French police guard water amid drought
Reservoirs built for farmers’ use
MAUZÉ-SUR-LE-MIGNON, France — Wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns, the gendarmes appear suddenly in the middle of farm fields misted by morning rain. They stand behind two fences equipped with security cameras and overhead lights, looking every bit like prison guards. But there is no prison for miles.
Instead, they guard a large pit intended to serve as a gigantic reservoir. Welcome to the front line of France’s water wars.
World leaders gathered for two weeks at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, debating ways to mitigate the effects of climate change and the conflicts it engenders. But although the competition for scarce water is associated more with arid regions in the Middle East and Africa, Europe is not immune.
After a scorching summer that climatologists called a harrowing post card from the future, with record heat waves, wildfires, and droughts that dried up rivers, France is embroiled in a widening battle over who should get priority to use its water, and how.
The French government has embarked on a plan to build large reservoirs around the country to serve farmers during the increasingly arid spring and summer months.
But what the government calls an adaptation, opponents deem an aberration — what they consider the privatization of water to benefit a few, outdated industrial farmers.
Confrontations between the two sides have grown increasingly ugly, a taste, perhaps, of the water wars predicted to worsen around the world as temperatures rise.
Thousands of activists opposed to the latest reservoir under construction, in the western region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, recently faced off against about 1,600 military police officers in the middle of fields of rapeseed and the dried-up remains of wheat.
That normally picturesque countryside was transformed into a scene from a dystopian novel: police officers wearing riot gear, armored trucks shooting tear gas canisters, smoke billowing, and helicopters roaring overhead.
The protesters later paraded with two sections of water pipes they had dug up and dismantled so they could not later feed the reservoir, the latest sabotage of many, which they consider civil disobedience.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described the scene as “ecoterrorism.”
“It’s them that are eco-terrorists,” responded JeanJacques Guillet, a former mayor of three villages, watching diggers claw at the red earth on the site days later. “They are terrorizing the environment.”
In theory, the reservoirs suck up water during the wet winter months and hold it for farmers to use during the critical spring and summer growing seasons.
That way, they will ensure the country’s food production, and also reduce the strain on the aquifers during increasing summer droughts.
There is no official count of how many megareservoirs exist, but activists estimate there are about 50, clustered in the west of the country. The scene of the latest battle is in the region of Deux-Sèvres, where plans to build 16 were unveiled in 2017. To sweeten the deal, the newly formed water cooperative representing about 230 farmers later signed an agreement to make their practices more eco-friendly by reducing their use of pesticides, building hedges, and bolstering the biodiversity on their lands.
The cooperative, Water Coop 79, considers the planned megabasins a lifeline. “The idea is to secure water to keep agriculture in the territory,” says François Petorin, a grain farmer, who grows wheat, rapeseed, sunflowers, and a little corn over 210 hectares. “We know that two years out of 10, there’s a risk that we won’t fill the reservoirs 100 percent. But today, 10 years out of 10, we risk not being able to water our fields.”
That is the definition of privatizing water, critics say. Worse, they add, it is being done with public funds: Seventy percent of the budget of about $62 million to build the Deux-Sèvres reservoirs is being covered by the French government.
Rather than forcing farmers to find less water-intensive forms of agriculture, the reservoirs will actually increase their water use largely to irrigate corn fields, opponents argue.
To complicate the issue, most of the large reservoirs in France are being built close to the country’s second-largest wetland, the Marais Poitevin.