WATER WARS
In agricultural valley, fury is what’s growing over limited resource
The fight began early one morning on a sandy dirt road between fields of lima beans, where farmers discovered an excavator machine digging a trench for a water pipe. Infuriated that the pipe would carry water pumped from beneath their farms, a crowd gathered and drove away the crew of workers in a fit of shouts.
Then the protesters set fire to the plastic pipes, leaving them charred on the side of the road.
As tensions rose after that confrontation, threats flew between protesters and men sent by the company laying the pipes. Some men wielded wooden clubs, a machete and a baseball bat. Some protesters faced criminal charges.
In this feud over water, small farmers in the Peruvian town of Ocucaje challenge what they view as a water grab by a company that exports grapes and asparagus. It’s a type of conflict on the rise in parts of the world where groundwater is over-exploited. In southern Peru, water disputes have grown especially bitter as some big farms bought up wells and started piping water to fields miles away.
In the past two decades, an agricultural boom transformed the Ica Valley, turning a desert bordered by sand dunes into rows of asparagus and grapevines that supply the USA, Europe and Asia. The farms depend on water pumped from wells, and groundwater levels have been falling throughout much of the Ica Valley. Some wells have gone dry, and farmers with small plots say the newly arrived megafarms are using up their water.
Leading the resistance in Ocucaje is Joselyn Guzmán, 21, a college student whose family grows lima beans, corn and cotton on their 25-acre farm. “We don’t want them to come and exploit our water,” Guzmán said as she walked down an unpaved lane, followed by more than a dozen farmers and townspeople.
The company, Agrícola La Ven- ta, applied to the government water authority to start pumping from three inactive wells it bought from an association of farmers. The company said its wells wouldn’t negatively impact neighboring farmers. Guzmán and others are worried the pumping will shrivel their crops, which are flood-irrigated once a year when the Ica River swells with seasonal rains and are then sustained by moisture left in the soil.
Measurements show significant groundwater depletion in and around the Ica Valley. The National Water Authority estimated area wells pump roughly double the amount of water than what naturally seeps back into aquifers from water that flows down from the Andes.
A USA TODAY/ Desert Sun analysis of Peruvian government data found groundwater levels falling in about 60% of the wells for which measurements are available. The average drop over the past 1218 years: about 16 feet.
In some areas, water levels plunged more than 80 feet since 2001. The drawdown accelerated in the 1990s, when the Peruvian government started a push to attract more investment in export crops. In the Ica area, acreage planted with asparagus exploded, skyrocketing from 1,015 acres in 1991 to 25,698 acres in 2011. Peru became the world’s top exporter of fresh asparagus. Water managers in Ica back plans to capture more water in the Andes and route it to the Ica River.
In Ocucaje, groundwater levels are relatively higher than in other areas around Ica. Despite that, the company’s plans to tap water in the town generate dissension.
Agrícola La Venta promotes its efforts to use water sustainably. Javier De los Ríos, the company’s manager and director, said he wouldn’t approve of any violence by his workers. “They burned seven of our pipes,” he said. Referring to Guzmán, he said, “The little chubby one … she poured the gaso- line to set the pipes on fire.” He said his workers saw her do it.
He said pumping water from the aquifer won’t affect the shallow layer of moist soil that the town’s farmers rely on.
He pointed to one 2014 report by the government water authority showing groundwater levels remain relatively high in Ocucaje — 7 to 23 feet underground. The National Water Authority is evaluating the company’s proposal.
In a 2010 report, Progressio, Water Witness International and the Peruvian Center for Social Studies researchers concluded that unsustainable water use in the Ica Valley negatively impacted small and medium-size farms. “Unless action is taken, the overexploitation of the aquifer will eventually exhaust the water resources which the city of Ica and its population of over a third of a million people depend on,” researchers said.