State Pension Fund Is Helping a Middle Eastern Firm Export Arizona’s Precious Groundwater – By Nathan Halverson (Mother Jones) / Aug 10, 2023
“It makes me angry,” says a La Paz County supervisor. “It’s unbelievable.”
This article is a collaboration between Mother Jones and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Also listen to Reveal’s accompanying podcast, “The Great Arizona Water Grab.”
As rural Arizonans face the prospect of wells running dry, foreign firms are sucking up vast amounts of the state’s groundwater to grow hay for Saudi Arabia and other wealthy nations. Now it turns out that a key investor in this water transfer scheme is Arizona’s own employee retirement fund.
In La Paz County, a rural community about 100 miles west of Phoenix, Al Dahra Farms USA has been running a 3,000-acre farming operation in the Sonoran desert, draining down the same groundwater that the county’s residents rely on to fill their wells. The Emirati-owned farming company tapped into a former public water supply in 2013 to grow hay that gets shipped to countries in Asia and the Middle East.
The state of Arizona helped fund the land deal that allowed Al Dahra to tap into the groundwater in La Paz County, according to records obtained by Reveal. The state’s retirement system invested $175 million in 2012 into an East Coast company that bought about 20 square miles of land that had previously been set aside as a public water source. The company, International Farming Corporation, then leased some of the land to Al Dahra.
