God's Last Offer - Ed Ayres,
pub.: Four Walls Eight Windows - 1999;

ISBN 1-56858-125-4

p. 247 - 251   (David's third selection, out of six) :-

[last sentence, previous section: ]
In other words, do what we have to do to stabilize the spikes, and the policies needed to solve these other problems—including water management—become much clearer.

Because a rising share of the consumption is in products that are traded internationally, this means—in effect—that water shortages in one part of the world will be felt in many other parts not only in the distribution of food, but through the sales of hundreds of other products. And, while the control of water-as-food may have the more primal imapct, water-as-consumer-products may wield the greater financial clout. The reason is that in the current global economy, the market value of water to industry is far greater than it is to agriculture—which is one of the reasons why so much water has been diverted from farms in the first place. A thousand tons of water used to produce a ton of wheat, for example, has a market value of $200, while the same amount of water used in heavy industry yields, on average, about $14,000 in output. As long as nations are in competition with each other to capture export income, that industrial stranglehold on water—and the raising of the consumption spike—will continue.


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God's Last Offer - Ed Ayres, pub.: New York ; Four Walls Eight Windows - 1999

Ed Ayres has been editor of World Watch magazine since 1993. He is editorial director of Worldwatch Institute. He is coeditor of The Worldwatch Reader (W.W. Norton, fall 1998) and Vital Signs: The Trends that Are Shaping Our Future (W.W. Norton, 1993). Founder of Running Times magazine, he was also its editor for fourteen years. He has covered environmental issues for Outside, Buzzworm, The Washington Post, Time, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, and others. His "Notes to the Reader" column in World Watch is syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.


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