The drought in Spain acquires another dimension when historical precedents are taken into account. So three things are observed. The first is that aridity and irregular rainfall have been with us for more than a hundred years, like a kind of great national drama that soon became a regional struggle. The second is that the impact of the lack of rainfall cannot be understood without the spectacular expansion of irrigation, which today consumes 80% of our water resources, although it represents less than 3% of GDP. And the third is that the story of the big measures against drought is the story of our water management.
As Josep Joan Mateu, a historian from the University of Lleida, recalls, Spain was considered until the end of the 19th century as a kind of orchard to be exploited. However, the end of the century economic crisis and the loss of the last colonies transformed this scenario and paved the way for the ideas of regenerationist intellectuals such as JoaquÃn Costa and politicians such as Rafael Gasset to end up prevailing.
According to these ideas, Spain not only did not have abundant water resources in comparison with other European powers, but the irregular distribution of water increased regional inequality. Droughts became a national problem for a country that was totally dependent, according to Costa, on the expansion of water, roads and schools to modernize. He had to create an impressive network of swamps and canals and thereby multiply irrigated crops.
Thus, according to Costa o Gasset, the takeoff of the productivity of the countryside would reduce the public deficit to a minimum, catapulting the collection of taxes with the revaluation of the land. The spread of irrigation would also stop the rural exodus, creating millions of jobs in what we now call emptied Spain. Finally, the division of the strawberry or tomato fields would turn many day laborers into small businessmen, who would ally themselves with the urban middle classes to put an end to the caciquil and latifundista regime of the Restoration.
José Luis Ramos, from the Complutense University of Madrid, believes that Costa y Gasset’s ideas gave an overwhelming turn to Spanish water policies. Let us remember that, before they were hegemonic, at the very end of the 19th century, the State prevented droughts by legislatively facilitating the private construction of irrigation works and, on rare occasions, helping investors in failed projects.
However, in the first decades of the following century, and from the General Plan for Irrigation Channels and Swamps, promoted by the Minister of Agriculture Rafael Gasset and promulgated by his successor in 1902, the State began to identify the needs of irrigation with those of the majority of Spaniards and to consider water an abundant public good, the use and consumption of which should be massively subsidized. Especially from 1911, the administration assumed all the promotion, financing and exploitation of the infrastructures to collect, store and transport it. Expected demand had to be met without addressing issues such as environmental impact or the reality that water was, and is, a scarce resource.
Despite the general plan and all the works and normative developments that came up to the twenties, the efforts, in general, failed. The locations of the new canals and reservoirs were often arbitrary, their connections could be improved, and, to top it off, they opted for inland irrigation as opposed to the Mediterranean ones, which were much more efficient. And this is how Levante or Murcia were practically left to their own devices during the droughts.
The fear of droughts and of being left behind in the modernization of the countryside would soon fuel a regional struggle for water and the infrastructures that made it available. In 1926, with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the current hydrographic confederations were launched, autonomous and regional entities of the Ministry of Public Works, among which tensions arose, because the Mediterranean confederations felt marginalized.
According to Antonio Gil, from the University of Alicante, the I National Hydrological Plan of 1933, already in the Second Republic and very shortly after the harsh drought of 1930, set out to correct the imbalances, amid strong protests on the Castilian plateau. The plan, heavily tilted towards the Mediterranean, included, among other things, a project to expand irrigation to 84,000 hectares in Murcia and almost 340,000 in Levante.
Leandro del Moral, from the University of Seville, recalls that, after the Civil War and from the 1940s, the Francoist plans inherited many of the projects foreseen by the Republican plan, promoted by the socialist Indalecio Prieto, and also the participation and diagnosis of Manuel Lorenzo Pardo, its author: “Júcar and Turia regularly abundant although moderately supplied, Vinalopó and Segura exhausted and the Almanzora, non-existent. There is, then, in the Valencian area a need for management, in the Alicante and Murcian areas a need for help and in the Andalusian area an urgent need for reliefâ€.
If at the end of the 19th century the national reservoir capacity was 100 cubic hectoliters, by the end of the twenties of the following century, that capacity had multiplied by seven. From then until 1970, thanks to around a thousand new reservoirs, the capacity went from 700 to 37,000 cubic hectoliters. It was during the Franco regime when the large transfer infrastructures of the Ebro or the Tagus were built and important regulations were deployed to take advantage of (and overexploit and destroy in many cases) dozens of aquifers and rivers.
It is true that many of those projects placed emphasis on the new needs of irrigation, industry, the thriving services sector of the cities or the generation of hydroelectric power. However, it is also worth remembering that, between 1944 and 1946, there was one of the worst droughts in contemporary Spain, which left Madrid with repeated cuts in supply and Spanish reservoirs at 14% of their capacity. A good part of Franco’s hydraulic projects multiplied from 1950.
At the beginning of the eighties, we found another great drought and another political reaction of the first order. In 1985, a Water Law was approved, the first to be promulgated since 1879. The preliminary draft of the first National Hydrological Plan of the democracy, born from that new Water Law, was delayed until 1993 and coincided with a drought so brutal that it left the reservoirs to 15% of their capacity during the first half of the 1990s.
The enactment of the plan as a law would not come until 1998 and, as great innovations, it provided for a six-fold increase in cubic hectoliters in annual transfers, as well as the creation of a transition regime to convert the exploitation rights of the wells into concessions. used privately by thousands of irrigators. At the same time, the standard promised to rationalize the use and consumption of water by promoting efficiency or the reuse of wastewater.
Although Spain continued to bet on subsidizing it massively and expanding its irrigation, water was beginning to be considered a scarce commodity, and therefore the ideas of JoaquÃn Costa or Rafael Gasset, who invoked little less than an unlimited right to semi-free water, began to abandon The European directive-framework and the new Water Law of the year 2000 would abound in this direction. In addition, in 2007, in the midst of an intense drought that lasted from 2005 to 2009, the first Special Drought Plans were authorized, which, among other things, promised to guarantee the availability of water to ensure the health and life of the population. .
There is debate about the extent to which we have abandoned Costa’s ideas. José Luis Ramos, for example, considers that the current model is very similar to that of then. The State continues to be the main promoter of infrastructure, irrigation interests continue to be confused with those of Spain and water continues to be massively subsidized as if we had plenty of it.
For his part, Alberto Fernández Lop, a water program technician at WWF Spain, believes that “we are settling for mitigating droughts instead of preventing them”, that “efficiency measures in the use of water have caused an increase in consumption in irrigated crops” and that, finally, the transfers “have created a false sense of security and certainty in the long term among their beneficiaries.”
Meanwhile, droughts and severe heat waves are multiplying on the back of climate change, and our country is in a particularly vulnerable position. The State Meteorological Agency has projected increases in temperatures of between two and six and a half degrees by the end of the 21st century, and there are many who wonder where we are going to get the water from when, at the start of this spring of 2023 and in much less adverse circumstances, the reservoirs barely reached half their capacity.
