Water wars in France boiling over
Reservoirs watched by police as climate change gets worse
MAUZE-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 like prison guards. But there is no prison for miles.
Instead, they guard a pit intended to serve as a gigantic reservoir.
Welcome to the front line of France’s water wars.
World leaders gathered recently at the U.N. 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 summer that climatologists called a harrowing postcard 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 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calls an adaptation, opponents deem an aberration — what they consider the privatization of water to benefit a few, outdated industrial farmers.
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, smoke billowing and helicopters roaring overhead.
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.
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-Sevres, 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 green their practices by reducing their use of pesticides, building hedges and bolstering the biodiversity on their lands.
The cooperative, Water Co-op 79, considers the planned megabasins a lifeline. “The idea is to secure water to keep agriculture in the territory,” says Francois Petorin, a grain farmer. “We know that two years out of
10, there’s a risk that we won’t fill the reservoirs 100%. 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-Sevres reservoirs is being covered by the French government.
Rather than forcing farmers to find less water-intensive forms of agriculture, the reservoirs will increase their water use largely to irrigate cornfields, 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 — a huge marsh interlaced with canals that locals call the “Green Venice.”
The French geological survey released a study in June concluding that the project would have a “limited impact” on aquifer levels in the winter, and in the spring and summer, it could even increase watershed levels.
But hydroclimatologists such as Florence Habets point out that the survey used old data and did not take into account multiyear droughts heralded by climate change. And the official study on how much water can be taken from the Deux-Sevres region’s rivers and aquifers, without negatively affecting the environment, is being done only now.
“The groundwater is the tap of the wetland,” says Julien Le Guet, using a wooden pole called a pigouille to paddle a boat through the thin canals of the Marais Poitevin. “Instead of the groundwater replenishing the marsh, the marsh will replenish the groundwater.”
Le Guet, 45, has been a boat guide here for 14 years. He speaks lyrically about winter rains and despairingly about the recent drops in water levels. His love for the place propelled him to create a major oppositional group called Bassines Non Merci, which is French for Reservoirs, No Thanks.
But the government’s response has been to charge forward.
A recent survey of cooperative farmers revealed that only 10% had reduced their pesticide use. As a result, a handful of environmental groups that initially supported the project have since denounced it as an “irrigation development program.”