$3 Billion A Yr For A Crop That No Longer Has an American Market

[Montagnard]

Politically connected Texas Agcorps in the US receives $3 billion a year in subsidy and water assistance for cotton which has no American market. The cotton is shipped to China which turns into the cheap clothing that is shipped back to firms like Wal-mart.

In the meantime the Texas Agcorp is drawing down the Ogallala Aquifer at a rate faster than nature can replenish. Consequently towns on the Southern Plains are now desperately seeking sources for water.

Once there was buffalo grass and the wind….

[jean]

1. Great information. Is there a citation?

[Montagnard]

2. Pulled from several sources

basis the book, the Worst Hard Times

[FloridaPat]

3. Agcorp isn't the only one drawing down the Ogallala Aquifer.

It's been going on for decades. It use to go as far north as souther Illinios. I think today it's most only in Texas. As for the rest - yes good work America. Ship cotton overseas so we can buy it back as clothing.

[aquart]

4. You mean NO LONGER has an American market.

Which isn't strictly true, either. We buy the finished goods. Basically, we're back to where we were when we were a British colony. We provided the raw materials for THEIR factories which they sold back to us as finished goods.

Now we're China's colony.

[Up2Late]

5. Typical, very sad, but typical

If you want to see what unregulated Cotton farming can do, you should check out some of the on-line info about the Aral Sea, formerly the 5th largest inland lake, and 2nd largest in Central Asia. But since the late 1950's, when Uzbekistan started irrigating the surrounding desert to grow Cotton, the lake that was once lager than Lake Huron, is about 1/3 it's old size.

The worst part is, since about 2001-2002 when the situation got a good deal of world attention because the island in the middle of the lake was where the Soviet Union stored it's biological Weapons has now become a peninsula, but since then, it continues to get worst, but is just not talked about any more.

Here's some links:

This USGS website shows well how much it has changed (if you click on the pictures were you see yellow corner markers, it will zoom into that area).

<http://enrin.grida.no/aral/aralsea/english/arsea/arsea.htm>

<http://www.dfd.dlr.de/app/land/aralsee/>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/678898.stm>

This link goes to medium resolution NASA Satellite pictures:

<http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/?search=Aral+Sea>

[SoCalDem]

6. Not as dramatic, but there used to be a Lake Chad

and now its dust (from what used to be the sediment on the lake bottom) is causing coral reefs to die in the Caribbean, and creating an asthma epidemic there as well..

http://www.grida.no/climate/vitalafrica/english/14.htm




Lake Chad and the Aral Sea
Lake Chad and the Aral Sea: A sad tale of two lakes


When I studied African politics about 40 years ago with visiting Lincoln University professor John Marcum at the University of Pennsylvania, Lake Chad was immense in surface area. It was the fourth largest inland water body on the African continent. The lake's surface area in 1963 was about 25000 square kilometers. The lake is very shallow, on the order of 5 to 8 m deep. Its waters provided livelihoods for fishermen as well as for settlements, cultivators and herders. The Chari and the Longone rivers are the major ones that feed the lake, a land-locked lake with no outlet to the oceans.

"The lake is shared by Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria and Niger which, along with CAR (Central African Republic), make up the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), whose name in French is the Commission du Bassin du Lac Tchad (CBLT). Its basin extends over 967,000 sq km and is home to about 20 million people, according to LCBC. These include 11.7 million in Nigeria, 5.0 million in Chad, 2.5 million in Cameroon, 634,000 in the CAR and 193,000 in Niger" (www.irinnews.org; March 21, 2003).

The Lake Chad Basin Commission is an organization designed to manage the basin and to resolve disputes that might arise over the lake and its resources.

Being on the fringe of the Sahara, high temperatures assure that evaporation rates of the lake's water would be high (estimated at 2000mm/year). Rainfall (about 1500mm/year in the south and 100mm in the north of the basin) has been another source of its water.

Today, the surface area of the lake barely reaches 1350 square kilometers. According to a BBC news report (March 24, 2004), "Nigeria's president has warned that Lake Chad will soon disappear unless immediate action is taken." Once the fourth-largest African lake (and the sixth largest lake in the world), today, is on its way to extinction.

[Up2Late]

8. Thanks, I had not heard of the Lake Chad problem

I'll have to look for more info on this.

Here's a link to a 2001 NASA satellite photo, I'll see if I can find one that's a bit newer.

<http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/?search=Lake+Chad>

[Up2Late]

9. I found this Satellite picture from today, it's RAW but still clear...

But it will take a little work. Go to the link below, which will open up about several dozen thumbnail pictures.

<http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2006047/>

Go all the way to the bottom and that over to the 3rd column, then up 3 rows to the picture with this label:

12:15 UTC
(in the Aqua group)

Click on that picture. Once it opens, you can click on 5 different resolutions in the normal visible spectrum, or Bands 7-2-1 which is color IR. It has a few other bands, but I'm not sure what those are for. In Color IR, bright green shows where the plants and grasses are. In the Bands 1-4-3 (true color), the red dots are active fires.

Aqua
2006/047
02/16/06
12:15 UTC

Another thing I had noticed with the Aral Sea, and I see it's also a problem with Lake Chad, I have a Rand-McNally World Atlas that I bought last year, and both Lake Chad and the Aral Sea are shown as they were in about 1973. Almost every map of central Asia makes it look like their is no problem. :mad:

[SoCalDem]

10. PBS has shown a great documentary about the asthma/coral reef

connection.. It's really sad..

http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/episodes/onedegreefactor/experts/africandust.html

[Up2Late]

13. Like I said above, I don't know much about Lake Chad, but if it's like...

...the Aral Sea, that dust is full of pesticides and all kinds of Man-made poisons. That's one of the big problems with the Aral Sea desiccation, big wind storm whip up the dust from the dry sea bed, which contains PCB, DDT, Lead, just name an industrial pollutant, it's there. Plus a lot of it is Salt which is making the surrounding lands un-farmable. Plus the water keeps getting more and more salty as the desiccation progresses.

Here are some amazing African Dust storms from the same NASA satellites, Some of these are in Chad where you can see the lake, but for some reason, it won't let me limit my search to just Africa or Chad.


<http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/?search=Dust+storm>

[blogslut]

7. Meanwhile back at the ranch...

...bush donor, swift boat liar and notorious corporate raider, T. Boone Pickens is buying up land over the Oglalla Aquifer:

High noon at the Ogallala aquifer
How a water-grabbing scheme concocted by T. Boone Pickens is turning conservative Texans into a bunch of regulation-loving liberals.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jacques Leslie

Feb. 1, 2001 | The citizens of Roberts County, Texas, will be interested to know that T. Boone Pickens, the noted corporate takeover artist and fellow resident, considers himself the county's "No. 1 steward of the land," as he proclaimed in a recent phone conversation with me. Why then, they might ask, is he trying to sell their water out from under them?

The mere fact that Pickens can do that, in a hauntingly literal way, is the beginning of a parable about regulation and the environment that starts in the Texas Panhandle, winds its way through Austin and resonates in post-inaugural Washington. It's a cautionary tale suggesting that even in a certain recent governor's home state, whose laissez-faire mind-set he'd like to see replicated nationally, free enterprise is fine, as long as it's not your resources that it exploits..."

more here:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/02/01/water_texas/

[Retrograde]

11. why worry about the environoment

when the Rapture's coming? If you believe you're going to be bodily transported somewhere it's hard to find time to worry about little things like aquifers.

Bleh. Sometimes it's good to be old.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

12. Corporate welfare.