Arizona is a desert state, everyone knows that, and its share of Colorado River water is inadequate for its cities and farms.
What does that leave? Groundwater, which isn’t regulated. Now let’s visit Wenden, a town in southwestern Arizona, next door to a giant farm owned by a Saudi company that pumps out the groundwater to raise alfalfa which is shipped abroad to feed cows in Saudi Arabia that produce milk for Saudi consumption.
Homes are cheap there, but eventually the town will be uninhabitable. The townspeople can’t drill wells for domestic water supply because the water table is too far underground now. It’ll soon also be out of reach of the well supplying the town’s tiny water utility, owned and run by a local resident.
Floors are unlevel and foundations are cracking because the ground under houses, sheds, and store buildings is sinking. Mud flows across yards; residents line their fences with sheet metal trying to keep it out. Streets are covered with a mud that dries hard as cement.
All of this to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia. Welcome to unregulated capitalism in small-town Arizona. (Read story here.)
Wouldn’t it be better if some rules were in place? Capitalism, like street traffic, works less well on an anarchy basis, when anyone can do anything to anybody and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
But Wenden’s townspeople are getting nowhere in the legislature, because Arizona is a Republican state, and Republicans don’t believe in regulating capitalism, or even for that matter Saudi exploitation of a small Arizona town’s farmland and water to benefit Saudis halfway around the world.
Shouldn’t American farms and water be managed for the benefit of Americans?
Photo: Aerial view of mud-caked Wenden, Arizona, next to Saudi-owned green alfalfa fields
