The Story
Mention the Guaraní Aquifer in hydrological company and you will quickly have people’s attention; it was once described to me by a hydrologist friend as the Taj Mahal of aquifers. Lying under the fertile South American low lands of Argentina, Southern Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay covering an area of land the size of California and Texas combined, the Guaraní Aquifer holds enough water to sustain the world’s population for 200 years. But despite its impressive stats, and strategic importance within the global water debate, the Guaraní Aquifer remains in relative obscurity.
In recent years there has been a move to examine, understand and monitor groundwater to a greater extent, and this has shifted attention towards aquifers, and the Guaraní. But, despite 40% of the US population relying on groundwater for their basic water needs (source: EPA), the general population continues to operate an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ policy towards their water supply.
Map of the Guarani Aquifer
The Guaraní Project documentary was born out of a desire to encourage people to understand that water shortages are not a problem restricted to developing countries. Shortages are reaching crisis point right on our doorsteps: the Ogallala Aquifer that supplies water to 8 million Americans in central US has been drastically depleted by aggressive municipal use, and in 2008, 438 million gallons of water were shipped to Barcelona, Spain, to relieve the worst drought that the region had experience in over 60 years. Water use has grown at twice the rate of the world’s population for the last century, and we’ve reached peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.
Humanity is extracting and polluting the world’s fresh water reserves faster than they can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, and a rising standard of living — has outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.
The Guaraní Project seeks to raise awareness of the global water situation through the story of the Guaraní Aquifer. The story we want to tell combines many threads that are not exclusive to the South American aquifer: the conflict between commercial and municipal use of water, questions of sustainability and environmental protection, and the delicate geo-political situation that surrounds any transboundary water resource.
The Guaraní also offers a few unique threads of its own, including a festering conspiracy theory that a neo-colonialist US is attacking South America sovereignty by buying land on the aquifer: George W Bush owns a 100,000 acre ranch in Paraguay and eco-millionaire Douglas Tompkins, founder of North Face, brought half a million acres of the Esteros del Ibera, a vast Argentine marshland over the Guaraní Aquifer in 2007. There is also a celebrity angle to the story of the Guaraní: the James Bond movie, The Quantum of Solace, despite being set in Bolivia, is allegedly based on uncertain future of the Guaraní Aquifer.
Documentaries and the academic water community have often been uncomfortable bedfellows. In order to have impact past water documentaries appear to have called on scaremongering tactics in an attempt to ‘call to arms’ its viewership, drawing accusations of sensationalism at best, and inaccuracy at worst, from hydrologists.
The Guaraní Project team believes that if we provide the information, people can and will act. We also believe that it is much harder of the four governments that share the Aquifer to continue to enact vacuous policies if public interest has been aroused.
The Mercosur Summit in early August this year ended with an agreement to protect the giant water resource they share. But closer examination of the statute reveals a “bare-bones agreement that contains less than ideal cooperative mechanisms,” commented Gabriel Eckstein, Director of the International Water Law Project in a blog post shortly after the announcement. Eckstein continues to point out that the agreement focuses on the sovereign rights of individual states while limiting the obligation to cooperate and jointly manage the Guaraní Aquifer. The idea that a state has sovereign rights over transboundry water resources harkens back to the long-discredited Harmon Doctrine, as Eckstein highlights.
This latest agreement follows on the heals of the World Bank Guaraní Aquifer System Project, which sought to measure and monitor the Aquifer. The project lasted 6 years and the resulting report offered a framework for continued corporation. But Project has lain cold since the report’s publication in early 2009. Resurgent sentiments that the World Bank project was another US imperialist attempt to cripple the South American people may explain the lack of action.
“The Guaraní system is a striking example of an international water body threatened by environmental degradation,” says Karin Kemper, a water resources specialist with the World Bank. “Without better management, the aquifer is likely to suffer from pollution and rapid depletion. Uncontrolled exploitation could reduce it from a strategic water reserve to a degraded resource that is a focus of conflict in the region.”
As water issues continue to grow in importance, so does the Guaraní Aquifer. But first, the information gap has to be bridged. And The Guaraní Project aspires to use the popular and accessible medium of film and photography to tell a story whose effect ripples throughout the world.