On this edition of Your Call's One Planet Series, we discuss an unprecedented deal: a private company purchased land in a tiny Arizona town and sold its water rights to a suburb 200 miles away.
According to the Guardian, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land in Cibola roughly one decade ago. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14 million gross profit. More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing through a canal system to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.
Guest:
Maanvi Singh, West Coast reporter for Guardian US
Resources:
The Guardian: ‘Water is more valuable than oil’: the corporation cashing in on America’s drought
Az Central: Investors are buying up rural Arizona farmland to sell the water to urban homebuilders
