For years, a Saudi-owned hay farm has been using massive amounts of water in the middle of the Arizona desert and exporting the hay back to Saudi Arabia.
The farm’s water use has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story more than eight years ago.
Since then, the water crisis in the American West has only worsened as megafarms have taken hold there. And it’s not just foreign companies fueling the problem: Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knowingly invested in a local land deal that resulted in draining down the groundwater of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling them.
Since we first aired this story in July, our reporting has spurred Arizona’s governor and attorney general into action.
On this week’s Reveal, learn about water use in the West, who’s profiting and who’s getting left behind.
For more of Halverson’s reporting into a global scramble for food and water, watch “The Grab.” By Center for Investigative Reporting Studios and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the film will be in theaters and available to stream starting June 14.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.
New findings from two scientific studies reveal that the environmental impact of the global rubber trade due to deforestation has been significantly underestimated, with Southeast Asian rubber production potentially causing up to three times more forest depletion than previously believed.
With more than four million hectares of forest, an area as large as Switzerland, lost for rubber farming since 1993, “the effects of rubber on biodiversity and ecosystem services in Southeast Asia could be extensive,” said the report published on Wednesday in Nature journal.
Mature rubber plantations spanned a combined area of 14.2 million hectares in Southeast Asia. Over 70% of these plantations were concentrated in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Notable rubber-producing regions also included China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Rubber plantations abandoned before 2021 were excluded from the study, even though they may have contributed to deforestation.
More than a million hectares of rubber plantations in Southeast Asia are established in key biodiversity areas, some of the most critical sites for the conservation of species and habitats globally, the report said.
Rising global demand for rubber is intensifying stress on natural woodlands and leading to a decline in biodiversity, according to researchers who used satellite data to produce high-resolution maps of rubber-driven forest loss and analyzed over 100 case studies.
Southeast Asia accounts for 90% of global rubber output.
An infographic showing area of rubber-related deforestation between 2001 and 2016 for individual countries in Southeast Asia. Credit: Nature journal.
Another review of case studies and analysis of recent trends in rubber area and yield also found that rubber is regularly linked to deforestation. It was published in Conservation Letters on Wednesday.
As demand grows and yields stagnate, continued deforestation for rubber is to be expected, lead author Eleanor Warren-Thomas warned.
“Some 2.7 million to 5.3 million hectares of additional harvested area could be needed to meet industry estimates of demand by 2030,” she said.
“It is critical that existing rubber producers are supported to improve their yields and maintain production, to avoid ongoing expansion of plantation area.”
‘Sobering’ result
Rubber, a crucial rainforest product, is obtained by tapping latex from specific trees native to the Amazon and now widespread in tropical regions. The collected latex is processed to boost flexibility and durability through heat treatment.
Rubber production’s link to deforestation was acknowledged before, but it was difficult to quantify the extent of this harm due to distinguishing it from natural forest cover in satellite imagery.
As a result, the issue received limited attention in assessments of losses from commercial plantations, according to Yunxia Wang, the study’s lead author in Nature.
“However, thanks to expanding earth observation and computing technology, there are increasing opportunities to map ‘difficult’ commodities. The results have been sobering,” she added.
Although rubber-related deforestation is prevalent, senior author Antje Ahrends expressed specific concerns about specific countries.
“In Cambodia, for example, over 40% of rubber plantations are associated with deforestation,” she said.
19% of that was in key biodiversity areas, according to research.
The Nature journal study said the rubber impact in Southeast Asia is still lower than that of oil palm, but not by a factor of 8 to 10 as previously suggested, but only by a factor of 2.5 to 4.0.
“With 70% of the world’s natural rubber yields destined for tire manufacture, demand is not likely to diminish, and the threat this poses to biodiversity should not be underestimated,” Ahrends said.
“In addition, while predominantly grown by smallholders with the potential to support livelihoods, rubber is also associated with land grabbing and human rights infringement in some countries.”
