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A drought-hit river town votes to pay farmers not to plant
After three dry summers, a community on the Guadiana decided that leaving fields empty was cheaper than watching the river disappear.
World affairs reporter
7 min read
The riverbed near the town in late August, when flow fell to its lowest level on record.
The vote took eleven minutes. In a sports hall that doubles as the town’s polling station, residents agreed to pay a group of farmers to leave a quarter of their fields fallow for the next two years.
The money, about $1.4m, comes from a water fee on households and hotels. The logic is blunt: every hectare left unplanted keeps roughly 6,000 cubic metres of water in the river.
Paying for what is not there
For the farmers, the offer is not charity. It is roughly what they would earn in a good year, without the risk of a bad one. For the town, it is insurance against the summer when the taps run dry.
“We used to argue about who got the water. Now we argue about who gets paid not to use it. It is a better argument,” said one member of the local irrigation board.
Hydrologists say the scheme is small but significant. Similar programmes in California and Australia have struggled because payments were too low or monitoring too weak. Here, satellite imagery will be used to check which fields stay bare.
What happens next
The regional government is watching closely. If river levels hold through next summer, officials say the model could be extended to a dozen other municipalities along the basin. Farmers’ unions are divided: some welcome guaranteed income, others worry it is the first step towards permanently shrinking agriculture in the region.
Amara Diallo
World affairs reporter
Amara reports on trade, borders and the places the world economy passes through.
