“Wells are drying up and underwater tables falling so fast in the Middle East and parts of India, China and the U.S. that food supplies are seriously threatened, one of the world’s leading resource analysts has warned,” The Guardian reports. “In a major new essay, Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world’s people, are now overpumping their underground water tables to the point — known as ‘peak water’ — where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year,” the newspaper writes, and discusses some of Brown’s findings (Vidal, 7/6). “Tapping underground water resources, which got seriously underway in the mid-20th century, helped expand world food production, but as the demand for grain continued climbing the amount of water pumped continued to grow,” Brown writes in the essay, noting, “Eventually the extraction of water began to exceed the recharge rate of aquifers from precipitation, and water tables began to fall.” Brown continues, “The bottom line is that water constraints augmented by soil erosion, the loss of cropland, a shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology, and climate change are making it more difficult to expand world food production” (7/6).