Water wars hit Spanish lettuce patch

Published Date: 08 June 2008

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

in Fortuna, Spain

FIELDS of lettuce and greenhouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel holiday homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses – dozens of them, all recently built – give way to the beach. At last, this corner of south-east Spain is thriving.

There is only one problem with the picture of bounty: this province, Murcia, is running out of water. Spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development, swaths of south-east Spain are steadily turning into desert.

Murcia, traditionally a poor farming region, has undergone a resort-building boom in recent years, even as many of its farmers have switched to more thirsty crops, encouraged by water transfer plans, which have become increasingly untenable. The combination has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

This year, farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting each other over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market, mostly from illegal wells.

Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of the present centre on oil. But those of the future – one made hotter and drier by climate change in much of the world – seem likely to focus on water, they say.

"Water will be the environmental issue this year – the problem is urgent and immediate," said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Union's Environment Directorate. "If you already have water shortages in spring, you know it's going to be a really bad summer."

Climate change means that creeping deserts may eventually drive 135 million people off their land, the United Nations estimates. Most of them are in the developing world. But Southern Europe is experiencing the problem now, its climate drying to the point that it is becoming more like Africa's, scientists say.

For Murcia, the water crisis has come already. And its arrival has been accelerated by developers and farmers who have followed water-hungry ventures highly unsuited to a drier, warmer climate: crops such as lettuce that need ample irrigation, resorts that promise a swimming pool in the garden, acres of freshly sodded golf courses that soak up millions of gallons a day.

"I come under a lot of pressure to release water from farmers and also from developers," said Antonio Perez Gracia, the water manager for Fortuna, sipping coffee with farmers in a bar in the town's dusty square. He rued the fact that he could provide each property owner with only 30% of its government-determined water allotment.

"I'm not sure what we'll do this summer," he added, noting that the local aquifer was sinking so quickly that the pumps would not reach it soon. "Farmers can complain as much as they want, but if there's no more water, there's no more water."

Ruben Vives, a farmer who relies on Perez Gracia's largess, said he could not afford the current black market water prices. "This year, my livelihood is in danger," said Vives, who has farmed low-water crop such as lemons here for nearly two decades.

The hundreds of thousands of wells – most of them illegal – that have in the past provided a temporary reprieve from thirst have depleted underground water to the point of no return. Water from northern Spain that was once transferred here has also slowed to a trickle, as wetter northern provinces are drying up, too.

The scramble for water has set off scandals. Local officials are in prison for taking payoffs to grant building permits in places where there is not adequate water. Chema Gil, a journalist who exposed one such scheme, has been subject to death threats, carries pepper spray and is guarded day and night be the Guardia Civil, a police force with military and civilian functions.

"The model of Murcia is completely unsustainable," Gil said. "We consume two and a half times more water than the system can recover. So where do you get it? Import it from elsewhere? Dry up the aquifer? With climate change we're heading into a cul-de-sac. All the water we're using to water lettuce and golf courses will be needed just to drink."

Facing a national crisis, Spain has become something of an unwitting laboratory, sponsoring a European conference on water issues this summer and announcing a national action plan this year to fight desertification. That plan includes a shift to more efficient methods of irrigation, as well as an extensive programme of desalinisation plants to provide the fresh water that nature does not.

The Spanish Environment Ministry estimates that one-third of the county is at risk of turning into desert from a combination of climate change and poor land use.

Still, national officials visibly bridle when asked about the "Africanisation" of Spain's climate – a term now common among scientists.

"We are in much better shape than Africa, but within the EU our situation is serious," said Antonio Serrano Rodríguez, the secretary general for land and biodiversity at Spain's Environment Ministry.

Still, Serrano and others acknowledge the broad outlines of the problem. "There will be places that can't be farmed any more, that were marginal and are now useless," Serrano said. "We have parts of the country that are close to the limit."

While southern Spain has always been dry and plagued by cyclical droughts, the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880, records show.

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