Sunday, May 23, 2004

IRRIGATING WITH SEA-WATER

Another nasty one for the Greenies: Scientists have found ways of making major food crops much more salt-tolerant. So we should in the future be able to grow crops on poor and saline soils (of which Australia has millions of acres) and even use sea-water to irrigate them (Mangroves and marine angiosperms live quite happily in salt water, after all) . So that food-shortage that the Greenies have been predicting for decades now just got pushed back yet again. Though with the way the earth's population is ceasing to grow, there was never any likelihood of food shortages anyway. According to the Greenies of the 60s, we should all be starving to death and eating soylent green (cannibalism) by now. Instead, the world has continued to be plagued by agricultural surpluses, not shortages.

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