9 ms·

I like solar and all, but I will say that just looking at the farming practices of these growers, this transformation will likely be shortlived (I am thinking i

by hosh 6y ago

I like solar and all, but I will say that just looking at the farming practices of these growers, this transformation will likely be shortlived (I am thinking in terms of generations, not in terms of seasons). Yes, the solar allows people to rapidly deploy solar to use as pumps, but those pumps are also depleting the aquifer. They are probably not putting anything back into the aquifer with practices such as rainwater harvesting (earthworks and improving infiltration, rather than rain barrels). In metro Phoenix, AZ (here in the States) we have been seeing something similar as the deep water have been drying up. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights (from the Colorado river), and people’s solutions have been to install an electric pump to get at the water. With so many people draining off of the aquifer, people who have been depending on the water have been having difficulty with getting consistent water. Many of them are finding that they have to try to sell the property. What they have not been doing are things like, capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape; use of greywater; use of a composting toilet (which cleans waste with the carbon cycle rather than the hydrologic cycle), and otherwise conserve drinking and cooking water. Tuscon, AZ and Flagstaff, AZ have residents and public policies in place that does a much better job with this than Phoenix. With cheap solar added to the mix, what will happen is that it hastens the aquifer depletion. So those poppy farmers are not thinking with whole systems or thinking in the long term. On the other hand, if they were thinking in the long term, they probably would not be growing poppy as a cash crop in the first place. Perhaps small batches to make high quality anesthesia for local use, as part of of a more diverse crop. You don’t kill off your aquifer, and you don’t make something that will kill off your customers. You’d have nothing left. My conclusion is that that the market forces, while transformative, is also very limited and short-sighted, and there are better ways for humans to interact with each other.

