People in Wenden, Arizona, are starting to lose access to drinking water as sovereign state-backed megafarms use it to grow their crops.

While there are serious drought In the Colorado River Basin, Arizona’s overused aquifers are drying up, taking a toll on local economies and lifestyles.

CNN report Officials from the state’s water department observed the movement of the water using a camera dropped into the town’s well. says.A nearby well owned by a UAE company was literally and quickly pumping water out of the ground.”

This is important because Wenden and Salome residents get their water from the same source as their farms (underground pools), but as the groundwater table in the area is declining, it will drop from about 100 feet in the 1950s to 2022. shows that the water level has plummeted to about 540 feet.

La Paz County, Arizona, confronting Like the rest of the state and the southwestern United States, it’s the worst drought in 1,200 years. The drought has been blamed on foreign-owned farms growing water-intensive crops like alfalfa. Crops grown on these huge farms are sent to other countries, mainly the United Arab Emirates, to be fed to cattle and other animals.

CNN Said In Salome, local water utility owner Bill Farr says his well, which supplies water to 200 residents and a school, isapproaching the end of its useful life.”

Al Dahra Agricultural company, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, and Fondomonte Arizona LLC, a commercial agricultural venture wholly owned by Almarai, one of the largest dairy companies in the Gulf region,exhausted them [water],” according to To Holly Irwin, La Paz County Supervisor.

she continued,

“This is what pisses people off the most. We should take care of our own people instead of having outsiders come in and buy property and keep drilling holes in the ground.

2018 Saudi Arabia implemented Imports are required due to laws banning the production of thirsty crops such as alfalfa and hay.raw materials from overseas,According to Eckart Woertz, director of the GIGA Middle East Institute based in Germany.

according to According to the Emirates247 website, the UAE currently imports 80% of the food it produces.

Fondomonte is part of the Almarai Company, which operates in the United States. Owning about 10,000 acres of farmland near Vicksburg, he is one of the largest dairy suppliers in the Gulf Coast. The Saudi-backed company also has about 3,500 acres in Southern California, another of his famous agricultural regions in the United States. Use water from the Colorado River to water your crops.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, foreign-owned megafarms in Arizona grown It will increase from about 1.25 million acres in 2010 to about 3 million acres by 2020.

farmland possession In the US Midwest, there was a four-fold increase compared to other countries.

In 2014, Fondomonte paid $47.5 million for 10,000 acres of farmland and signed a deal with the state to lease more land to grow crops. Most of what these megafarms grow is alfalfa and hay, which is loaded onto trucks and shipped to Saudi Arabia.

Almaray is Said In the past, businesses in Arizona haveContinued efforts to increase and secure a supply of top quality alfalfa hay from outside the Kingdom to support the dairy industry.”

Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s most popular English-language newspaper, To tell,

“This is also in line with the Saudi government’s mandate to keep local resources in good condition.”