The Water Trade Is Booming — and Sucking Australia Dry
- Media Manager
- Dec 27, 2023
- 1 min read
Bloomberg
Written By: Peter Waldman, Sinduja Rangarajan, Angus Whitley
and Sybilla Gross
Published: December 27th, 2023
On the world’s driest inhabited continent, water is making a few big investors very rich.
In Australia, more than any other place in the world, water has the power to make or break livelihoods. The driest inhabited continent, it has spent the past three decades building the world’s most advanced water exchange, handing significant control of one of life’s most critical natural resources to the market. The Campbells’ farm was lost partly to drought, but even more so to the well cloaked hand of capitalism.
Today, Australia’s farmers and financiers annually wheel and deal nearly 8,000 gigaliters of water—enough to supply the population of France for a year—at a value of A$4 billion. They source it from 77,000km (48,000 miles) of interconnected rivers and streams, which feed irrigation canals in four of Australia’s six states. Almost all the trading happens in southeastern Australia, in the Murray-Darling Basin, named for Australia’s two longest rivers.
