French police must monitor water as drought intensifies

MAUZÉ-SUR-LE-MIGNON, France – Wearing bulletproof vests and armed, the gendarmes suddenly appear in the middle of the cultivated fields misted by the morning rain.

Behind two fences equipped with security cameras and overhead lights, they look like prison guards.

But there is no prison for miles.

Instead, they guard a large pit meant to serve as a giant tank.

Welcome to the frontline water war in France.

World leaders gathered for two weeks at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, discussing ways to mitigate the effects of climate change and the conflicts it generates.

But while competition for water scarcity is more associated with the arid regions of the Middle East and Africa, Europe he is not immune.

After a scorching summer that climatologists have called a harrowing postcard from the future, with record heatwaves, fires and droughts that dried up rivers,

France is embroiled in a growing battle over who should have priority use water and how.

The French government has initiated a plan to build large tanks across the country to serve farmers during the increasingly drier spring and summer months.

But what the government calls an adaptation, opponents consider an aberration:

what they see as the privatization of water for the benefit of a few old-fashioned industrial farmers.

The clashes between the two sides became increasingly unpleasant:

a taste, perhaps, of the water wars that are set to worsen around the world as temperatures rise.

Thousands of activists opposed to the latest dam under construction in the western region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine recently clashed with some 1,600 military policemen amid rapeseed fields and dried corn remains.

That normally picturesque field has been transformed into a scene from a dystopian novel:

cops withn riot gear, armored trucks firing tear gas, smoke and helicopters rumbling overhead.

The demonstrators then marched with two sections of water pipes that they had dug and dismantled so they could not then feed the tank, the last one sabotage of many, who consider civil disobedience.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described the scene as ecoterrorism“.

“They’re the ones who are eco-terrorists,” said Jean-Jacques Guillet, a former mayor of three cities, watching the excavators dig into the site’s red earth days later.

“They are terrorizing the environment.”

“They sent 1,600 gendarmes to protect a pit full of rocks,” he added, looking at four armed military policemen standing nearby.

There are hundreds of thousands of reservoirs across France that have been used by farmers for generations, raising little controversy.

For ecologists, what differentiates the newest is theirs cut it and the origin of the water they collect.

The latest one under construction will have an area of ​​16 hectares and will contain the equivalent of 288 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with groundwater, pumped by pipes.

Opponents like Guillet call them “megabasineras”.

In theory, the tanks take in water during the wet winter months and hold it for farmers to use during the critical spring and summer seasons.

In this way they will guarantee the country’s food production and also reduce the pressure on the groundwater during the growing summer drought.

There’s no official tally of how many mega tanks there are, but activists estimate there are about 50, grouped in the western part of the country. The scene of the latest battle is in the Deux-Sèvres region, where plans to build 16 were unveiled in 2017.

To sweeten the deal, the new water cooperative, which represents some 230 farmers, later signed a deal to green their practices. reducing the use of pesticidesbuilding hedges and strengthening the biodiversity of their lands.

The co-op, Water Co-op 79, sees planned mega pools as a lifeline.

“The idea is to guarantee water to maintain agriculture in the area,” says François Petorin, a cereal farmer who grows wheat, rapeseed, sunflower and some corn on 210 hectares.

“We know that two years out of ten there is a risk of not filling the tanks 100%.

But today, 10 out of 10 years, we run the risk of not being able to irrigate our fields”.

That’s the definition of water privatization, critics say.

Worse still, they add, it is being done with public funds:

70% of the €60 million (about $62 million) budget to build the Deux-Sèvres reservoirs is provided by the French government.

Alternatives

Instead of forcing farmers to find ways to farm less intensive on water, the tanks will actually dramatically increase their use of water to irrigate cornfields, opponents argue.

“Our president has decided that this is the best way to fight climate change:

create the maximum number of docks nationwide,” Guillet said.

“It’s not just minority water grabbing, financed with our own money, it’s wasted,” he added, pointing to reports on lto evaporation of the tanks.

An environmental group has successfully sued several of the invaders in a neighboring region, where after more than a decade of litigation, judges have declared them illegal.

They are still empty holes.

The group plans to go back to court to force the local government to return the land to its pristine state or some approximation.

“It’s very, very, very difficult to go back even when they are banned,” said Patrick Picaud, vice president of the environmental organization Nature Environment 17, which has also taken the Deux-Sèvres plan to court, leading to a reduction in the number of reservoirs authorized, as well as the amount of water they can contain.

“They are a disaster: for the environment, for public coffers and also for agriculture,” said Picaud.

“There must be a law prohibiting construction before the judicial process is over.”

To complicate matters, most of France’s large dams are being built near the country’s second-largest wetland, the Marais Poitevin, a huge swamp intertwined with canals that the locals affectionately call “Green Venice“.

The French Geological Institute released a study in June concluding that the project would have “limited impact” on groundwater levels in winter, and could even raise reservoir levels in spring and summer.

But hydrocliologists like Florence Habets point out that the study used data ancient and did not take into account the multi-year droughts heralded by climate change.

And the official study is now underway on the amount of water that can be extracted from the rivers and aquifers of the Deux-Sèvres region, without negatively affecting the environment.

“Ground water is the tap of the wetland,” says Julien Le Guet, using a traditional wooden pole called a pigouille to row a boat through the narrow channels of the Marais Poitevin.

“Instead of groundwater replenishing the swamp, the swamp will replenish the groundwater.”

Le Guet, 45, has been a nautical guide for 14 years.

It speaks lyrically of the winter rains, when trees grow on the rising lake, and desperately of recent drops in water levels.

His love for the place prompted him to create a major opposition group called Bassines Non Merciwhich is French for Tanks, No thanks.

But the government’s response was to charge him.

Days after the latest protest, a neighboring region announced it would build 30 large tanks.

“That’s why we must continue to fight this battle,” said Le Guet.

“So that the national plan for the construction of the reservoirs does not go ahead”.

Schisms have already formed among the farmers themselves, the intended recipients of the watersheds.

Small-scale vegetable growers, who use relatively little water, say they shouldn’t be burdening agribusinesses, 30 of which account for a third of the area’s total irrigation budget.

“Why do I have to pay for research if I’ll never get water from it?” said Olivier Drouineau, an organic farmer who grows vegetables on 4.5 hectares.

“It benefits only the largest farms.”

A recent survey of cooperative farmers revealed that only 10% have reduced their use of pesticides.

As a result, a handful of environmental groups who initially supported the project later denounced it as an “irrigation development program”.

Walking through a strip of flowering plants he grows to feed bees, Petorin said it was too early to expect pesticide cuts or other changes, after years of delays caused by protests and lawsuits.

“This is a mutual agreement,” he said.

Construction on another reservoir, half a mile from his farm, is scheduled to begin in March. A

Petorin is concerned that protests and costly acts of sabotage will continue.

After so many years of consultations and discussions, the idea of ​​needing gendarmes to protect water wells seems “not normal”, he said, “because there are people who want to break everything”.

Le Guet said his group was already planning the next protest.

“They can put a team of police officers in the 50 tanks,” he said.

c.2022 The New York Times Society