The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome

The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome

by Jampel Dell'Angelo a,b,⁎, Maria Cristina Rulli c, Paolo D'Odorico d

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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 (Rodríguez-Labajos and Martínez-Alier, 2015).

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