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This week, Reveal digs deeper into a story that reporters Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke eight years ago: A Saudi-owned farm in the Arizona desert is using vast amounts of water to grow and export hay to Saudi Arabia in the midst of a water crisis in the American West.
Since that story broke, megafarms have taken hold here. And the trend isn’t fueled just by foreign companies. Many people have no idea that their retirement funds are backing massive land deals that result in draining precious groundwater. In his latest report, Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knew they were investing in a local land deal that resulted in draining down the aquifer supplying nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement funds have fueled them.
And it’s not just happening in Arizona. Halverson takes us to Southern California, where retirement money also was invested in a megafarm deal. This time, the farm was tapping into the Colorado River to grow hay and ship it overseas. And it was happening as the federal and state governments have been trying to conserve water in one of the most important, and endangered, river systems in the country.
Halverson’s investigation into water use in the arid West is just one slice of his reporting into a global scramble for food and water, which is featured in a forthcoming documentary, “The Grab” by director Gabriela Cowperthwaite.
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