Murcia’s farmers fear for the future as Spain cuts water supplies from River Tagus

Spain is one of the EU’s biggest fruit and vegetable producers.

Almost half of the country’s exports are grown by farmers like Juan Francisco Abellaneda, co-founder of farming cooperative Delior.

His salads and watermelons fill the shelves of Europe’s supermarkets throughout the year. These crops are irrigated by water brought from the River Tagus, hundreds of kilometres to the north of Abellaneda’s 300 hectares of fields near Murcia.

But, as Spain faces the realities of climate change with three-quarters of the country at risk of desertification, the government has decided to limit the flow of water from the Tagus to the southeastern Levante.

“There are many thousands of hectares that are cultivated here, as soon as you cut that (the water supplies) by half, well, everything that is not cultivated will be desert, in a few decades, in a few years,” Abellaneda explains.

Without water, the land can’t be irrigated leading to uncertainty about the future. It means he may have to cut some of the 700 staff employed by the Delior cooperative.

“We need the water. If they take it from us, it will be nothing but a desert here,” Abellaneda says.

Water levels in the Tagus, the Iberian peninsula’s longest river, have dropped dangerously low. In some places, the dried-up riverbed can be crossed on foot in summer.

As the Tagus runs dry, the right to pull water from the river - which crosses into Portugal before meeting the Atlantic Ocean - has been the centre of a heated debate.

“The Tagus is suffering," says Domingo Baeza, professor of river ecology at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

"It is degraded in numerous places... because we have far outstripped its capacity (with) uncontrolled expansion of the land it irrigates."

Water is channelled