Investigation Finds Saudi Arabian Firm Tapped Arizona's Dwindling Water For Years Without Oversight
An overseas-based operation has been able to extract significant source water from Arizona’s Butler Valley, one of the country’s driest regions, for years, with relatively little oversight even as drought throughout the region grows.
“A megadrought has seared Arizona, stressing its rivers and reservoirs and reducing water to a trickle in the homes of farmworkers near this desert valley,” The Washington Post reported. “For nearly a decade, the state of Arizona has leased this rural terrain west of Phoenix to a Saudi-owned company, allowing it to pump all the water it needs to grow … alfalfa hay — a crop it exports to feed the kingdom’s dairy cows. And, for years, the state did not know how much water the company was consuming.”
Though some state planners initially suggested the use of water meters to keep tabs on just how much the company, Fondomonte Arizona, was extracting, that suggestion was shot down by an apparent preference to keep the foreign company happy as well as the sensitive nature of source water “ownership” in the region.
“The inaction was an early sign of how state officials gave leeway to Fondomonte as a global fight for water took root in the Arizona desert,” according to the Post. “State officials now acknowledge that decades of farming and explosive growth have dangerously diminished Arizona’s water reserves.”
Given the ongoing water supply issues, the state governor’s office is working on plans to end the renewal of Fondomonte’s leases on thousands of acres of land in Butler Valley. But the company also owns 10,000 acres in the region, which won’t be easy to change.
“Some folks say that not a drop of our water should go to foreign interests, if simply out of principle,” per AZCentral. “But short of passing knee-jerk legislation that bars companies with foreign investors from owning or leasing farmland in Arizona, the state can’t simply boot them from land they own.”
Though Fondomonte is not at the root of the West’s foundational water scarcity issues, it has become a stark illustration of how those issues can develop without prudent oversight and planning from legislators. Now, faced with existential questions about its drinking water future as a whole, officials in Arizona are left to reconsider the benefits and costs of outsourcing its remaining supplies to private interests.
To read more about how states across the country are wrestling with drought issues, visit Water Online’s Water Scarcity Solutions Center.