Spain Whipsaws Between Drought And Flood, While Water Bottling Companies Drain The Aquifers

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Extreme weather is being felt across Spain. “I watched with horror, sadness and astonishment when the floods engulfed Valencia,” says Roser Albó Garriga, a farmer in the mountains of Catalonia a few hundred miles north, who is suffering water scarcity. Recent heavy rains round Barcelona have not reached her area. “In the last few years, we haven’t had enough water to grow our crops or even to drink,” she says. Sudden torrential downpours do not resolve water shortages, she adds. Catalonia had unusually heavy rains in 2020, followed by four years of drought. “The truth is that these types of rains cause damage and misfortune,” she says, “but most of the water just ends up in the sea because the parched land can’t absorb it when so much falls all at once.”

But while Garriga and other Catalans have been suffering water shortages in recent years, there’s one group of people that appears to be immune, and even profits from them: the multinational companies extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water. The tragedy in Spain makes the country one of the canaries in the coalmine when it comes to understanding the global threat to water security. Can the growing number of angry citizens surrounded by private water plants but left without safe water in their homes force a rethink of how this resource is managed? And as weather patterns change, should private companies continue to have easy access to vital reserves of underground water?

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The Spanish mineral water association categorically rejects the idea that the industry is contributing to shortages. It points out that mineral water companies use just 0.03% of total subterranean water resources in Spain, according to the Geological and Mining Institute, which is part of the science ministry. “In Spain, when a mineral water concession is granted, the competent authorities establish a maximum flow rate for use, which guarantees the water level of each spring and, therefore, its sustainability,” it says. But not all are convinced. Determined to find out how much water the bottling companies were extracting in the Montseny region, Carles Lumeras spent nine weeks this year sitting on the roadside counting the lorries coming out of the plants. A member of the environmental organisation Coordinating Group for the Protection of Montseny, he has been worried about the expansion of bottling plants since the 1990s, but says it is only in recent years, as water shortages have started to bite, that locals have begun to get organised.

From 6am to 10pm, he and 15 other volunteers took turns to sit outside four plants around the municipality of Arbúcies, including Nestlé’s factory. They are drab-looking warehouses with towers of blue and red crates stacked in the yard outside. Some companies drill for water directly beneath the bottling factories, others, like Nestlé, have wells – locked in little brick huts – dotted along local mountain paths. The group counted a total of 185 trucks leaving the four plants each day. Multiplying the number of crates of water each lorry carried, they calculated that these four sites were manufacturing 5.6m litres of water a day, equivalent to 1.8bn litres a year. “That is an enormous amount of water, an enormous volume of plastic,” Lumeras says. While his figures are rough estimates, worldwide it is clear that large volumes of water are being extracted. Last year, 408bn litres of bottled water were sold, and this figure is expected to rise to 425bn litres in 2024, according to data analytics firm Euromonitor International. Despite concerns about plastic use, the volume of bottled water sold has risen by more than 50% over the last 10 years. And it’s big business: last year, global sales totalled US$312bn.

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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/23/spanish-villages-people-forced-to-buy-back-own-drinking-water-drought-flood