Landsats Aff

Landsats 1AC

Others argue, however, that when it comes to water the past will not be a reliable guide to the future. A renewable but not infinite resource, fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce: The amount available to the world today is almost the same as it was when the Mesopotamians traded blows, even as global demand has steadily increased. Just since 1950, the renewable supply per person has fallen 58 percent as world population has swelled from 2.5 billion to 6 billion. Moreover, unlike oil and most other strategic resources, fresh water has no substitute in most of its uses. It is essential for growing food, manufacturing goods, and safeguarding human health. And while history suggests that cooperation over water has been the norm, it has not been the rule. One fourth of water-related interactions during the last half century were hostile. Although the vast majority of these hostilities involved no more than verbal antagonism, rival countries went beyond name-calling on 37 recorded occasions and fired shots, blew up a dam, or undertook some other form of military action. Lost amidst this perennial debate over whether there will be water wars has been a serious effort to understand precisely how and why tensions develop, beyond the simplistic cause-and-effect equation that water shortages lead to wars. First, whether or not water scarcity causes outright warfare between nations in the years ahead, it already causes enough violence and conflict within nations to threaten social and political stability. And as recent events in the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated, today's civil conflicts have a nasty habit of spilling over borders and becoming tomorrow's international wars. Second, water disputes between countries, though typically not leading to war directly, have fueled decades of regional tensions, thwarted economic development, and risked provoking larger conflicts before eventually giving way to cooperation. The obsession with water wars begs more important questions: What are the early signs and likely locations of water-related disputes, and what can governments and international agents do to prevent the eruption of violence and political instability?

With Israel's new Prime Minister Ehud Barak promising to restart peace with the Palestinians and Syria, the issue of water - often forgotten by outsiders, but all-important in the parched Holy Land - will take center stage. After all, destroying an enemy's water and its sources has been a strategic aim in every war fought in the Mideast during the past two generations. And severe water shortages here - the Middle East is experiencing its driest spell in 50 years - could complicate any talks. "If we solve every other problem in the Middle East but do not satisfactorily resolve the water problem, our region will explode," once warned the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the architects of the Mideast peace process. As crops shrivel, river and reservoir levels drop, and new dams and competing claims loom, experts are striving to cope with dwindling water resources. "The Malthusian specter is real in the Middle East," says Thomas Stauffer, a Washington-based Mideast water and energy analyst. Water resources are "fully utilized," while the population continues to grow - ingredients the economist Malthus predicted would lead to conflict. "The consequences are profound. Scarcity means conflict, so oil wars are less likely than water wars." His concerns are echoed by the results of a two-year study carried out by the US National Academy of Sciences alongside Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian water experts. "Fresh-water supplies in the Middle East now are barely sufficient to maintain a quality standard of living," said Gilbert White, a University of Colorado geographer who led the team. Increasing water use across the largely arid region, the team found, guarantees that "the area's inhabitants will almost assuredly live under conditions of significant water stress in the near future." Already, at least 400 million people live in regions with severe water shortages. Within 50 years, that figure is expected to soar to 4 billion. There is no more water on the planet than there was 2,000 years ago, when the population was just 3 percent what it is today. "Our concerns about global warming are trivial compared to the issues that we face over water," a senior official of NASA's Earth Sciences Directorate has said.

Landsats 1AC

Advantage 2 is Famine –
Landsats are crucial to predictable agricultural reports—the alternative is unpredictable markets and food shortages.
NASA 7 (Laura Rocchio, http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/news-archive/soc_0010.html, 7/6/11) CJQ

Market intelligence about global crop production ensures that food supply is consistent with demand. If, for example, Australia has a bumper crop of wheat, U.S. farmers can avoid a wheat glut (and protect against a precipitous price drop) by not planting wheat, and vice versa.  Accurate crop estimates thereby translate into dependable food prices by enabling producers to make wise planting decisions and by equipping U.S. agricultural commodity traders with the knowledge they need to set realistic and reasonable prices. The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has the responsibility of providing this market intelligence in the form of timely, objective, unclassified, global crop condition and production estimates, for all major commodities, for all foreign countries. These estimates are an integral part of the World Agricultural Production and World Agricultural Supply & Demand numbers used by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as Principle Federal Economic Indicators. To accomplish this Herculean task, FAS synthesizes information from its global network of marketing experts, agricultural economists, meteorologists and remote sensing scientists. While FAS attachés collect crop production information from foreign government reports and fields visits, it is the comprehensive view afforded by space-based Earth-observing satellites, such as Landsat, that provide the unbiased, global, farm-level observations necessary to objectively verify these reports. Unbiased report verification means food supply estimates can be used with confidence. “Less confidence in the food supply translates into more volatile markets where food shortages and over-stocks are more likely to occur,” says Dr. Bradley Doorn a Technical Remote Sensing Coordinator with FAS. It was a grain shortage 35 years ago that initially led FAS to use Landsat data.

Landsats exponentially increase agricultural output—energy measurement, soil detection, soil mapping and spatial planning make possible agricultural revolution.
Singh et al 10 (Pradeep Kumar Singh, Feroz Ahmed Parry, Kouser Parveen, Sumati Narayan, Asima

Amin and Ashis Vaidya, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, http://www.journalcra.com/sites/default/files/Download_331.pdf,accessed 7/7/11) CJQ

Remote sensors are generally categorized as aerial or satellite sensors. They can indicate variations in field colour that corresponds to changes in soil type, crop development, field boundaries, roads, water etc. Remote science in agricultural terms means viewing crop from overhead (from a satellite or low flying aircraft) without coming into contact, recording what is viewed and displaying the image and provide the map to pinpoint the field problems more earlier and more effectively. In remote sensing, information transfer is accomplished by use of electromagnetic radiation (EMR). EMR is a form of energy that reveals its presence by the observable effects it produces when it strikes the matter. Due to remote sensing we have been able to observe large regions suitable for agriculture, making use of sensors to measure energy at wavelengths which are beyond the range of human vision (ultraviolet infrared, etc.) and globally monitoring earth possible from nearly any site. Remote sensing technology can be used to provide valuable information on various agricultural resources which influences production (Roa, 1999). Some of the broad agricultural application areas are: i. Crop production forecasting: It includes the identification of crops, acreage estimation and yield forecasting. Reliable and timely estimates of crop acreage and production are important for the formation of marketing strategies and price fixation. Identification of crop is based on the fact that each crop has a unique spectral signature, which is influenced by the leaf area index, per cent ground cover, growth stage, difference in cultural practices, stress conditions and canopy architecture, yield of crop is influenced by large number of factors such as crop genotype, management practices, weather conditions of soil characteristics. Remote sensing data related to yield parameters are used in yield modeling for yield forescasting. ii. Soil mapping: Soil maps afford the information on the suitability and limitation of the soil for agricultural production, which are helpful in selection of proper cropping system and optimal land use planning. iii. Wasteland mapping: Information on degraded and wasteland e.g. salt affected areas, acidic soils, eroded soils, water logged area, dryland etc. Landuse/land cover information is important for spatial planning management and utilization of land for various purposes like agriculture, forestry, environmental studies and to find out the additional land resources that could be tilled. The information generated on landuse pattern also help identify suitable cropping patterns to convert single cropped area to double cropped and allows cultivation of land for increasing the food production.

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