Ninth of a series

“How did their water get under our sand?”

Butler Valley is a sparsely populated area in the western Arizona desert. Situated about 125 miles northwest of Phoenix and 40 miles east of the Colorado River, the 315-square-mile valley has only one paved road. The state owns 99% of its land, which it holds in trust for the benefit of its public school children. In terms of annual rainfall, Butler Valley is one of the driest places in the United States, but beneath the surface it’s a different story altogether. For almost 40 years the valley has been a reserve for storing water from the Colorado River, and it currently holds more than 6 million acre-feet of water underground.

Enter Fondamente Arizona, a company that produces thousands of tons of alfalfa, a highly water-intensive crop, on land in Butler Valley that it leases from the state of Arizona. Don’t be fooled by its name: Fondamente Arizona is not a southwestern farming operation; it is a subsidiary of a Saudi company called Almarai, and the alfalfa it produces is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed the kingdom’s cattle.

Why? Because Saudi Arabia has banned large-scale production of alfalfa and other animal feed crops to protect its limited supply of water.

No such regulations exist in Arizona, and The Washington Post reported that a proposal just to measure the Saudi company’s water use was stonewalled by the state’s Republican government, with the help of heavy spending and lobbying by, surprise, Fondomonte Arizona.

According to U.S. Geological Survey studies, alfalfa in Butler Valley requires 6.4 acre-feet of water per acre of land. That means the company has likely been pumping 22,400 acre-feet of water each year for the last seven years. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep. One acre foot = 325,850 gallons. So 22,400 acre feet = just shy of 7.3 trillion gallons of water.)

And what has Arizona charged Fondamente for all this water?

Not one penny.

So, go figure. For the past 10 years we have been using massive amounts of water in drought-stricken Arizona to grow alfalfa, which is then shipped more than 8,000 miles to Saudi Arabia to enable that desert country to conserve its own scarce water resources.

Isn’t what they are doing to “our” water what we used to do to “their” oil?

Perhaps colonialism is alive and well; only now it’s working in reverse.

By far the biggest user of water on Earth is agriculture. Once upon a time we called it farming, but this is neither Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer nor Norman Rockwell’s family farm. This is industry, and it takes up more than a quarter of the world’s land to conduct its business. On most of that land it grows crops – like alfalfa – to feed animals, not humans.

Agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s annual water consumption. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. It takes one gallon of water to produce a single almond – and 1,900 gallons to produce a pound. Rising demand for food around the world, due to both population growth and richer diets, has led to fresh water being sucked from the ground in such massive quantities that the Earth’s tilt has shifted.

While the specific effects of climate change on these matters is still not fully clear in the short or the long run, I don’t think we should count on cosmic benevolence.

* Earlier this month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that she will cancel Fondomonte’s leases, saying she will do “everything in my power to protect Arizona’s water so we can continue to grow sustainably for generations to come.” This, of course, is a political response, not an ecological one. Will a politician, particularly in the very dry American West, ever question the possible incompatibility between limitless growth and healthy water?

Weekly update: a new feature of related news and stories, often sent in by a reader:

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — The Negro River, the Amazon’s second largest tributary, on Monday reached its lowest level since official measurements began near Manaus 121 years ago. The record confirms that this part of the world´s largest rainforest is suffering its worst drought, just a little over two years after its most significant flooding.