Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Thirty kilometers south of the giraffe refuge is a five-hundred-hectare experimental farm begun in 1989 by ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. After millions of square kilometers of desolation, to enter ICRISAT’s leafy orchards and fields is a photosynthetic shock.

  Along with programs to improve millet and peanut production, ICRISAT-Niger is growing drought-tolerant jujube trees from India that bear a small fruit called Sahel apple, as well as Sudanese tamarinds and Ethiopian moringas—whose leaves, boiled with peanuts, provide ten times the calcium of milk and more vitamin A than most vegetables. Under tents of shade cloth, okra, hibiscus, sesame, and heat-tolerant tomatoes spring from the tan Sahel sands, along with heat-resistant lettuce from Israel. Nearby grow papaya and Israeli mangoes. (ICRISAT-Niger’s Israeli director believes that if food can grow in the Israeli Negev, it can grow in Niger.) As proof, they’ve resurrected a delicious native onion that was developed by the French, but lost after colonization ended. There are also cowpeas, oranges, pomelos, tangelos, and stands of Jatropha curcas, a Central American shrub whose oily seeds can be pressed for biodiesel. Lining the paths are Indian neem trees—a source of natural antiseptics and bug repellant.

  Under development are desert-adapted grapes and figs. ICRISAT has created this nutritious oasis with minimal insecticide and with only microdoses of fertilizers, injecting directly to the roots of each plant just one-fifth of a typical field’s normal application of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. It also has fifteen scientists, one hundred field technicians and support staff, and three hundred laborers. And something else, rare in Niger’s poor croplands: deep wells.

  As in the Negev, all you have to do to grow food in a desert is add technical know-how, hard labor, and water. Except the rains have all but stopped, or they now fall at the wrong times. After three years, the 2010 drought is being called the one that never ends.

  “True,” says ICRISAT hydrologist Navid Dejwakh. “But the western Sahel is on top of an ocean of water.”

  There is an immense hydrological potential just below the surface, he says—in some places, barely three meters down. Much is so shallow that the energy of a solar panel is all that’s needed to extract it. “Or a hand shovel. It’s so counterintuitive—you can’t see it based on vegetation, because so many trees have been cut.”

  Almost two-thirds of the country would be suitable for producing food, his colleagues believe. In fact, NGOs in parts of southern Niger have tapped this water since the early 1990s to plant some 200 million trees. Although one in five is killed by the rising heat, and this regreening still covers only a tiny percentage of the land, it is proof that the water is there.

  This subterranean ocean, says Dejwakh, is from ancient rainfall and from the underground alluvial flow of the Niger River. “It is contained by a sand layer, with very little slope. It’s perfect for filtering rainwater. It is rather amazing to think that there is all this water waiting for these people. They don’t have to starve.”

  Dejwakh and everyone at ICRISAT, which is part of the international agricultural research consortium that includes both CIMMYT and IRRI, are certain that, given financing, there is enough water just below Niger’s surface to grow plenty of food for everyone in the country. “Absolutely.”

  Everyone—meaning all 16.6 million current Nigeriens?

  “Right.”

  And in thirty years, when, at the present growth rate, there are 50 million of them?

  Dejwakh’s smile vanishes. “Fifty million?”

  Right.

  “Fifty million,” he answers slowly. “Less rainfall, too.” He purses his lips. “Even with this ocean of water, 50 million people will have serious problems.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The World Unraveling

  i. Sin

  The road to the naval colony in Karachi, Pakistan, passes a fifty-acre field so lifeless that its soil is bleached white. This is Moach Goth, a cemetery for the unknown. The tens of thousands interred here are found in the streets, the dumps, or in the mangroves along the harbor: addicts, unclaimed bombing fatalities, terror victims, the homeless. Their graves are marked with plywood triangles bearing fading numbers and sometimes a date. Across the road, two other equally large fields, already full, are disappearing under weeds and mesquite scrub.