colinmhayes 6y ago
Can't agree that the poppy farmers aren't thinking long term. Abusing the aquifer is the nash equilibrium. As soon as one person starts pumping everyone else has to too, because the water will be gone soon either way. This is a collaboration failure more than some sort of ignoring the long term for the short term.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  The problem isn't farmer's, it's the breathless tone of the journalist who seems to know nothing about aquifer depletion. Classic capitalism-aggrandizing faux-environmentalism.
- hosh 6y ago
  I was describing alternative ways to get water rather than draining the aquifer, as well as long term effects of flooding the market with opium. I do not think the Nash equilibrium describes that.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Unfortunately, it does. A farmer can convert now, and pay the extra price of doing so, while missing out on the easier aquifer water. Or, they can do what everyone else does: pump now, then convert when their hand is forced. Absent some group collaboration, this bad deal is the correct choice: anything else would be worse for an individual farmer. That's a Nash equilibrium. Not addressing the short vs long term thinking about opium, since it's unrelated, but I don't think your analysis is correct; the Pashtuns have been growing this crop for literally thousands of years.
    - hosh 6y ago
      That is a lot to think about. I did not know what a Nash equilibrium is. I don’t have an immediate answer to this. I only have some vague notions that the alternatives I am thinking of does not cost as much as it is perceived, and conversion strategies may not require a large investment with an immediate opportunity cost. In other words, not all viable strategies are known by the actors. I tried looking up information on the Pashtuns and pre-modern cultivation of opium. So far, I have only found articles and papers talking about significant cultivation since the 1950s. I have found articles describing this as a fairly complex issue. I am interested in understanding the traditional farming practices of the Pashtuns, and how and why it changed. Is there anything written about that you know off the top of your head?
      - 6y ago
coding123 6y ago
Yes eventually. Pima and Cochise counties are also similarly in trouble. Many rain collection techniques are really just starting to take off in Arizona. But they are also short sighted. You can tell when you listen to the radio there, news daily about the Colorado river problems and rural farmers. They literally don't know what to do. In any case I do think as wells run dry in Afghanistan, they will migrate to these techniques too. However if they are just now pumping, it may be that they are many years behind AZ's farming culture and they probably have a good 20 years of pumping. Drugs, unfortunately is a long term crop. Even if that eventually goes away there are many crops that can make money. They'll adapt as US farmers do each year.
BurningFrog 6y ago
You have a good argument about the aquifer. That growing poppies is dumb because it will kill off all your customers is a bad argument for two reasons. 1. The heroin market has proven sustainable for generations. 2. Even if suddenly no one wants heroin anymore, the farmer can plant a different crop the next season.
- hosh 6y ago
  1. That does not mean that heroine is a positive influence in the world that helps nourish people’s physical and emotional health. 2. It isn’t about whether you can adapt and find a different crop to grow. It is that you are growing something that helps things go into a degenerative, rather than a regenerative feedback loop.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    You're making ethical arguments. That's good for discussing what people should do. However, we live in a world where entities often do not make ethical decisions. They make practical decisions: should I grow coca or coffee beans? The gang with guns wants me to grow coca, and they are willing to kill people who don't work for them... so I guess I grow coca. You can wish for them to be dead heroes, but that's not how you should bet. At a larger scale, ethics don't win over profits. There are for-profit prison corporations. I bet they have very well thought-out corporate mission statements. If you want to talk about why people make the decisions they do, you need to think about psychology and economics. If you want to talk about how people can be supported to make better decisions, you need to talk about politics and economics.
    - hosh 6y ago
      I think if I were talking about small groups of people where much of the food production is done onsite, and there is a higher cooperation locally, this can be done. It has been done, even in just a regular neighborhood. I am not necessarily talking about changing large agricorps or policy changes.
  - slickQ 6y ago
shellac 6y ago
As the article says So much water is now being used that ground water levels in Helmand are estimated to be falling by 3m a year. The fear is that pretty soon the water will simply run out. "Maybe this boom will not last longer than 10 years," says Orzala Nemat, who runs the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the country's biggest think tank. That won't just affect the people who have moved into the desert areas, she says. It will affect the entire region.
lovetocode 6y ago
It’s Afghanistan. These people likely don’t care about anything you outlined.
- hinkley 6y ago
  They might care about arsenic though. The aquifers in Pakistan have trace levels of arsenic, but as the water levels drop it is becoming more concentrated. If I'm reading this UNICEF report correctly: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WASH_WQ_ARSENIC_NATIONAL.pdf https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WA... That problem extends quite a ways into eastern Afghanistan as well.
- oa335 6y ago
  Why do you say that?
wavefunction 6y ago
It seems like Arizona is not a very optimal place to grow crops not already suited to the environment. And the usage of water by residential customers has got to be extreme for the region. I have only flown into and out of Phoenix but the amount of backyard pools and golf courses visible during the approaches and departures was not something I could wrap my head around.
- hosh 6y ago
  Brad Landcaster is growing a neighborhood of edible perennials using a fraction of the street runoff, out in Tucson. So we also end up with large structures for flood control. Phoenix and Tuscon does get seasonal monsoons, but the infrastructure is largely designed to get rid of the water instead of letting it infiltrate the soil near where it lands. And yes, the pools, golf courses, and lawns bug me too. Phoenix also has the worst tap water in the nation. Many residents, including me, get their drinking water from water and ice stores and water dispensing vending machines.
- jseliger 6y ago
  Phoenix is in many ways not an optimal place to see huge population growth, but with most of California, Portland, and Seattle choking off developing through zoning controls, and the same in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia, the US population is filtering to where housing can be (relatively) easily built. If California, Portland, and Seattle removed height limits on housing, as well as parking minimums, a lot of the growth in Phoenix would taper off. They haven't, so it doesn't.
  - rhacker 6y ago
    I've tried driving through Seattle (during non-pandemic) Its hell to drive because of all the cars. I don't understand people that want to increase populations in areas where there's literally no infrastructure for it.
    - kyuudou 6y ago
      I have a similar observation about Austin, TX. And there's every incentive not to live in a dense urban core due to absurd rents and not many folks are going to bike in a TX summer.
newyankee 6y ago
I do not mean to be snarky, but do you think they really care about long term. Even with education and healthcare slowly coming along around the world, the Afghanistan fertility rate is still above 5 kids per woman or something. It is a society still rooted in tradition. People from the West try to create a halo around traditional ways of living and tribals and other such things for different reasons (some genuine, some not). The truth is they are competing in their own Darwinian way to maximize their own benefit with whatever resources they can land their hand on. The farmers generally are relatively richer land owners and will alway strife for output maximization and regulation of output is not easy for the state in a place like this.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > It is a society still rooted in tradition. Societies change. Do you know anything about Afghanistan of the 70's? Look it up if you don't. It was fairly westernized. I suspect there's a large portion of the population that would like to return to that, but they either don't have the control, or even if there are a majority of them, they don't have to the will to go against fundamentalists willing to die (or, more importantly, kill) to prevent it. In any case, painting the entire country with such a broad brush seems unwarranted.
  - iguy 6y ago
    I think it would be more accurate to say that a small urban class was fairly westernised. Sometimes, such a class starts a trend, and everyone follows. IMO it helps a lot if there's real economic growth, I mean from useful jobs not from oil etc, so that country bumpkins can live out the dream of moving to the city & having nicer things. But it's not a sure thing, sadly.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it could have gone a route that left it significantly more modern and with much more of what we would consider western values, as portions of the country were already like that as recently as 50 years ago. I think any narrative along the lines of "Afghanistan is traditional and tribal and you can't change that" which doesn't address that at all is at best poorly communicated, but more likely working from poor assumptions.
hinkley 6y ago
They should be showing videos like this at town hall meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE (warning: the intro is very loud)
rtkwe 6y ago
> capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape Not sure they could if they wanted to. The downstream/aquifer water rights of the run off are already spoken for in a lot of the south-western US because there's just not enough water falling anywhere really.
- rhacker 6y ago
  It doesn't matter in Arizona as long as the water is caught before it hits the ground, it's OK.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    Huh ok. I know some other states like Colorado have limits on the total amount you can capture at any one time. Kind of surprised Arizona doesn't have similar laws, guess it doesn't have too many rivers with downstream requirements.
    - rhacker 6y ago
      yep, co is 2 55 gal barrels. I know I've been looking for a home to buy in about 12 states :). I chose CA, closing in a few weeks. In any case, yes, most of the laws had been driven by the Univ of AZ. They found that letting the water go into the ground mostly feeds the trees. Very little of it goes into the actual ground water, and it takes a really long time for it to arrive. So the theory is that by capturing water and using it specifically on the things you want to water (food plants, and showering) you're conserving a fuck-ton of water. And besides, all of that water that is captured actually ends up in the ground anyway - where do you think the shower water goes when you're on septic. The point is, AZ is pretty much ahead of the game with regards to water capture and science research on it.
fred_is_fred 6y ago
If you've not read Cadillac Desert, I highly recommend it. One key learning - water always flows downhill towards money and by extension political power. Phoenix won't run dry, nor will LA - smaller communities and farmers will get hit first.

