fair use http://www.iht.com/Severe drought in Spain stirs up regional tensions
By Victoria Burnett Published: April 13, 2008
MADRID: A drought that Spanish officials are calling the worst in a century has pushed the coastal city of Barcelona to the brink of a water crisis and re-ignited a tense debate among the country's rivalrous regions about who should control the precious resource.
Faced with having to ration domestic water supplies during the coming months, the regional government of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, plans to import drinking water by ship from as far afield as southern France and from desalination plants in southern Spain. Officials said they were even considering buying water from other parts of the country and carrying it to Barcelona by train.
With water levels in some Catalan reservoirs at 20 percent of capacity, the regional government has banned Catalans from filling large swimming pools or watering their gardens and has switched off city fountains. At a national level, Spain's reservoirs are half empty, according to data published by the Environment Ministry last week.
The quest for solutions to Barcelona's water shortage has sparked an angry debate between Catalan officials and the central government. In a country where regional interests often seem to be pitted against national ones, the crisis has revived the question of whether water should be centrally managed and whether Spain's greener provinces should share water with those that lack it.
Manuel Ramón Llamas, an expert in the management of water resources at the Complutense University in Madrid, said Spain's problem was not so much that it lacks water but that it manages what water it has badly and charges too little for supplies.
"Spain is the driest country in Europe, and we've become an international laughingstock on the water question," he said by telephone. "Water demand here is falsely elevated because water is practically free."
Catalonia's regional government wants to divert water from the Segre River, a tributary of the huge Ebro River in Catalonia, to Barcelona. It hopes a desalination plant that is under construction on the coast near Barcelona will come on line next year and alleviate supply problems.
"Diverting water from the Segre is the only viable way for us to get the water we need in the time frame that it is needed," Francesc Baltasar, the Catalan environment minister, said in a news conference on television Thursday.
That option has been vetoed, however, by the central government, which controls all water that flows into, or along, the Ebro. It has also met fierce opposition from Aragon, a region bordering Catalonia through which the Segre flows.
The government's opposition to the Segre diversion infuriated Catalan politicians, who accuse Madrid of lacking solidarity. José Montilla, head of the regional government, last week declared that "Catalonia, too, is Spain" - an unusual pronouncement from the leader of a region that fiercely promotes its own language and where nationalists consider Spain a separate country.
Catalonia has long aspired to have greater control over its water. In 2005 the region's inhabitants passed an autonomy statute that awards the regional government greater powers over its rivers - powers that have yet to be approved by Spain's constitutional court. The Catalan statute sparked a flurry of claims from other regions to greater autonomy and greater control over local rivers.
In the absence of a diversion from the Segre, the state-run Catalan Water Agency has contracted 10 ships to supply Barcelona with drinking water at a cost of nearly €80 million, or $127 million. Some of the ships will bring water from Marseilles, 300 kilometers, or 200 miles, away, and others, in August, will carry water more than 600 kilometers from a desalination plant in Almería.
The government plans to spend €35 million upgrading port facilities and €43 million buying and transporting the water. The central government last week suggested that Spain consider approaching France about diverting water from the Rhone - a project that would take more than a decade and that Montilla described as a "bad-taste joke."
Llamas, the university expert on water management, said successive governments had become bogged down in politics. "Water is a fundamental problem that should transcend political boundaries," he said. "Our problem is not that Spain lacks water. It's that we are suffering a mental drought among our politicians."
Sounds familiar? the infamous water wars are heating up like everything else.