  In the farthest row, a man in a loose white turban, his nose gullied with lesions, sinks a spade into the white dust. His name is Khair Mohammad; all morning he has been digging little rectangles, three feet long. Each will be headed by a small blank hunk of stone, because they are for children who never lived long enough to be named, or who were never born at all. No one will visit them. Mohammad has buried thousands.

  Once a week, they are brought in ambulances by Pakistan’s Edhi Foundation, one of the world’s largest social welfare NGOs, each wrapped in white cloth. Mohammad has received them for twenty-three years; the caretaker before him, his father, recalled them arriving in wooden carts pulled by men. Some are found in the garbage, some are left in front of mosques. If an infant is still alive, the Edhi Foundation gives it a home. If not, they come here.

  Grave digger, Moach Goth Cemetery, Karachi, Pakistan

  “God knows who they are. God knows who is the father. The mothers are sinners: they sin, then throw their baby away.”

  The majority are girls. Some are full term, some fit in the palm of his hand. Sometimes he and his son Nadeem, who assists him, can’t tell if it was male or female. God would also know how many were unrecognizable lumps of tissue that never made it here, or were never seen in the trash. An estimated 890,000 abortions occur in Pakistan each year, though no one really knows. Women of means use abortion as stop-gap birth control. Mothers who can’t afford more children often get rid of new babies.

  “Unmarried pregnant women,” explains Karachi gynecologist Nikhat Saeed Khan, “have no place to go, because premarital sex doesn’t exist in our culture, of course. So they endanger their own lives with untrained midwives or abortionists, or find some misoprostol to take.” The same, she says, goes for adulterers and for women claiming rape who can’t produce witnesses: their “crimes” risk punishment by death.

  Nadeem arrives, carrying a jerry can of water. He’s the fifth youngest of Mohammad’s four sons and six daughters. He wears a white tunic, his head uncovered despite the sun. Nadeem’s job is to wash each baby, then offer prayers over them as his father buries them.

  “They are innocent of sin, so they will go to God,” he says. “And God will ask their parents why they aborted or abandoned them.”

  “This is our sad job,’ says his father. “I believe God will reward us.”

  In the white sky overhead is a swirling funnel of hundreds of black kites—the bird that circles Karachi garbage heaps and docks when fishing boats discard offal. Their long shadows speed across the tiny nameless graves.

  Could all this be avoided? What if the mothers could choose when to conceive a child, and when not to?

  “Ask God,” says Nadeem.

  ii. Shakiness

  “It happened so fast,” says Tanveer Arif.

  Although he’s talking about 1995, he still sounds stunned. That was when the wells went dry in Gadap Town. Only two decades earlier, the lands here were among the most productive wheat and cornfields on Earth. There were guava and coconut orchards, and 5,000 farms that provided all the vegetables for nearby Karachi.

  Most of those farms are now overgrown with invasive mesquite, and used only as picnic grounds for weekend outings. A few rent horses, or have private zoos stocked with the black bucks, wild ass, and blue bulls that were here when Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947 and was still one-third forest. Today, Pakistan’s forest cover is barely 4 percent, a figure that includes lands designated as forest where little or nothing is actually covered.

  Arif sits on the crumbling porch of a brick farmhouse belonging to a friend who no longer comes here. There’s only one employee left, a caretaker with a
curly beard named Soomar, who’s worked here forty years, since he was five. “The well then was only 25 feet deep,” Soomar says. “Fifteen years ago we had to go to 200 feet. Then 250. Then completely dry.” They dug another, a foot-wide bore hole he keeps covered with two mud bricks. After 350 feet, still nothing.

  “So we quit,” he says, spitting out a wad of betel leaf.

  A third hole, at the same depth but 2,000 feet away, still delivers, but its pressure is falling. Soomar pipes its flow down shallow ditches to fields whose soil is now just powder, and farms at a very modest scale—just enough to keep himself employed, Arif suspects. He harvested 40 kilograms of wheat this year. They used to get 150 kilos.

  “This is a man-made environmental disaster,” says Arif, mopping his skull with his shirtsleeve. Gadap Town was a Green Revolution zone, planted in dwarf hybrids that yielded incredible harvests: just add water. So everyone stuck straws in the ground, and when the flow slowed, they stuck in more, and deeper. Now that has failed, with no alternatives in place, such as catchment dams in dry riverbeds to capture monsoon runoff.

