – as it contained enough nutrients to keep us healthy.  If they ran the same campaign today it would be a less catchy 2.3 apples a day to have the same micronutrient effect.

We have EU regulations and standards for the humble carrot that are longer than the Bible, whilst perfectly good food is thrown away by farmers all over the world as it does not make some often arbitrary grade or another.  Supermarkets follow madly inappropriate ‘display until’ and ‘use by’ dates which results in discarding yet more food in our food scarce world. 

At the other extreme and in the absence of regulations, we have Chinese entrepreneurs adding melamine to their baby milk, making imitation rice out of recycled plastic bags and flour and still others contaminating vinegar with anti-freeze - killing poor unsuspecting consumers. In a recent crackdown, Chinese authorities arrested 2,000 people and closed 4,000 businesses for tampering with foods in a host of unbelievable ways.  Being China, they gave some of them life sentences and shot a few of the ringleaders. This will put off the next batch of happy go lucky food cheats for a while.

In the West we subsidise our farmers and fishermen causing ruin and devastation in developing countries. The EU spent hundreds of millions of Euros buying fishing rights off the coast of Africa for our over sized fleets. Our industrial trawlers promptly raped those seas. The local subsistence fishermen were left with nothing to catch - and we are then surprised when they up sticks and migrate to Europe.

A single mature blue-fin tuna fetched $380,000 in the Tokyo fish market earlier this year, which is about the same price as a rhino horn on the black market in China.  This is the markets telling us what we all know – that we have eaten much of our breeding stock. Most, if not all our fisheries, are on the edge of collapse – not just the grand banks and the sea of Galilee. Yet we still fish for Tuna? 

Faced with food insecurity – Saudi and China have bought more farmland in Africa than exists in France to grow food for their populations.  UK based hedge funds are doing the same – but to grow crop based bio-fuel (which should be banned – see last issue’s article). 

China now mandates the planting of four trees a year for each man, woman and child.  At the same time, its support of alternative energy technologies means that in the coming decades we will be buying solar panels from China rather than oil from Saudi.  Neither of these governments need to worry about getting re-elected so take the longer term and sensible decisions that will safeguard the futures of their citizens.

Could it be that as we emerge from the end of two hundred years of industrial revolution and start the sustainability revolution that democracy is no longer an effective method of government? Over regulation is as wasteful as under regulation is potentially harmful.

To protect our fragile world we need to push for the adoption by the UN of a fifth crime against peace – Ecocide.  This is the concept of a crime against the environment to rank alongside others including genocide and war crimes. If this were the case many of our current leaders – political and business - may well be found guilty which is why it will never be accepted into international law! 

Perhaps, as in earlier revolutions, the people will get rid of their ineffective leaders and find new ones. More and more of us are beginning to understand that the lunatics are running the asylum. We need new leaders who understand the environmental and the food crisis we are facing and act in our global interests to resolve the root causes.  In reshaping the governance framework for the sustainability revolution – we need to create an environment where our entrepreneurs, their energy and capital are focussed on solving our shared problems - not on making them worse.

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew

Author of The Protein Crunch – Civilisation on the brink

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_ “We need to be educating the next generation to take action, something we have so far failed to accomplish. This involves an education of both head and heart, learning to know as well as to feel, balancing cleverness with wisdom. We can choose to engage in the sustainability revolution instead of just waiting for it to happen to us,”
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Excerpt from "The Protein Crunch" by Jason Drew

"We need to redefine the concept of intelligence. Data is not knowledge and intelligence is more than cleverness. We cannot afford to become cleverer and less intelligent. We need to be educating the next generation to take action, something we have so far failed to accomplish. This involves an education of both head and heart, learning to know as well as to feel, balancing cleverness with wisdom.. "
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Let me first explain why we need to bother.

The credit crunch has shaken our global economy, but it will recover. ‘The Protein Crunch’ is far more serious and, if we open our eyes, we will see that it is unfolding right in front of us.
Our food – protein – comes from three sources: our water, land and seas. All of these natural resources are under increasing pressure from our burgeoning population: when more demand meets less supply, we arrive at ‘The Protein Crunch’.

Every day, newspapers cover some element of this looming issue: mine water pollution in Johannesburg, Chinese land purchases in the Congo to grow food for china, a single tuna sold for $380,000 in Tokyo, floods in Pakistan and the food price riots that ignited North Africa. Few of us understand the causes of these crises and events, are all connected to the deterioration of our environment and its ecosystems.    

Just 100 years ago it would have been inconceivable to think that the human impact on the environment might become so great as to threaten the Earth and our own survival. We now stand at a turning point in our history and in the history of the Earth. Mankind has acquired the scale and the power to wreck the biosphere on which we depend – yet also the knowledge to fix it. The environment has shaped our past and will determine our future.

Capitalism may have caused many of our existing environmental problems, but is also the best tool to get us out of our predicament. 