by hosh 6y ago

colinmhayes 6y ago

Can't agree that the poppy farmers aren't thinking long term. Abusing the aquifer is the nash equilibrium. As soon as one person starts pumping everyone else has to too, because the water will be gone soon either way. This is a collaboration failure more than some sort of ignoring the long term for the short term.

Ericson2314 6y ago
The problem isn't farmer's, it's the breathless tone of the journalist who seems to know nothing about aquifer depletion. Classic capitalism-aggrandizing faux-environmentalism.
hosh 6y ago
I was describing alternative ways to get water rather than draining the aquifer, as well as long term effects of flooding the market with opium. I do not think the Nash equilibrium describes that.
- samatman 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it does. A farmer can convert now, and pay the extra price of doing so, while missing out on the easier aquifer water. Or, they can do what everyone else does: pump now, then convert when their hand is forced. Absent some group collaboration, this bad deal is the correct choice: anything else would be worse for an individual farmer. That's a Nash equilibrium. Not addressing the short vs long term thinking about opium, since it's unrelated, but I don't think your analysis is correct; the Pashtuns have been growing this crop for literally thousands of years.
  - hosh 6y ago
    That is a lot to think about. I did not know what a Nash equilibrium is. I don’t have an immediate answer to this. I only have some vague notions that the alternatives I am thinking of does not cost as much as it is perceived, and conversion strategies may not require a large investment with an immediate opportunity cost. In other words, not all viable strategies are known by the actors. I tried looking up information on the Pashtuns and pre-modern cultivation of opium. So far, I have only found articles and papers talking about significant cultivation since the 1950s. I have found articles describing this as a fairly complex issue. I am interested in understanding the traditional farming practices of the Pashtuns, and how and why it changed. Is there anything written about that you know off the top of your head?
    - 6y ago