  “Instead,” says Arif, “they mine them all the way down to bedrock for sand to build more Karachi, so the soil can’t replenish.” Where trees once lined Karachi’s rivers are now mounds of sand and gravel that go on for miles. As does Karachi.

  Arif, a biologist, directs the Karachi-based Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment. Running an environmental NGO in Pakistan practically redefines the word defeat, but Arif soldiers on. His efforts to save the Houbara bustard, a game fowl favored by Dubai oil sheiks who jet over on weekends with permits allowing them one hundred birds apiece, elicit phone warnings that his legs will be broken. All the good trees around—especially guggal, the local myrrh species—were cut by men with political connections and weapons, or by politicians themselves, who then brought in Texas mesquite to control erosion, which instead ran amuck in the fields. People try burning it, but it just comes back faster. Then they brought Australian eucalyptus, whose thirsty roots broke up pipes all over town. Arif led the campaign to have guggal declared endangered, but thugs hassled the Green Guard youth brigades he organized to protect the remaining stands. East of Karachi, in forests along the Indus River, the timber exploiters are often members of parliament who can quickly relieve a protesting ranger of his job. Up north, the Taliban does the same.

  Until quite recently, Pakistan brimmed with fecundity. A major cradle of human civilization arose along its great Indus River, which carried nutrients down from the Roof of the World, the Tibetan Plateau, and deposited some of the richest soil in Asia over its enormous flood plain. Pakistan’s current water crisis and dwindling crop fertility are, as Tanveer Arif states, a man-made disaster. There are multiple causes of this; all stem from packing 185 million people into a country not much bigger than Texas, which has 26 million.

  Within the next two decades, Pakistan, one of the fastest-growing countries on Earth, will surpass Indonesia as the most populous Muslim nation. Indonesia has 248 million, but it also has one of the developing world’s better family-planning programs; still, it will add 40 million by 2030. Pakistan, however, currently with three-fourths of Indonesia’s population, will add double that amount. By mid-century, if its growth continues apace, Pakistan will far outnumber today’s United States, with a projected 395 million people—all in a land the size of Texas.

  Along with India, Pakistan is where the Green Revolution was first implemented. Starvation was averted, and millions lived to beget millions more. Today, 60 percent of those Pakistani millions are under thirty. The wells and rivers that watered the Green Revolution and gave them life are now giving out, leaving one-third of Pakistani children chronically malnourished. Unemployment, in double digits, grows along with the population, and the percentage of those underemployed is even higher.

  Unemployed young men grow frustrated, and angry. A nation filled with angry young males is not a stable place, especially when they are tempted with paid opportunities to commit mayhem, including international mayhem.

  A shaky nation with too many people running out of water and driven to mayhem becomes an entire planet’s concern. Especially when that nation happens to be a nuclear power.

  Yet again, the explosions have subsided in Lyari Town. The streets here, the oldest part of Karachi, are once more mobbed with cars, motorbikes, horse-drawn wagons, motorized rickshaws, carts of watermelon and betel leaf vendors, and the fabulously painted transport trucks that have become Pakistan’s greatest indigenous art form, whose extravagant adornment often costs a trucker more than his house. Everyone is back: men in white kurtis and prayer caps; hijab’d women brilliant as tropical birdlife, wrapped in multihued loose pants and tunics called salwar kameez; other women in black chadors, even transvestites in chadors, all threading their way through the stalled traffic, buying provisions and tea.

  Since 10:00 a.m., that traffic has gone from mere paralysis to pandemonium, as Lyari’s stoplights are out for the next three hours. All but the most privileged parts of Karachi are subject to load-shedding—daily rolling blackouts—because the city can’t possibly keep up with demand. There were fewer than a half-million people here in 1947. Today’s 21 million is a forty-two-fold increase.

  No one could have prepared for this.

