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The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome
The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome
by Jampel Dell'Angelo a,b,⁎, Maria Cristina Rulli c, Paolo D'Odorico d
See excepts below:
Abstract
Large-scale acquisitions of agricultural land in developing countries have been rapidly increasing in the last 10 years, contributing to a major agrarian transition from subsistence or small scale farming to large-scale commercial agriculture by agribusiness
transnational corporations. Likely driven by recent food crises, new
bioenergy policies, and financial speculations, this phenomenon has been
often investigated from the economic development, human right, land tenure
and food security perspectives, while its hydrologic implications have
remained understudied. It has been suggested that a major driver of
large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is the quest for water resources
that can be used (locally) to sustain agricultural production in the
acquired land. The appropriation of water resources associated with
LSLAs has often been termed ‘water grabbing’, though to date a formal
definition of such a normative and inherently pejorative term is
missing. The intrinsic assumption is that the acquisition of water
undergoes the same dynamics of unbalanced power relationships that
underlie many LSLAs. Here we invoke hydrological theories of “green” and
“blue” water flows to stress the extent to which water appropriations
are inherently coupled to land acquisitions and specifically focus on
blue water. We then propose a formal definition of blue water grabbing
based both on biophysical conditions (water scarcity) and ethical
implications (human right to food). Blue water grabs are appropriations
of irrigation (i.e., blue) water in regions affected by undernourishment
and where agricultural production is constrained by blue water
availability. We use this framework to provide a global assessment of
the likelihood that LSLAs entail blue water grabbing.
2.1. What is Water Grabbing?
While
on the concept of land grabbing there is a broad semantic consensus and
it has been formally defined by a coalition of international
organizations (ILC Tirana Declaration), the concept of water grabbing is
neither used officially in policy fora nor unofficially by
international development organizations. As we show in this section, the
concept of water grabbing has been used by different authors in
peer-reviewed publications to indicate relatively different phenomena.
The common denominator among the different definitions is that there is
an aspect of injustice and power imbalance which is represented by the
word ‘grabbing’. Water grabbing means something different from water
appropriation, exploitation, extraction, consumption, or use. It
involves the notion of ‘grabber’ and ‘grabbed’, a dynamic of usurpation
based on the power imbalance between subjects that lose and subjects
that win, unjustly. The definition of water grabbing deals with the
ethical question of when it is appropriate to define a particular case
of typology of natural resources extraction as ‘grabbing’. It also deals
with the biophysical question of how do we quantify or identify the
appropriation of a resource, that by its own nature is fluid, renewable
and difficult to quantify (RodrÃguez-Labajos and MartÃnez-Alier, 2015).
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