Both studies stress the importance of stopping rubber-related deforestation without marginalizing the 85% of smallholder farmers who are often less than 5 hectares in size who contribute to natural rubber production.
A new regulation is set to be implemented in the European Union next year, aiming to prohibit commodity importers from purchasing products that contribute to deforestation. It will include soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa, coffee, and rubber.
Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.
A Saudi-owned farm in the middle of the Arizona desert has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story eight years ago. The farm is using massive amounts of water to grow hay and export it to Saudi Arabia in the midst of a water crisis in the American West.
Since then, 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. Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knew they were investing in a local land deal, which resulted in draining down the aquifer of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling 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 river water.
Halverson’s investigation into water use in the West is just one slice of his reporting into a global scramble for food and water, which is featured in an upcoming documentary, “The Grab” by director Gabriela Cowperthwaite. “The Grab” will be coming soon to a theater or screen near you.
A new study from a group of agricultural researchers found that nearly 18,000 deaths occur annually in the United States due to air pollution coming from farms.
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that gases associated with manure and animal feed are producing particles that are able to drift hundreds of miles away from their source. Most of the deaths attributable to farm pollution, however, come from animal-based agriculture, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths the study uncovered.
Chronic exposure to increased levels of fine particulate matter (sometimes shortened to PM2.5) that is released from farms “increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke,” an analysis of the study noted.
Notably, deaths associated with farm pollution are more localized than deaths that occur with greenhouse gas pollution. Communities upwind from farms discharging the pollutants are at greatest risk, said Jason Hill, University of Minnesota professor and a lead author of the study. In other words, the health effects from agriculture-based air pollution tend to be more localized, dependent upon local weather patterns and other factors.
While that reduces the risk from these pollutants at the national and global levels (areas most affected by this type of pollution are in eastern North Carolina, California’s Central Valley and the Upper Midwest), the annual number of deaths caused by farm pollution now exceed deaths caused by pollution from coal power plants in the U.S.
The biggest culprit behind the deaths from farm pollution, in the study’s estimation, is ammonia, a chemical that’s released by manure and fertilizer, and which often combines with other pollutants found on farms, including nitrogen and sulfur. Hill, speaking with The Washington Post about the study, pointed out that animal waste is often stored in “lagoons” on farms, where huge amounts of ammonia are generated by the breakdown of animal feces. Ammonia is also created when farmers apply too much fertilizer on crops.
According to the study, livestock waste and fertilizer overuse likely accounted for about 12,400 deaths per year. While particulate matter emanating from “dust from tillage, livestock dust, field burning, and fuel combustion in agricultural equipment use” accounted for around 4,800 more deaths annually.
Agriculture industry leaders were quick to push back against the study’s findings. “U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” claimed Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council.
A spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, which runs industrial hog operations in North Carolina, agreed with Monroe’s contentions, citing a study from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which said it didn’t find air quality problems in the areas where they had farms. But that study has some noteworthy flaws, including the fact that monitors used to detect ammonia levels were set up far away from the farms themselves.
Ammonia is a reactive chemical, and is difficult to detect unless a significant amount is released at one time.
“Air quality–related health benefits … can be achieved through the actions of food producers and consumers,” the study’s authors said. Reducing particulate-related emissions, promoting dietary shifts in animals, reducing food loss and waste, and other methods are cited in the study as helpful to reducing the number of deaths from agricultural air pollution.
“The greatest benefits are from changes in livestock waste management and fertilizer application practices,” the study said. “Producer-side interventions in the 10 percent of counties with the highest mitigation potential alone could prevent 3,600 deaths per year.”
Methods based out of regenerative agriculture — described as “a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm” by the Climate Reality Project — could also be beneficial for scaling back farm-based air pollution, particularly in California, where such efforts could potentially reduce the impact of wildfires in the state. Such methods (including encouraging animals to graze natural plants, shrubs, or grass on the land, rather than animal feed, and engaging in no-till farming strategies to increase moisture levels in the soil) have been cited by farmer Alexis Koefoed as helping her family’s farm survive a wildfire last year.
“I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.
