Spain and Portugal fight for water

Spain and Portugal are suffering from extreme drought. Now Spanish farmers no longer want to share the water from their rivers with the Portuguese.

Spain and Portugal are approaching increasingly hot summers. Large parts of the peninsula could become desert. The struggle for water resources is correspondingly tough.

Susana Vera / Reuters

Contracts are binding. Pablo Carbajal, mayor of Calzada del Coto, a small village near León, the capital of the province of the same name in northwestern Spain, knows this too. Nevertheless, he supports the farmers in his region, who called on the Spanish government in a protest rally earlier in the week to let less water flow across the border to Portugal. After the extremely hot summer, water is scarce in his area and is needed for his own fields.

But since 1998 there has been an agreement, the so-called La Albufeira Agreement, which was signed by the then Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar and his Portuguese counterpart António Guterres. This pact obliges Spain to share part of its water resources with its neighbor in solidarity. Five Portuguese rivers have their source in Spain, including three major watercourses, the Tejo, Douro and Guadiana.

The agreement guarantees the Portuguese a minimum amount of water, namely 14,300 cubic hectometres annually, from the transboundary rivers. In winter and spring, the Spaniards store large amounts of water in hundreds of reservoirs. However, by the end of the hydrological year, which runs from October 1st to September 30th, an equalization must have taken place. For this year, this means that the Spaniards will have to drain another 400 cubic hectometres from the Douro Basin to Portugal in the coming days of September. This would drain two reservoirs in the area.

If necessary, the water export should be stopped by force

But now resistance suddenly arises. “Why should our fields dry up and our water be used to generate electricity in Portugal?” Carbajal complained to the Portuguese daily Público. 3,000 farmers from the surrounding area drove to León with 400 tractors to make their voices heard under the motto “Without water, no bread and no future”. Her spokesman Herminio Medina threatened the Spanish Environment Minister Teresa Ribera that, if necessary, they would use force to prevent the locks on the two reservoirs from opening in the coming days. Medina fears that the few young people who still live in the region will migrate if even the fields cannot continue to be irrigated.

In fact, Spain’s water reserves are in bad shape. The reservoirs are currently only 34 percent full on average. This is the lowest level in the last 27 years. The situation is somewhat better in Portugal. The water reserves there are currently 53 percent full. But the situation remains tense. Meteorologists expect little rainfall on the Iberian Peninsula in autumn.

The Spanish weather service Aemet also estimates that 1,500 square kilometers of Spain will become desert every year in the future. More than a fifth of Spanish territory is already deserted and can no longer be farmed. A water emergency was declared for 300 communities this summer and water was rationed. The state of emergency will probably be further expanded in October.

Growing mangoes and avocados uses a lot of water

In Portugal, the protests of Spanish farmers are met with incomprehension. The Portuguese environmental organization Zero accuses its neighbors of wasting the water from the rivers. The Portuguese media pointed out that in Andalusia, with its extremely low rainfall, over a hundred golf courses continue to be irrigated despite the drought. According to estimates by the Spanish environmental organization Ecologistas en Acción, each golf course uses as much water as would otherwise be used by 10,000 to 15,000 residents.

Not the Andalusian golf courses, but agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of water consumption in Spain. According to figures from environmental organizations, the Iberians irrigate 4 million hectares of farmland, as much as France and Italy combined. On a large scale, Spanish farmers are cultivating water-intensive fruits such as mangoes and avocados on the so-called Costa Tropical in southern Andalusia. In the Doñana, a wetland at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, so much water was tapped this year for the cultivation of strawberries that the last lagoon has now dried up.

Because there is no improvement in sight and the dispute over water between the Iberian neighbors is threatening to escalate, Rui Godinho, President of the Portuguese Water Management Association, has now asked the Spaniards to sit down at a table to discuss water management in the coming years . “The drought is one of the most complex political problems of the coming decades.” Godinho therefore wants a neighborly solution.

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