Biblical literature, which is capable of eliciting memorable exegesis of Scripture, tends to identify the misfortunes of the early Jews with the barrenness of the Promised Land. "When the people obeyed God, the field was productive," says Deuteronomy. Disobedience, on the other hand, brought with it drought and famine, Leviticus relates. The scarcity of water, a natural evil in a desert territory like Judea, symbolized a divine punishment. In Andalusia, paradoxically, Catholics tend to take the virgins out into the street when the rain makes them wait too long. Of course, it is useless, but believers find it comforting. It's like a contrition. Metaphorically it is equivalent to asking for forgiveness.
The South of Spain has historically lived pending the sky, just like the ancient Israel of the venerable book of Psalms, which grants the divine will the power to turn rivers into deserts and transform fertile land into salt flats. Drought is one of the (cyclical) curses of Andalusia, where water is a scarce resource and has the capacity to destabilize the economy and disrupt politics, just as gas and energy prices have begun to condition the lives of families and weigh down the immediate future of Europe.
The great autonomy of the South is not, however, an exactly dry territory. At least, no more than many other areas of the country. Lower Andalusia is a geographical enclave marked by the fertile presence of the Guadalquivir, which flows into the Atlantic after leaving behind a landscape of endless marshes, somewhere between amphibian and changing. At the end of this secular path, camouflaging what historians call the Lacus Ligustinus, is Doñana.
The average annual rainfall in the region exceeds 650 litres/m2. The problem is not so much that it does not rain in the humid months –ever shorter and scarcer– as the irregular nature of the rains and the growing demand for water, not precisely for human consumption. Since the birth of autonomy, at the beginning of the eighties, up to eighty reservoirs have been built in Andalusia, which have doubled the total reservoir capacity. This policy, in force since the 19th century, has made it possible to double potential reserves to 11,000 Hm3, although it has been at the cost of a significant environmental and economic impact.
The President of the Junta, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, who this Wednesday inaugurated the political course accusing Pedro Sánchez of not avoiding the drought in the South, –“Andalusia dies of a sedative due to the inability of the Government”– has proclaimed that this new legislature will be "the one of the water". The PP promises to make investments in infrastructure with public funds left unspent by the socialists and whose financing (140 million euros per year) comes from a canon that has been charging Andalusian families for twelve years, despite the fact that the works hydraulics linked to its collection have not been executed more than 50%.
Andalusia thus failed to fulfill the commitment to Europe that all towns with more than 2,000 inhabitants would purify their wastewater, avoiding discharges into the sea and rivers. The EU fined Spain with a sanction of 32.7 million euros, of which 5.5 correspond to the Board. This amount will continue to grow as long as these works are not carried out, which mainly affect municipalities with very intense tourist activity, such as Isla Cristina and Matalascañas (Huelva), Barbate and Tarifa (Cádiz), Alhaurín el Grande, Nerja or Coín (Málaga).
Moreno Bonilla plans to use the available funds in desalination plants, internal transfers and purification systems, eliminating the canon of the water bill in 2023. Not before. Simultaneously, he calls on the State to allocate European funds to digitize the integral water cycle and transfer the flow of the Tinto, Odiel, Piedras and Guadalquivir rivers for the farmers of Doñana. San Telmo persists in the old nineteenth-century formula: fight drought through more public works, equating domestic consumption with agricultural production. He is preparing legislative changes and guiding his claims before Moncloa in this direction.
Is it a smart way? The evidence of climate change –Andalusia has just passed the hottest summer in its history– denies the infallibility of this formula. At least, from the perspective of the general interest. The swamps, without regular rainfall to fill them, only serve to divert public resources to construction companies. This is precisely what has happened for decades due to the political influence of the agricultural sector. The demand for water in Andalusia –where since the drought of the 1990s the population has maintained acceptable saving habits, with few exceptions– has not stopped growing in parallel with the expansion of irrigation. It is the (agricultural) industry that mortgages the water reserves, not private consumption.
Every time drought strikes, the entire water management system enters a critical phase. It already happened between 1991 and 1995. History repeats itself now. Farmers have been warning for months of a loss of production of the order of 30%. Experts explain that, since the 1940s, rainfall has decreased by an average of 15%. Even more so in the Guadalquivir basins (the largest in the region, owned by the state) and the Mediterranean (which runs from Algeciras to Almería).
The problem is background. From model. An autonomy that is incapable of controlling the use of water, tolerant of illegal irrigation and not at all rigorous in managing the costs of public works, can hide said faults when the reservoirs are full. This has stopped happening. Acting on demand, and not only on domestic demand, is going to become one of the great political problems during the next decade if global warming continues. Water scarcity will generate conflicts and chronic tensions, as demand grows faster than both naturally available and artificially generated resources.
Agricultural activity in the South consumes 81% of all water resources, compared to 15.7% for domestic demand and 2.5% for industrial activity. This is the big picture. The flow of irrigation has not stopped increasing since the end of the 1990s, in part due to luxury or recreational uses linked to real estate businesses, such as golf clubs, which consume more than 30 Hm3 of water per year. 24% of the Andalusian countryside, whose official turnover reaches 6,000 million a year, is currently exploited under irrigation. It is almost a third of the total existing areas in Spain.
There are more than a million hectares, most of which, and without considering illegal irrigation, have been converted into intensive exploitation in the last 25 years, when there was already full awareness of the effects of the drought and scientific diagnoses of climate change. The motive, obviously, is economic: encouraged by community aid, farmers replaced the dry land with vegetable, fruit, citrus, olive groves and vineyards.
This trend has been especially intense in the outskirts of Andalusia (Huelva, Jaén, Almería), but it has not solved one of the endemic regional problems: employment. The field has gone from supporting 22% of the population to being the essential activity of 8% of workers. They are businessmen and private owners – to whom the Board is especially understanding, largely due to electoral reasons – who have made the demand grow exponentially. A part of the costs of its activity comes out of the public coffers, but the profits do not return in the same proportion via tax.
In the background lies a serious problem of territorial misgovernment, one of the pending issues of all the regional governments. Illegal irrigation, in the same way as irregular urban planning, is a scourge in Andalusia, although there are social sectors with considerable capacity for political influence that benefit from this culture at the cost of depleting surface water and the last aquifers, as is the case in Doñana, where the PP intends to legalize up to 1,500 hectares of illegal irrigation with the tacit support of the PSOE.
The demand for water in Andalusia has become infinite; available reserves dwindle. The water war, like the energy crisis unleashed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is a battle for dominance. And it represents the crisis of an economic model that climate change can make unsustainable – rainfall, according to experts, will decrease by up to 20% – and that no one aspires to reform because it would imply proposing an agrarian reform based on sustainability criteria, instead of of in the old patrimonial claim of forty years ago. The dire biblical omen of drought is already the new normal in the South.
