Water and Labor: Essential for Production, Increasingly Limited. What Are We Really Doing About It?

By Mario Steta

Without water or workers, most businesses would struggle to thrive — but without both, horticultural production simply cannot exist. While this may seem like an overused statement, the truth is undeniable: water scarcity and the ongoing shortage of agricultural labor are now harsh realities in nearly every major blueberry-producing region worldwide. Yet, our collective commitment to improving access, reliability, efficiency, and recognizing the value of these resources often seems to fade as soon as conditions improve.

In regions where water has long been a limiting factor, like Israel and southern Spain, water optimization efforts have been underway for decades. Drip irrigation and fertigation technologies have spread globally with varying levels of sophistication, undoubtedly contributing to improved water efficiency and crop yields. Still, these advances have not been enough to prevent the severe consequences of prolonged droughts. In the past five years alone, we’ve witnessed the wipe-out of vast areas of citrus groves in northern Morocco and nut orchards in California.

Years of drought in places like California and the Iberian Peninsula did lead to some measures aimed at building resilience and optimizing water distribution. But it was only when access to water allocations became truly limited — as happened recently in Huelva, Spain, and the Zambujeira region of Portugal — that growers and governments began to put political differences aside and take meaningful action.

Some encouraging examples from a governmental perspective include:

• Long-needed upgrades to the water distribution systems of the Santa Clara Dam in Odemira, Portugal.
  
• Portugal’s national water strategy, Água que une: Estratégia Nacional para a Gestão da Água, which aims to modernize infrastructure across the country.
  
• Morocco’s national water strategy, which includes plans for several desalination plants, such as the one already operational in Agadir.

Europe is experiencing record-breaking temperatures for the June–July period, and even the U.K. is again considering restrictions on agricultural water use. The reality is clear: without real accountability behind our water usage, no amount of investment or public policy will be enough to meet present or future needs.

Some reflections for the public sector:

• In many countries, water management is fragmented, involving several government entities — sometimes up to seven. There’s an urgent need to streamline authority and responsibility.
  
• Paradoxically, some incentive structures penalize those who use water efficiently.
  
• Legal clarity remains an issue, particularly where proof of water rights or allocated volumes is lacking.
  
• Decision-making powers are often blurred — for example, in Portugal, the Ministry of Agriculture may approve and subsidize water collection projects while other government agencies block them.
  

Can politics finally be set aside to prioritize long-term water strategies? For growers, some key questions arise:

• Are our water rights up to date? Are our wells properly registered?
  
• Do we fully comply with allocated volumes?
  
• Do we measure our extraction accurately and report transparently when required?
  
• Are we actively engaged in improving water efficiency, distribution, and quality — including efforts to prevent pollution?

Fortunately, tools and insights are improving. Companies like Waterplan and Renewable Group now help us better understand water risk in real time and model future hotspots. Unfortunately, examples like Peru — where water availability has been relatively stable — are becoming the exception rather than the rule.

A final thought: we must truly recognize and assign value to water. In regions where access is based on reverse osmosis (RO) infrastructure, water pricing is often more transparent and reflective of actual costs, even when subsidized. But in most parts of the world, the price of water is merely the cost of pumping and distribution, far from representing its real value.

As for the challenges and dynamics of labor, I’ll explore those in a future column. As always, I welcome your thoughts, ideas, and perspectives.

08.07.2025

IBO Editorial