A new report has found that investors and agribusiness in Latin America are increasingly buying up small parcels of land with abundant water access, thus securing control over the vital resource. They’re also exacerbating water scarcity by planting water-intensive crops and expanding irrigated cultivation, according to the report by the Belgium-based International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). “It is becoming more and more difficult to produce food in rural communities through peasant farming because there is no water,” Viviana Catrileo Epul, director of Chile’s National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), told Mongabay. “The advance of monocultures and extractivism is so strong and ferocious that it is leaving us without water.” The trend, which researchers have coined “water grabbing” — a form of land grabbing except it refers specifically to the control of water — is a problem for peasant communities and smallholder farmers, who often rely on the same surface or groundwater resources, amid a global freshwater crisis. In countries like Chile, Mexico and Peru, it has also put a greater strain on an already overwhelmed water supplies. “In a context of climate change and global water scarcity, agribusiness and investors are seeing access to water as a major asset and are increasingly targeting land with freshwater and coastal access, as well as forests, aiming to rapidly extract value from these resources,” Sofía Monsalve Suárez, a co-author of the IPES-Food report and panel expert at the think tank, told Mongabay. Because of a growth in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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