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Last week, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that the state has revoked permits for a Saudi company to drill two new water wells on state land. According to Mayes, her office discovered inconsistencies in applications for new wells submitted by Fondomonte, a company owned by one of Saudi Arabia's largest dairy farms, and approved by state regulators last August. Following this discovery, the permits were revoked a week prior to Mayes's announcement.
The wells would have pumped 3,000 gallons of groundwater per minute to irrigate existing farms on land leased from the Arizona State Land Department, where Fondomonte currently grows alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia to feed dairy cattle there. According to the terms of the lease, Fondomonte would not have had to pay for the water. "There's nothing to say except, that's insane," Mayes said.
The Center for Western Priorities' podcast The Landscape explored this issue in a recent episode with author and professor Natalie Koch, whose new book—Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia—explores the ways in which Arizona and Saudi Arabia have worked together to promote desert agriculture, and how that work is connected to a global obsession with engineering our way out of ecosystem collapse.
The River of Sorrows film tour kicks off this week
See one of Colorado’s last, best wild places up close at a premiere showing of The River of Sorrows on the Colorado film tour starting on Wednesday. The film follows two packrafters down the near-dry Dolores River, telling the complex story of the river and the public lands that surround it. View details and RSVP here for the first showing on Wednesday April 26th in Boulder, Colorado or another upcoming event.
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It's outrageous and frankly unacceptable that the state would even consider granting new wells to allow the Saudis to pump millions of gallons of water to grow more alfalfa for their cows.”
