Arizona Rural Groundwater being Shipped Around the Globe

In 1980 Arizona passed a law regulating groundwater in Phoenix, Tucson, and other populated, mostly urban areas. The law left the rest of the state without limits to drilling for or pumping groundwater. Though there have been several attempts to expand the law, all have failed including the most recent attempt this past spring. Outside of active groundwater management areas or irrigation non-expansion areas anyone in Arizona can drill a well and use unlimited amounts of groundwater.

According to a 2019 investigation by the Arizona Republic, the water levels has dropped more than 100 feet in some rural areas including this one. “The Arizona Republic analyzed water-level data for more than 33,000 wells throughout Arizona. The investigation found the water levels in nearly one in four wells in Arizona’s groundwater monitoring program have dropped more than 100 feet since they were drilled, a loss that scientists and water experts say is likely irrecoverable.” Read the Arizona Republic’s excellent coverage of the building water crisis at this link.

The recent growth in groundwater pumping has been attributed to large industrial farms; many from out of state and out of country including the Saudi holdings. In 2014 alone the Saudi dairy Almarai bought 15 square miles of farmland in western Arizona in an unregulated groundwater area. In some of the communities in non-managed groundwater areas where it is no longer feasible for the homeowner with a private well to access water because the water table has fallen so far. Arizona has to a large extent ignored the problem because only about 20% of the state’s population has been impacted in any way, and many homeowners only know they have a problem when their well goes dry.

In this dessert location groundwater was laid down over millennia ago and is not being recharged in any significant way. This is the only water that many rural communities can count on as the Southwest becomes hotter and drier with climate change. In addition, Arizona faces its first-ever mandatory cuts in Colorado River water withdrawals this year under an agreement that will shrink the amount of water that’s available to replenish aquifers in urban areas. With climate change projected to make the southwest drier and put strains on water from rivers, the urban center will need to pump more groundwater.

Big farming companies owned by out-of-state investors and foreign agriculture giants have purchase farmland in areas where there is no limit on pumping. It is about growing food. The Saudi Arabians are one of the foreign entities pumping massive amounts of groundwater to grow wheat. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the Arabian Peninsula and have overdrawn their own aquifer.

Saudi Arabia has no perennial rivers though seasonally some surface water flows in the south east where annual rainfall of almost a foot falls between October and March. They have groundwater systems, but those systems have no natural recharge; unless they are artificially recharged they have a limited life span.

In 1975 it was estimated that Saudi Arabia was using less than 500 billion gallons of water a year for irrigation and a similar amount of water for industry and domestic use. Then water consumption and use changed dramatically. Driven by a government policy in support of achieving food security Saudi Arabia began using groundwater sources for irrigation and growing wheat and grains in the dessert. By 1980 the artesian wells that had fed the oasis’s ran dry, and at its peak in 1999-2000 pumped almost 5 trillion gallons of water in a single year for agricultural irrigation exporting wheat to its neighbors.

The Saudis calculated their water reserves and realized that they had been sacrificing water security for food security and began a program to import food and farm in other countries, limit groundwater pumping and build desalination plants. The farming operations in Arizona desert are simply implementing the unsustainable groundwater use practices that threatened their water security at home to the United States. Arizona does not have coastal access to even consider desalination in the future.

It is not just the Saudis, I am singling them out because their actions are informed and egregious. Mankind uses a lot of water. According to a group of researchers in the Netherlands who have been studying, quantifying and mapping national water footprints since the beginning of this century, mankind uses 9,087 billion cubic meters of water each year. Most of the water use is for agricultural production an estimated 92% when utilization of rainwater is counted.

The water we use is our water footprint. When we think about our use of water, we think of our domestic use of water in our homes for drinking, food preparation, washing clothes and dishes, bathing , and flushing toilets, watering lawns and gardens or maintaining pools, ponds, hosing off patios and decks, washing cars and similar activities. However, most of our water footprint is the water used to produce the food we eat and more and more that food is traveling the globe. That would be fine in areas where the groundwater is recharging and being used sustainably or where agriculture is irrigated from rain captured in farm ponds, but not when the groundwater is not being recharged in any meaningful way.The future of Arizona is being shipped in ton after ton of alfalfa shipped to Saudi Arabia for their dairies.