• Infrastructures The four hydraulic blunders of the Andalusian drought

At six o'clock in the afternoon of Monday, May 1, Nuestro Padre Jesús, popularly known in Jaén as El Abuelo, went in procession from his dressing room to walk the streets of the center of the capital. The prayer had only one purpose: to ask for water. Thousands of devotees accompanied one of the most praised images of Andalusian popular religiosity. There were prayers, buses packed with farmers who arrived from the most distant villages of the province and a blessing of the fields by the bishop with the sacred canvas of the Holy Face from the four cardinal points of the Cathedral.

It has not rained in Jaén for months. A few days ago some drops fell in the Natural Park of the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura and Las Villas, the largest green lung in extension of Spain, astonished for years in front of theinsignificant flow of a newborn Guadalquivir. It doesn't rain. And this drought suffered by Jaén and the rest of the Andalusian provinces seems to hide something more serious and unapproachable.

At the end of April, the data on reservoir water in the province were dramatic. Only 645 cubic hectometres remain, representing 27.30 per cent of a total capacity of 2,361.3 cubic hectometres. The worst thing is to compare these data with the average of the last ten years. The reservoir water has plummeted more than thirty-one points, since in 2013 it reached more than 59 percent of the total capacity. The Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation have authorized within the commission of desembalse the emptying of 385 cubic hectometres of water for the irrigation campaign that begins this May. That would leave for human consumption in a province of 632,027 inhabitants (2019 data) less than half of the water that currently exists. The two largest reservoirs in the province, the two large inland seas of Jaén, are the Tranco de Beas, located between the mountains of Segura and Las Villas, and the Giribaile, between the regions of El Condado and La Loma. The first has a capacity of 506 cubic hectometres and is at 29.45 percent. The Giribaile has a capacity of 491 cubic hectometres and stands at 16.29 percent (both data from April 24). The waters of both are intended exclusively for irrigation.

The same trend accuses the Guadalmena, the third largest reservoir in the province, with 22 percent of water dammed. La Fernandina, the fourth reservoir in Jaén and which supplies Linares and La Carolina, is at 39 percent, in a better situation thanks to the fact that much of its flow comes from northern Andalusia and southern Ciudad Real where January was generous in rainfall.

The more than sixty-eight million olive trees that take root in the province of Jaén represent the largest humanized forest in the world. It is one of the most valuable ecological treasures not only in Spain but in Europe. In absolute terms its value, its wealth, its legacy is as if we added dozens of doñanas in a territory of 13,496 square kilometers, the third largest province of Andalusia, after Seville and Cordoba. To summarize it in a single sentence: Diminished the Mediterranean forest, the olive grove has contributed to stop the desertification of Jaén. These days the olive blossom is about to explode and that means two things: That pollen allergies will imprison in their homes the thousands of affected people who each year increase health statistics and that a first projection of the olive harvest campaign that each year begins before can be initiated. Agricultural organizations, large landowners, medium and modest farmers know that these weeks the 2023-2024 harvest is taking shape. And the expectations could not be more dramatic.

an olive grove in the province of Jaén.M.M.P.

We are on the verge of the second worst consecutive harvest in history. The news is that never, since data is available, had there been two harvests in a row with such low olive harvesting and olive oil production. Last season the campaign closed with 652,086 tons of olive oil. And once again the comparison with the previous campaign gives us an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy: In the 2021-2022 campaign, the campaign closed with 1,491,460 tons of olive oil. Or put in percentage: the decrease has been 56 percent. Is the drama set only in Jaén or does the rest of the producers participate in the problem? No one in Europe, neither Italy nor Greece, escapes the decline in production. With data from the European Commission last February, production in the EU-27 is 1,405,000 tons compared to 2,272,000 in the previous season.

What is happening? The answer comes from the scientific community and is unanimous: Climate change caused by human activity is producing a precipitous period of drought that could last for years. There is no longer anyone in politics, in economics and even less in the scientific community who doubts this certainty. In Jaén, the latest conclusions signed from the university level are recent and worrying: "All climate projections coincide in three fundamental changes in weather conditions in the medium and long term for the Mediterranean olive grove: increase in temperatures, decrease in precipitation and rise in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Given these new conditions, olive cultivation will behave differently from what it currently has." This paragraph is part of the report written by the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training of Córdoba, dependent on the Junta de Andalucía, together with professors from the universities ofCórdoba and the Polytechnic of Madrid. The report includes perspectives more typical of a horror film than of a future plan for a Mediterranean basin such as Andalusia. Climate change will not have similar effects in all the Andalusian regions: while it will benefit cold areas such as the north of Granada, it will lead to the ruin of crops in the lower valley of the Guadalquivir, where the summers are increasingly dry, severe and unbearable.

Future prospects

Jaén farmers, however, know well the resilience of the olive tree. It is a hard crop, accustomed to climatic extremism, persistent droughts, hellish summers. "But everything has a limit," say the heads of agrarian organizations such as Asaja that at the request of its national president Pedro Barato demand the urgent convocation of the National Drought Table where a State pact, "which would have to necessarily go through the consensus between the two major parties", offers a horizon of some hope to the dramatic years that await us.

The future prospects for a crop full of culture, history and symbolism – the main economic source of the province of Jaén and much of Andalusia – is today an open (and worrying) debate. A couple of years ago a team of researchers formed by María Benlloch-González, Manuel Benlloch Marín and Ricardo Fernández-Escobar, all of them from the Department of Agronomy of the Technical School of Agronomic and Forestry Engineering of the University of Córdoba, won the fifth edition of the Luis Vañó Research Prize granted by the Jaén firm Castillo de Canena, One of the most prestigious aoves in the world. The projections launched in that work were very worrying: The rise in temperature threatens the production of the olive grove in such a way that a possible increase of four degrees will lead to an advance of the flowering date, an increase in abortion by pistil and a reduction in fruit production. In addition, a warmer temperature influences the characteristics of the olive and the ripening processes, which leads to the tree offering smaller fruits and much lower yield. Francisco Vañó, CEO of Castillo de Canena, puts it this way: "We are facing an unprecedented paradigm where talent, consensus, solidarity and ambition are needed. Climate change is not a future threat. It is a present threat. And in lands like ours the drama can be unimaginable." So much so that companies like Castillo de Canena are preparing for the inevitable by experimenting with new varieties more resistant to drought and the extreme impositions of meteorology.

What do these perspectives translate into? In two realities: An increase in the prices of olive oil at origin, which will have an impact on an uncontrolled increase in the pvp in stores and large surfaces and, even more serious, in a climatic unknown in the landscapes of Jaén and Andalusia that subsist on agriculture.

It takes months and months of incessant rain to recover, at least, fifty percent of the water stored in the swamps of this province. And the prospects, however much they may be, are bleak and desperate.

  • Jaén (Spain)
  • Córdoba
  • Grenade
  • Seville
  • European Commission
  • Drought

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