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Earth

To feed itself Africa must capture more rainwater

28 August 2004

DAMS have had their day and underground water reserves are running dry. The only way to water and feed a growing population is to catch more rain.

This is the preliminary conclusion of a five-year international project aimed at solving the world’s water crisis.

“We need individual farmers to catch the rain,” David Molden, head of the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (CAWMA), told the conference. And to do that, he said, the world’s 2 billion poor farmers must be given access to low-cost technologies designed to capture rainwater.

The statistics are startling. More than 90 per cent…

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