With nearly one billion people hungry or starving and another billion people overweight or obese, something clearly isn’t working. With food demand outstripping supply, food prices will inevitably increase. Food price inflation brings with it civil unrest and political turmoil, as we have witnessed in recent months.

It seems that our brains are wired to react to emergencies, but if the threat is not immediate we find it hard to galvanise ourselves into action. It is as if we are floating down a river heading towards a waterfall, ignoring the roar of the water and waiting until we see the foaming water, before we react and then look for someone else to blame for our predicament. What the Earth needs is for many more of us to understand our predicament, and start the sustainability revolution we need to survive. There will be no time to waste looking for scapegoats: we will need to move and make change happen fast.

How can your keyboard help save the environment? 

Why not switch your browser to www.ecosia.org  - powered by Bing and Yahoo it is a superb search engine.  80% of its revenues are donated to reforestation projects – over £200,000 in its first year.

The second thing you can do is join the 10 million of us already members of www.Avaaz.org today. The site organizes on line petitions – amongst its many causes are some great environmental campaigns.

Greenpeace had been pushing Morrisons supermarkets to source its Tuna using the less destructive line fishing method rather than netting - and failed. When it became an Avaaz cause and many hundreds of thousands of emails flooded into their CEO – the company took note and within a week announced it would change its policy. A campaign launched to petition the president of Brazil on the rain forest preservation has attracted 700,000 signatures in just 48 Hours.
Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for us to share our views and increase awareness on environmental issues. 

Whether targeting politicians or business people -we can make a difference by making our collective voice heard.

We can all learn and share more about our world, once you have set your browser to Ecosia.org type in green news and search for coverage of the issues you feel strongly about.

We are in a race between education and catastrophe.
One of the most powerful things you can do is educate yourself and then pass on your knowledge to others. We need to get up to speed then act. 

There are already over a million local organisations doing things to help fix our planet, join the revolution!

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew

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Ban Bio Fuels 08/10/2011
 
Ban Bio Fuels 

Bio fuels are a man made eco-disaster waiting to happen and should be banned. Bio-fuels are like an addictive drug that eases the symptoms not the causes of the problem and has disastrous side effects that worsen the addiction. Let me explain.

The real issue is addiction to the combustion engine and cheap fuel – it is yesterdays technology – a product of the industrial revolution and as out of date as slavery.

If the true cost, including the environmental damage of combustion engines and their fuel, was included in the retail fuel price, America and the world would suffer a material price shock. 

As the old Industrial Revolution era is replaced with the era of the Sustainability Revolution – personal transport will be based on an electric motor powered by renewable sources.

Bio fuels were originally touted as an ecologically, sound means of combating climate change. The substitution of these crops for food was a major factor in the 2007-2008 rise in commodity and food prices as land was diverted away from food production to subsidised bio-fuel crop production. As a result – food price  riots that hit over 30 countries. In the last six months food prices have risen sharply again – causing turmoil in the middle east – further fuelling oil price rises -   and making bio-fuels more attractive. The addiction to fuel , with bio-fuel as the false hope will lead to more oil price rises as the food shortages they create cause unrest in the very regions that produce the oil. This is the madness and cruelty of any addiction.

In the United States an understandable political imperative is to reduce dependence on foreign oil supply. In 2008 some 18% of grain production was devoted to biofuels, over the 2007 and 2008 seasons. This could otherwise have fed 250 million people with their average grain requirements. In 2009 more than a quarter of the grain production was used in bio-fuels. Without this diversion of land to  bio-fuel production – food prices would have been lower and the world a safer place for all of us.

The principal bio-fuels are ethanol from sugar cane and agri-diesel from palm oil. Current ethanol production in Brazil takes up six million hectares of land, but the target is 30 million hectares producing 100 trillion litres of ethanol per year. Malaysia and Indonesia are the primary producers palm oil, where six million hectares is already under cultivation in Indonesia and a further 18 million hectares of forest have been cleared for expansion, with yet a further 20 million hectares under threat. All this adds to the destructive effect on a country that has already lost 72% of its ancient forests.

London based investment firms and hedge funds have been investing heavily in land in Africa to produce bio-fuel. One of these firms Crest Global Green Energy has acquired some 900,000 hectares of farmland in central Africa to grow bio-fuel crops.   In the UK less than one third of bio-fuel used comes from sources that meet the voluntary sustainability guidelines designed to protect water supplies, soil quality and forests in the source country.

None of us expect to be driving polluting combustion engine cars in the future so lets agree that the age of the polluting combustion engine is over – lets get on and ban bio-fuels by 2030 and combustion engines for personal transport by the same time.

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame and a notorious petrol head said of the US made Tesla electric car – it was ‘electrifying and biblically quick’.  Electric cars are our future and technology is advancing rapidly.  Mandating zero emission vehicles will create a massive boom and investment in the sustainability revolution that the planet needs to survive.

Good planets are hard to come by, lets not ruin ours.

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason Drew – August 2011, South Africa

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