coding123 6y ago

Yes eventually. Pima and Cochise counties are also similarly in trouble. Many rain collection techniques are really just starting to take off in Arizona. But they are also short sighted. You can tell when you listen to the radio there, news daily about the Colorado river problems and rural farmers. They literally don't know what to do. In any case I do think as wells run dry in Afghanistan, they will migrate to these techniques too. However if they are just now pumping, it may be that they are many years behind AZ's farming culture and they probably have a good 20 years of pumping. Drugs, unfortunately is a long term crop. Even if that eventually goes away there are many crops that can make money. They'll adapt as US farmers do each year.

BurningFrog 6y ago

You have a good argument about the aquifer. That growing poppies is dumb because it will kill off all your customers is a bad argument for two reasons. 1. The heroin market has proven sustainable for generations. 2. Even if suddenly no one wants heroin anymore, the farmer can plant a different crop the next season.

hosh 6y ago
1. That does not mean that heroine is a positive influence in the world that helps nourish people’s physical and emotional health. 2. It isn’t about whether you can adapt and find a different crop to grow. It is that you are growing something that helps things go into a degenerative, rather than a regenerative feedback loop.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  You're making ethical arguments. That's good for discussing what people should do. However, we live in a world where entities often do not make ethical decisions. They make practical decisions: should I grow coca or coffee beans? The gang with guns wants me to grow coca, and they are willing to kill people who don't work for them... so I guess I grow coca. You can wish for them to be dead heroes, but that's not how you should bet. At a larger scale, ethics don't win over profits. There are for-profit prison corporations. I bet they have very well thought-out corporate mission statements. If you want to talk about why people make the decisions they do, you need to think about psychology and economics. If you want to talk about how people can be supported to make better decisions, you need to talk about politics and economics.
  - hosh 6y ago
    I think if I were talking about small groups of people where much of the food production is done onsite, and there is a higher cooperation locally, this can be done. It has been done, even in just a regular neighborhood. I am not necessarily talking about changing large agricorps or policy changes.
- slickQ 6y ago

shellac 6y ago

As the article says So much water is now being used that ground water levels in Helmand are estimated to be falling by 3m a year. The fear is that pretty soon the water will simply run out. "Maybe this boom will not last longer than 10 years," says Orzala Nemat, who runs the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the country's biggest think tank. That won't just affect the people who have moved into the desert areas, she says. It will affect the entire region.

lovetocode 6y ago

It’s Afghanistan. These people likely don’t care about anything you outlined.

hinkley 6y ago
They might care about arsenic though. The aquifers in Pakistan have trace levels of arsenic, but as the water levels drop it is becoming more concentrated. If I'm reading this UNICEF report correctly: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WASH_WQ_ARSENIC_NATIONAL.pdf https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WA... That problem extends quite a ways into eastern Afghanistan as well.
oa335 6y ago
Why do you say that?

wavefunction 6y ago

It seems like Arizona is not a very optimal place to grow crops not already suited to the environment. And the usage of water by residential customers has got to be extreme for the region. I have only flown into and out of Phoenix but the amount of backyard pools and golf courses visible during the approaches and departures was not something I could wrap my head around.

