Water woes spiraled to such depths this year that the top regional environment minister here — a confirmed agnostic — confessed to climbing the stony shrine of the Virgin of Montserrat for a bit of solace.
Winter rains refused to fall, shriveling reserves to severe drought levels and prompting a water shipment from France. Catalonia’s go-to guy for the environment, Francesc Baltasar, told local radio that fear made for a quick, if dubious, epiphany at the feet of the Virgin Mary.
“I said, ‘You know, I’m agnostic but if you can do something, please do it,'” Baltasar said.
A monthlong downpour rescued Spain a couple of months later, ending the drought and adding yet another twist to Spain’s unease over its water resource: The unrelenting rain marooned a section of a long-awaited world’s fair in Zaragoza that, as luck would have it, touted water conservation.
Expo2008 rebounded to draw thousands of tourists for high-minded talk on sustainable development, but anxieties over water and market pressures now bedevil Spain’s most development-hungry regions.
Spain has fallen into a funk familiar to many communities in the U.S. The source it has always relied on for fresh water, the vast Ebro River, cannot meet the increasing demand. Fast-paced growth, market competition and climate change are playing havoc with its boundaries.
In Spain, tensions are high over access to and the cost of drinkable water — and what jurisdictions or interests have the right to tap the Ebro. In the U.S., state governments in the Midwest laid claim to and restricted Great Lakes waters from being transferred to Southern and Western parts of the United States that are suffering drought.
New ambitions, new woes
Spain, a Mediterranean country with arid plateaus, has always known turbulent periods of water shortages, but its predicament these days is built on modern-day ambitions.
Agriculture and large-scale irrigation have soared in the past decade. Analysts say that farm growth — far more damaging than golf course and hotel development that has also soared in the past decade — has been a decisive factor in Spain’s new thirst.
Economic tensions seep into every conversation about water here. Regions throughout Spain are bound to local growers, the indisputable heaviest users of water. And every region, intent on 21st Century growth, is just as keen to diversify its economy and capture the profits of Mediterranean tourism.
This spring, Aragon and Catalan authorities, regional neighbors in Spain, sniped at each other over political deals to lay claim to the rushing waters of the Ebro.
Catalonia wanted the river siphoned to help meet its water needs, including those of its capital, Barcelona, a tourism dynamo. Aragon officials, however, balked at the idea of sharing from the river, which runs through its capital, Zaragoza.
In a decision awash with political tensions, national authorities decided to approve a temporary transfer from the Ebro to Catalonia during the drought, a decision that riled Aragon’s political elite. Only the rains stopped the turmoil. The water transfer, in the end, never happened.
Aragon authorities in Zaragoza cast this year’s water fight as a matter of justice. They want to keep the Ebro waters at home to encourage development such as golf courses and theme parks across their big-sky landscape. It is the kind of change that environmentalists deride but government officials in charge of ecological protection see as an economic necessity. Barcelona had its era of development. Now, they say, it is Aragon’s turn.
“The single most important thing for me? Jobs,” Aragon Environmental Minister Alfredo Bone said in an interview in his office in Zaragoza. “The question is how to get this growth so that it is not a problem.”
By all accounts, including Spain’s major farm lobbies, farmers use 80 percent of this country’s water resources. Many farmers are blamed for tapping illegal wells in some of the most arid farm regions of Spain — including Zaragoza — that allow them to take water for free. By some estimates, there are as many as 1.5 million illegal wells.
‘Is this a need?’
Further stretching their resources, farmers now are focused on higher yields, in part to answer to globalized competition. Olives once were grown as an arid crop. Today, even olive groves are irrigated to boost production.
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“You have to ask: Is this a need or a demand?” said Leandro del Moral, head of Foundation for a New Water Culture, based in Zaragoza. “Of course, this is not just a discussion for Spain. It happens in California. It happens in Portugal, in Greece, in Italy. … What we are trying to introduce is a new message with the tradition: that there is a message of cost, a message of responsibility and a message of scarcity included in how we plan.”
Urban consumers — and Spain enjoys good citizen compliance on water cutbacks — pay for their water and are go online to get water from desalination plants, a dependable water supply. Water consumption experts point out that residential and industrial users, including hotels and golf courses, see desalinated water as a reasonable option and have been willing to pay the price.
Neighborhoods in Barcelona expect to be drinking water from a desalination plant under construction near the city’s airport by May 2009. That plant, experts said, should make water crises in Barcelona a memory.
Critics say economic favoritism has allowed the farm industry to refuse desalinated water and continue to tap illegal wells. The political cost of forcing farmers to pay, by many accounts, is deemed too high; farm advocates have loyal and natural constituencies. “Nobody has ever been able to confront the farmers,” said one analyst, echoing several politicians and water experts.
The high-profile expo in Zaragoza underscores the imbalance, critics say. “It’s the height of hypocrisy for Zaragoza to be having an expo that touts water sustainability,” said economist Josep Verges, who has tracked water use and contends farmers are getting a free ride.
“Zaragoza is one of the biggest culprits in what ails Spain: too many farmers using too much irrigated land,” Verges said.
Best-laid plans
Spain has tried for much of this decade to resolve its worries. A national plan to transfer water from the Ebro was embarked by the conservative-led government of Jose Maria Aznar and then scrapped after an upset in 2004 parliamentary elections.
Then Spain’s socialist-led government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero focused on building desalination plants. The multimillion-dollar effort has foundered somewhat, in part because in the most critical areas, farmers have refused to give up their illegal wells and pay for desalinated water.
Water experts said Spain is now in the middle of rethinking its water policy and trying to divine how to use both desalination and water transfer from the Ebro to coordinate equitable access to water.
In Catalonia, authorities were sent underground to chase whatever water they could find. Old wells were found deteriorated or poorly functioning. Repairs, which restored 30 wells at a cost of $95 million, let Barcelona capture millions more gallons daily.
Digging deeply — intellectually and otherwise — is perhaps the only way that what the media dubbed “La Guerra de Aguas” or “The Water War” can be avoided, said Damia Barcelo, director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research.
“The drought actually has been helpful,” he said. “There’s a recognition that we can’t talk about one source or one solution anymore.”
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