– From “Front and Center”, by C. Austin Burrell –
**Readers are also invited to visit “Bud Burrell’s Global Markets & Issues Reconnaissance” (at http://www.investrend.com/burrell-recon).**
The last century has seen the global population push past 6 Billion almost without notice or concern. With no focus of leaders of the World on population concerns except from China, current growth rates of population will push global population of the World towards 12 Billion by the year 2050. This projection could give or take a few percentage points absent a global war or other natural disaster that might materially alter the final number.
What sort of World will we live in if this isn’t prevented? Clean water is already becoming a global crisis. Along with this shortage of clean water for consumption and irrigation, there is growing crisis of arable land suitable for production of grains and other vegetable staples, one that increases in severity every single year. 60% of the top soil of the Central Midwestern United States has been depleted by improper and inefficient use and irrigation. The Imperial and Central Valleys of California are being converted to Mesopotamian Desert acreage faster than the conversion of the ancient fertile crescent that once existed between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq.
The Sierra Club wrote a book over 20 years ago titled “Cadillac Desert” about the gross mismanagement of water resources in the fourteen Western States of the US that now reads like prophesy.
What other shortages are extant or projected?
The World’s Oceans are being fished out to a point of not being capable of being replenished. Address the issue of big game fish, and you see a 95% plus drop in their populations in all Oceans, the very fish most eggs come from, particularly Tuna, which don’t begin to breed until they are eight years old. Tuna are on the verge of having been fished out of the Pacific and Atlantic.
The Cod beds of the North Atlantic that fed the modern World for the better part of 300 years are exhausted, and might only be saved by a 5 to 10 year moratorium on fishing in their breeding grounds. This year, there was a dramatic drop in the salmon runs in British Columbia, along with a comparable depletion of salmon and halibut runs in other parts of Canada and Alaska. The latter are the result of commercial fishing fleets using monofilament nylon gill nets that are up to 100 miles in length that the fish can’t see. Where they are used extensively, fish of all varieties simply disappear from the fishing areas, most particularly breeding fish that replenish stocks. [entire post]