“Everything becomes science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature, the reality of the present is emerging. In 1964, J.G. Ballard published a novel – The Drought – where he imagines a planet Earth without reserves of drinking water. That world is already ours, although in this case it is not a dystopian fable or a dream.
Climate change has turned Ballard’s doomsday storytelling into topical journalism. And it throws a disturbing light from above on the last great calamity that besets Andalusia, where the economic, social and political impact derived from the lack of rain is going to be colossal. Immense. Life is born with humidity. Death is always dry.
The residents of Hamilton, the town where Ballard’s book takes place, as in Doñana, have seen the wetlands and lagoons turn into infinite landscapes of dry mud. Some have left in search of an uncertain survival; others stop being people of order and lynch foreigners who try to steal holy water from the font of the parish church.
The animals are dying. Agriculture is a vestige of the past. Everything is so barren that not even children can cry. Nobody trusts anyone anymore. Community ties decay and morale disappears. Ballard thus imagines the decline of civilization. We may be contemplating his Alpha. By the time his Omega arrives, perhaps there will be no one left to tell about it.
T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land: “April is the cruelest month.” Now it is also the beginning of an eternal summer ahead of the calendar that, at least in the South of Spain, has already lasted for nine long months and, after a brief pause, succeeds itself.
The British writer speaks through powerful images about the devastation caused by the drought. In Andalusia, in addition to similar geographical replicas –immense empty swamps, white saline lagoons– the dimensions of the drama have the face of statistics.
Economists calculate that the break from the drought in southern GDP will reach 7%. The Covid supposed four more points of misfortunes. The agri-food sector continues to increase the price of its products and resorts to alternative markets –Morocco, Tunisia, Portugal– to comply with export contracts. There are no surpluses, only shortages.
The situation is unusual. In the last quarter of a century there was no similar context. Irrigated crops, which have grown exponentially to consume 80% of water reserves, are the most affected, but they are far from the only ones affected: the lack of water also weighs down the electricity industry and many companies engaged in other activities.
At risk, according to experts, are more than 120,000 jobs. Since 2021, 35,000 have been lost. Andalusia will not recover economic activity prior to the pandemic for a long time. Convergence with Europe has been a chimera for decades. And the social invoice flies over the sky like vultures in westerns. The INE places the poverty risk rate at 30%. The average income does not exceed 10,703 euros per person.
The central government, which has not hesitated to use Doñana’s agony in an electoral key, is passive in the face of this fateful panorama. The Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, which it administers, has ordered a drastic cut in risks. The decision, which makes many farms ruinous, comes with an oil production that is already 60% lower than in previous seasons or a 30% drop in crops such as rice. No way.
The great autonomy of the South lacks economic alternatives to the countryside. Neither tourism nor real estate construction can replace income from the agri-food sector. The exact dimensions of the problem become clear if one analyzes the historical background.
Andalusia experienced a similar hydrological crisis –then it was seasonal, now it seems chronic– between 2005 and 2008. What happened to its economy? Well, the price of food products, which have now led the current inflationary curve for months, skyrocketed.
Farmers lost income – price increases stemming from shortages were used to pay off debt, not increase profits – and consumers saw their overall spending power cut. The Andalusian field lost 1,512 million euros in those three years.
The agrarian structure of the South no longer responds to the historical archetype. The Andalusian countryside has a high degree of mechanization and works with high technology, optimizing its processes, but the traditional distribution between rainfed and irrigated crops, derived from the imponderable of recurrent droughts, has been completely disconnected from meteorological reality.
Since 1965, rainfed crops have fallen by 31% in Spain. Irrigation grew by 210% in search of maximum economic profitability, not only through dammed water, but also colonizing –in some cases, as in Doñana, illegally– the aquifers.
Now there is less water and climate change is a fact. Farmers will not be able to continue operating their farms as if they were factories. If this does not imply a full-fledged reconversion, similar to the one experienced by the industry in the North of Spain in the eighties, it is quite similar. Ballard, without suspecting it, anticipated the dry Andalusia of 2023.
