Speculators and water an uneasy mix

CANBERRA (Reuters) – On the cracked grey clay of an ancient lake bed on the edge of Australia’s outback, Guy Kingwill is at the frontier of a global rush to commercialize water.

Despite a long-running drought, Kingwill, who runs the vast Tandou farm, 142km southeast of the mining town of Broken Hill, has just sold his property’s critical water on a national market rather than pump it into irrigated cereal crops.

“The return on the water is higher,” Kingwill told Reuters. “Where we are it’s broadacre cropping. But the market now is driving significantly more per megaliter from horticulture than you can get a profit margin out of wheat and barley,” he says.

Across the world, speculators are increasingly looking to water as a new profit engine as supplies dwindle, caught between booming populations demanding more access and climate warming threatening its very availability.

Reuters