As the climate crisis depletes already scarce water resources in West Africa and Southeast Asia, predatory investors, and an insatiable demand for hydroelectric power are becoming glaring threats, endangering lives, livelihoods, and the ecosystems that sustain local communities.
Separate news reports from Senegal and Cambodia point to similar impacts in countries seven time zones apart coping with strikingly similar threats.
Forage Farms Take Water from Dakar
Flowing through central Guinea and west through Mali to the Senegalese port city of Saint-Louis, the 1,086-kilometre Senegal River was for centuries a major conduit through which European colonial powers conducted highly lucrative trade in gold, ivory, and slaves.
“Now foreign merchants are back, this time for the river itself,” writes Bloomberg News, in a report detailing the thirsty plans of Wall Street-based African Agriculture Inc., an investment company founded by Romanian-Swiss entrepreneur Frank Timis.
“His publicly listed companies, many scattered in offshore tax havens, were embroiled for years in controversies over environmental practices, respect for human rights, the accuracy of disclosures and allegations of corruption,” Bloomberg says.
Now, African Agriculture is growing 300 hectares of protein-rich alfalfa inside the once-flourishing Ndiael Wildlife Reserve east of Saint-Louis, drawing water from Senegal’s sole freshwater reserve, Lake Guiers, which is fed by a canal from the Senegal River. The country’s capital, Dakar, 263 kilometres to the south, receives half of its water supplies from Lake Guiers via underground pipes.
“The water isn’t nearly enough,” Bloomberg writes. “In the wee hours of every night, more than one million residents in greater Dakar await what feels like a miracle: a running tap.”
Should that miracle fail to happen, residents with means buy water from street vendors. Others are forced to make do with “heavily polluted groundwater from public wells.”
Back on African Agriculture’s Teranga Farms, emerald-green alfalfa crops are grown to feed Senegal’s starving cattle, Bloomberg writes. But the company has its eye on richer pastures: Persian Gulf residents who seek to nourish their livestock herds and racehorses with the very best in forage.
Company chair and CEO Alan Kessler said African Agriculture is intent on expanding its 300-hectare alfalfa pilot to 20,000 hectares, with 70% of the crop promised to clients in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
If it goes ahead, the project “will consume about twice as much water daily from Lake Guiers as the pumps and pipelines now convey to Dakar,” the news story states. “Timis has grabbed hold of the aquatic lifeline of one of the driest regions on the planet and is getting ready to test American investors’ appetite for speculating on the project’s development potential.”
‘Global Hunt for Climate Profits’
That makes the project “a parable of the global hunt for profits from climate change.”
African Agriculture is in the process of going public, through a merger with a blank-check company on Nasdaq, in a deal that pegs its value at US$450 million. But Africa is only the beginning: the “bigger prize” is Wall Street.
The planned listing “is a deliberate play on water scarcity,” revealed in the merger prospectus filed in May with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The prospectus highlights two trends: “the megadrought in the American Southwest, which has crimped alfalfa output in the U.S., the world’s largest supplier; and Americans’ increasing worries about using diminishing resources to irrigate water-intensive crops for export.”
If all goes as planned, African Agriculture will replace the U.S. as the main provider of alfalfa to the Gulf, shipping 350,000 tonnes annually to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and doing it all with Senegal’s dwindling—and increasingly polluted—water supplies.
Meanwhile, those struggling to survive around Lake Guiers and in Dakar see worsening conditions from a lack of water, among other ills.
For the 20,000 Fulani, West Africa’s largest nomadic people, who have ranged across the Ndiael for millennia, a life pummelled by drought grew even harder in 2012, when President Mackie Sall sold off swathes of the reserve to an Italian company intent on growing sunflowers for export to European biofuel markets. The venture led to the Fulani being blocked from the lake, and from essential grazing lands, by barbed-wire fences.
When the Italian venture failed, African Agriculture swooped in to buy the land and the rights to the water.
On Lake Gooier, meanwhile, agricultural run-off, especially nitrates from a vast sugarcane plantation owned by French-Swiss billionaire Jean-Claude Mimran, has led to an explosion in invasive plants that now cover 30% of the water, which also plays host to worms that produce a schistosomiasis, a disease that hits human organs and currently infects 80% of the children in the region.
Alfalfa doesn’t need nitrogen fertilizers, but it does require phosphorus, and levels of that pollutant in the lake are already twice the limit recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, reports Bloomberg.
Djiby Sambou, who grew up along the shores of Lake Guiers and now works as an environment officer for the United Nations, said two years of extreme drought could drain it. “This lake cannot support all the new demand,” Sambou said.
Downstream in Dakar, water scarcity afflicts some 2.5 million people, with shut-offs occurring daily. What little water comes from the taps—much of it from Lake Guiers—is so polluted from agricultural run-off that public health officials advise that infants be given only bottled mineral water until they are at least six months old, to avoid the diarrhea that kills 40,000 children each year in Senegal.
Damming Threatens Mekong River Ecosystems
As echoes of colonial-era exploitation persist in Senegal, 12,700 kilometres eastward in Cambodia, demand for hydroelectric power poses a threat to the mighty Mekong River, as well as the millions of people who depend on it for survival.
One of them is Mai, a 38-year-old fisher who lives with his family on a floating barge on the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s biggest lake. Twenty years ago, Mai would have been able to feed himself and his family with money earned from fishing and even send his three children to school, reports BBC News. But that economic security is now deeply threatened, as populations of critical fish species in the lower Mekong have dropped 87% over the last 17 years. Overfishing is involved, but climate change—and hydro dams being built to mitigate emissions—are the primary causes.
Mai may be among the last generation of fishers to live and thrive along the Mekong, with his hopes of providing for his children fast slipping away.
Flowing nearly 5,000 kilometres from the glaciers of Tibet, through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, the Mekong finally enters the South China Sea via Vietnam. All along its route, the river is now threatened by drought, with water levels dropping to their lowest point in more than 60 years between 2019 and 2021.
“But shrinking rainfall is not the only problem,” notes BBC. “Energy demands in Southeast Asia have increased by an average of 3% each year—a trend that will continue until 2030.” The response—to date—has been all about hydro.
China alone, in a bid to cut its dependence on climate-killing coal, has built 11 dams on the Mekong, and another 95 on its tributaries. Laos has two more on the main river, and both countries plan to build “dozens more.”
The impacts resonate all along the Mekong. Nutrient-rich sediment that farmers depend on is trapped behind concrete sluiceways, and water releases have rotted forests that adapted over hundreds of years to thrive in dry seasons alternating with months of monsoon rain.
Should no action be taken, analysts say the next 20 years could see agriculture-sustaining sediments of the Mekong decline by more than 90%.
If the system of dams releasing excess water into the forest during the dry season isn’t fixed, the trees cannot serve as crucial fish nurseries in the wet season, as their roots are attacked by fungi, leading to dry rot.
Cambodia is responding to the threats, placing a 10-year moratorium on dams along the Mekong in 2020, and more recently signalling a strong interest in solar and wind technologies. Young people are volunteering to protect the Mekong from illegal fishing activity, and all the countries that depend upon the “mother of waters” recently pledged to work toward controlling water flows and limiting new hydro projects.