hosh 6y ago
Brad Landcaster is growing a neighborhood of edible perennials using a fraction of the street runoff, out in Tucson. So we also end up with large structures for flood control. Phoenix and Tuscon does get seasonal monsoons, but the infrastructure is largely designed to get rid of the water instead of letting it infiltrate the soil near where it lands. And yes, the pools, golf courses, and lawns bug me too. Phoenix also has the worst tap water in the nation. Many residents, including me, get their drinking water from water and ice stores and water dispensing vending machines.
jseliger 6y ago
Phoenix is in many ways not an optimal place to see huge population growth, but with most of California, Portland, and Seattle choking off developing through zoning controls, and the same in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia, the US population is filtering to where housing can be (relatively) easily built. If California, Portland, and Seattle removed height limits on housing, as well as parking minimums, a lot of the growth in Phoenix would taper off. They haven't, so it doesn't.
- rhacker 6y ago
  I've tried driving through Seattle (during non-pandemic) Its hell to drive because of all the cars. I don't understand people that want to increase populations in areas where there's literally no infrastructure for it.
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    I have a similar observation about Austin, TX. And there's every incentive not to live in a dense urban core due to absurd rents and not many folks are going to bike in a TX summer.

newyankee 6y ago

I do not mean to be snarky, but do you think they really care about long term. Even with education and healthcare slowly coming along around the world, the Afghanistan fertility rate is still above 5 kids per woman or something. It is a society still rooted in tradition. People from the West try to create a halo around traditional ways of living and tribals and other such things for different reasons (some genuine, some not). The truth is they are competing in their own Darwinian way to maximize their own benefit with whatever resources they can land their hand on. The farmers generally are relatively richer land owners and will alway strife for output maximization and regulation of output is not easy for the state in a place like this.

kbenson 6y ago
> It is a society still rooted in tradition. Societies change. Do you know anything about Afghanistan of the 70's? Look it up if you don't. It was fairly westernized. I suspect there's a large portion of the population that would like to return to that, but they either don't have the control, or even if there are a majority of them, they don't have to the will to go against fundamentalists willing to die (or, more importantly, kill) to prevent it. In any case, painting the entire country with such a broad brush seems unwarranted.
- iguy 6y ago
  I think it would be more accurate to say that a small urban class was fairly westernised. Sometimes, such a class starts a trend, and everyone follows. IMO it helps a lot if there's real economic growth, I mean from useful jobs not from oil etc, so that country bumpkins can live out the dream of moving to the city & having nicer things. But it's not a sure thing, sadly.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it could have gone a route that left it significantly more modern and with much more of what we would consider western values, as portions of the country were already like that as recently as 50 years ago. I think any narrative along the lines of "Afghanistan is traditional and tribal and you can't change that" which doesn't address that at all is at best poorly communicated, but more likely working from poor assumptions.

hinkley 6y ago

They should be showing videos like this at town hall meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE (warning: the intro is very loud)

rtkwe 6y ago

> capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape Not sure they could if they wanted to. The downstream/aquifer water rights of the run off are already spoken for in a lot of the south-western US because there's just not enough water falling anywhere really.

rhacker 6y ago
It doesn't matter in Arizona as long as the water is caught before it hits the ground, it's OK.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  Huh ok. I know some other states like Colorado have limits on the total amount you can capture at any one time. Kind of surprised Arizona doesn't have similar laws, guess it doesn't have too many rivers with downstream requirements.
  - rhacker 6y ago
    yep, co is 2 55 gal barrels. I know I've been looking for a home to buy in about 12 states :). I chose CA, closing in a few weeks. In any case, yes, most of the laws had been driven by the Univ of AZ. They found that letting the water go into the ground mostly feeds the trees. Very little of it goes into the actual ground water, and it takes a really long time for it to arrive. So the theory is that by capturing water and using it specifically on the things you want to water (food plants, and showering) you're conserving a fuck-ton of water. And besides, all of that water that is captured actually ends up in the ground anyway - where do you think the shower water goes when you're on septic. The point is, AZ is pretty much ahead of the game with regards to water capture and science research on it.

fred_is_fred 6y ago

If you've not read Cadillac Desert, I highly recommend it. One key learning - water always flows downhill towards money and by extension political power. Phoenix won't run dry, nor will LA - smaller communities and farmers will get hit first.