A commercial water grab?

 

A few weeks ago I wrote about the declining availability of water in the western and southwestern states.  Now it looks as if Wall Street is getting involved, and trying to prevent locals from realizing what's going on until they've created a fait accompli.

Situated in the Sonoran Desert near the Arizona-California border is the tiny rural town of Cibola -- home to roughly 300 people, depending on the season.

Life here depends almost entirely on the Colorado River, which nourishes thirsty crops like cotton and alfalfa, sustains a nearby wildlife refuge and allows visitors to enjoy boating and other recreation.

It's a place few Americans are likely to have heard of, which made it all the more surprising when investment firm Greenstone Management Partners bought nearly 500 acres of land here. On its website, Greenstone says its "goal is to advance water transactions that benefit both the public good and private enterprise."

But critics accuse Greenstone -- a subsidiary of the East Coast financial services conglomerate MassMutual -- of trying to profit off Cibola's most precious and limited resource: water. And it comes at a time when Arizona's allocation of Colorado River water is being slashed amid a decades-long megadrought.

"These companies aren't buying up plots of land because they want to farm here and be a part of the community, they're buying up land here for the water rights," said Holly Irwin, a Cibola resident and La Paz County district supervisor.

Those water rights could soon benefit Queen Creek, Arizona, a growing Phoenix suburb about 200 miles away. Last September, the town approved the transfer of a $27 million purchase of Colorado River water from Greenstone's properties in Cibola, though the deal is now mired in a lawsuit filed by La Paz, Mohave and Yuma counties against the federal Bureau of Reclamation for signing off on the water transfer.

. . .

"Greenstone is going to make millions at the expense of what it's going to do to our communities in the future and the precedence it's going to set," said Irwin. "We are in the midst of an extreme drought, our communities need this water. At some point, the state has a responsibility to protect the people that are here and to protect our water and not cater to those that are buying property for the water rights to make millions off of it to benefit metropolitan areas."

. . .

In neighboring Mohave County, Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter describes what he sees as a battle for the future of Colorado River communities, adding that a number of East Coast investment firms have been trying to get in on the action.

"These companies are actually pretty savvy in that they come out West, purchase and pick up cheap rural agricultural land, they sit on it for a little while and then they're trying to sell the water," Lingenfelter said. "I don't think that they should be allowed to profiteer off of Arizona's finite resources ... If they're coming after a portion of our only water supply on the river for many of our communities, we have to fight it."

It's not just Arizona. East Coast firms have bought up thousands of acres of irrigated land across the Southwest, local officials told CNN. Water Asset Management, a New York-based investment firm, has become one of the biggest players in the field, with purchases in Arizona, California, Colorado and Nevada as well as pending deals in New Mexico and Texas.

. . .

"Water Asset Management has engaged in a number of different purchase methods to keep their transactions unknown to many of the local jurisdictions," Mueller said. "It's a very unpopular move to come from New York and invest in irrigated agriculture with the intent to dry it up and watch it blow away."

There's more at the link.

The companies involved will, of course, argue that what they're doing is entirely legal.  Trouble is, just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's morally right.  As the famous dictum reminds us:

The companies will, again, doubtless argue that morals are an abstract, a value rather than a commodity that can be quantified in gallons, or dollars and cents.  They deal in the latter, and leave the former to religion and philosophy - knowing that there's so much dissent and disagreement in both disciplines that they'll almost certainly never have to answer for the rights and/or wrongs of what they've done.

That's what the makers of Thalidomide relied on when trying to weasel out of the catastrophic damage their drug had caused.  It's what Pfizer, Moderna and others will almost certainly rely upon when confronted with the equally grave (if not worse) damage caused by their mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.  "We were following the science and the law.  That's all anyone can ask of us!"  That's their attitude.  Sadly, they never think of another well-known maxim:  "It's not just about what you can do, but also whether or not you should do it."

I suspect that increasingly, agricultural and riparian communities across the country are going to be confronted by this commercial conundrum.  Their "liquid asset", water, is today liquid in more ways than one.  Water's merely the latest commodity to be "financialized".  However, without it, communities and farms die - and that's a whole new ball game.

Peter