Forty million people in seven states depend upon the Colorado River for their water, and their future is doomed unless the allocation and use of that water is restructured, as this article describes. As matters stand corporate agricultural interests, including a massive Saudi Arabian corporate interest which does not benefit those seven states. To quote the report upon which this article is based, “The Almarai Company, a Saudi multinational, owns 10,000 acres of Arizona farmland, cultivating alfalfa to support dairies in Saudi Arabia, which banned alfalfa cultivation in 2018 in order to conserve water. This gross misuse of water has been unfolding for years, with 75 percent of Lake Mead’s decline in the past two decades attributed to cattle feed irrigation.”
A sign on Lake Mead along the Colorado River in Boulder City, Nevada indicates the lake’s water line in 2000 in contrast to 2023 low water levels due to the western drought. Credit: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty
As the dwindling Colorado River faces a potential “catastrophic collapse” due to the climate-driven loss of trillions of gallons of water, a report published Tuesday shines a spotlight on the dangerous overexploitation of the precious resource by specific sectors of industrial agriculture—and the federal government’s failure to address Big Ag’s abuses.
The Food & Water Watch report—entitledBig Ag Is Draining the Colorado River Dry—focuses on how “alfalfa farms and the aggressive proliferation of megadairies” are “sucking the Colorado dry,” and on “prolonged governmental refusal to rein in the most egregious offenders.”
According to the report, “livestock feed crops remain the largest consumers of water in the Colorado River Basin, accounting for 55% of all water used.” Among these, alfalfa “consumed 2.2 trillion gallons of water across the seven basin states in […]
Albus Eddie
on Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 6:09 am
“We cannot save the Colorado River without combating corporate power.” Truer words were never spoken. One of the sicknesses of our current society is that non-human “persons” (corporations) are given human rights. Cognitive distortions of this type and power do nothing but harm. Many of our challenges center on confronting the cognitive distortions on both the left and right which fuel the culture wars and distract from the more pressing problems at hand.
“We cannot save the Colorado River without combating corporate power.” Truer words were never spoken. One of the sicknesses of our current society is that non-human “persons” (corporations) are given human rights. Cognitive distortions of this type and power do nothing but harm. Many of our challenges center on confronting the cognitive distortions on both the left and right which fuel the culture wars and distract from the more pressing problems at hand.