  Three days earlier, when the grenade attacks began, everyone stayed hidden until long after the explosions ended. Thankfully, only two deaths this time. At the Civil Hospital, Pakistan’s biggest, which has a police station at its front entrance, eleven wounded were brought into emergency. That was far better than the attacks two weeks earlier, when the grenades were rocket-propelled, with forty wounded and eighteen dead—an overload for the fourteen tables in the surgical theater, where armed guards are posted lest warfare erupt in the triage units. To handle Karachi’s literally exploding population, a fourteen-story trauma unit is under construction.

  This latest salvo was over an unpaid loan. Everyone knows who owed whom, but as usual, no arrests. Newspapers reported it as yet another episode in “the ongoing gang wars” and life resumed. Lyari’s balconies are hung anew with laundry that is grimy again even before it has a chance to dry. Billboard-sized posters of smiling gangsters—urban Robin Hoods who provide most of Lyari’s jobs—continue to festoon exterior walls everywhere, except on mosques.

  Many of these urban warlords descend from the original farming families when Lyari was a village, long before Britain decided to build a major warm-water port on the Arabian Sea near a small fishing enclave called Kolachi, in what was then part of India. As the two villages grew and merged, farmers opened shops, consolidated, became community fixers, made land deals, and became powerful in a city where laws were scorned under colonial rule, and now exist mainly on paper.

  British rule in India ended in 1947, a triumph for Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle civil disobedience. But Muslims who feared living under a Hindu majority demanded independence, and Pakistan was born in two Muslim majority regions cleaved from eastern and western India. With its two halves separated by a thousand miles, governance in Pakistan was weakened from the start, and the division couldn’t last. In 1971, East Pakistan finally bolted. Following a civil war in which by some estimates 3 million died, it became Bangladesh.

  Although beset with its own problems—along with tiny Pacific atoll nations, it is the country most imperiled by sea level rise, lying almost entirely in the Ganges Delta—Bangladesh is comparatively stable, in part because since the 1980s it has made family planning a national priority. In Pakistan, however, the precedent of weak government was never really reversed, even under periodic military dictatorships. Even in cities, tribal allegiances still trump all others.

  In a room whose door opens directly onto a rubbled Lyari street where a dozen goats hug a strip of shade along a wall, ten women sit on the concrete floor where they waited out the grenade bombardment, embroidering salwar kameez for a dowry. The betrothed, a slender, pink-clad woman named Rashida,1 is on
e of eight people who currently live in this room. The goats are hers; she grazes them every day along the dry Lyari River, an hour’s walk away. She has three sisters and five brothers, all without work. Her father staples papers and serves tea in a bank. Rashida is lucky: her fiancé drives trucks. “Most men just roam around,” she says. “They’re mad because there’s nothing to do.”

  “And take out their tempers on us,” says orange-clad Shehzadi, who housekeeps for a politician.

  The mud-plastered room is stuffy and dim, as the power is still off. Rashida takes the turquoise kameez she’s beading with burgundy thread over to the doorway and holds it up to approving murmurs. Every woman is beading a different-colored set of salwar kameez for her; Rashida’s truck-driver husband-to-be is helping to pay. By the wedding, she’ll have twenty-five or thirty sets. The outfits will cost around four thousand rupees2 apiece. Because the garments are loose-fitting and so well crafted, she expects to wear them all her life. “Before, women would have eighty or ninety sets. But everything’s so expensive now!”

  Especially children: “Who today could possibly want a lot? I only want two girls and two boys. No more.” The other women smile and keep sewing, knowing better. They all said that once. And look what happened.

  All these women wrapped in beautifully appointed cottons, their multiple earrings dangling beneath long dupattas, are Balochs. Their fathers brought their families to Karachi, in Sindh province, from the western desert province of Balochistan, where there is even less work than here. Rashida, born here, dreamed of being a doctor when she was in school, but school ended after eighth grade. The schools are often closed because there’s no water or electricity. To protect all the children wandering the streets, the government builds extra-high speed bumps to slow traffic. Rashida’s sixteen-year-old sister Nasreen, sullen because the power failed during the soap opera she was watching while she embroidered, hasn’t studied at all.