Why America Is Giving Away Its Emergency Water Reserves To Saudi Arabia
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Edited By: Andrew Gonzales
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America is running out of water… A 23 year long so called super drought is the worst that the American west has experienced in the last 1,200 years according to a recent study published by the department of the interior. The Colorado river, a waterway that supplies homes, businesses and millions of acres of farmland is running dry which could threaten the entire country.
Water has become a precious resource. So why the are we selling it to hedge funds in New York and dairy companies in Saudi Arabia?
In every crisis lies great opportunity, and market speculators are capitalizing on the scarcity of water to generate profits by using complex financial instruments and shady backroom deals to hold a vital resource to ransom. I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory so lets start right at the very beginning and learn how people in suits in New York are making money off alfalfa farmers in Colorado.
Big farms and businesses do not get water from municipal water supplies because it is too expensive and for some applications they don’t want it to be treated with the chemicals that most tap water has to keep it safe to drink. A lot of big farms are also so remote that they simply do not have a connection to municipal supplies so these businesses opt to pump their own water directly out of lakes, rivers or underground aquifers.
But if farms have to pump their own water from communal supplies there is no reason for them to stop pumping, the more water they collect themselves the less will be left over for their competitors to use on their crops. To make sure that this doesn’t become a mad max style free for all of farms pumping as much water as they can to put their downstream competition out of businesses the states along the Colorado river all issue water rights.
Water rights are like coupon to pump an acre foot of water, an acre foot is how much water would fit in a box that is 1 foot high and one acre across. Farmers use acre feet because there is so much water involved that gallons or litres would just get confusing. Every state has a different laws for allocating these water rights coupons, but Colorado which is believe it or not the starting point of the Colorado River has (according to their own department of natural resources website) a unique system when compared to other parts of the united states.
Colorado uses a prior appropriation system which means that whoever used the water first gets to keep using it. The law was first introduced way back in 1872 when the states lawmakers first started noticing that the river could actually run out of water so something had to be done to make sure everybody got their fair share. The law worked by farmers and businesses proving that they had put some amount of water to a beneficial use, they were then allowed to keep using that much water every year. If farms stop using the water for a beneficial use for a period of ten years or more their water rights are abandoned and can be picked up by the next farmer in line that wants to use water for their crops.
Farmers with water rights get audited every decade by an engineer who presents cases to a water court of all of the farms they suspect have abandoned their water rights. It’s then the farmers job to prove that they did not intend to abandon their rights, if they can’t prove this in court their rights get given to the next farm or business in line on the waiting list. Farmers obviously don’t want to lose their water rights because without water they can’t grow anything, so to make sure that they can always prove that they are putting the full extent of their water rights to a beneficial use they grow very water intensive crops like alfalfa and almonds.
The use it or lose it business model has worked hand in hand with record setting droughts and greedy speculators to give us empty lakes and dwindling reserves of something we all need to survive. So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out how companies are making record profits by literally sucking the country dry.
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