Pumping the Future Dry: Water and Development in the Argentine Grape Belt, 1950-1990

MARK HEALEY; FACUNDO MARTÍN

Columbus

Congreso; 2019 Conference of the American Society for Environmental History; 2019

American Society for Environmental History

In the arid provinces of western Argentina, which receive less than 20 cm of annual rainfall, progress has long demanded water. This is true of the province of San Juan, the subject of my first book, but even more so of its larger neighbor Mendoza. For over a century, Mendoza has embraced a sociotechnical imaginary of ever-expanding irrigation, and this engineering project has produced a robust political and material infrastructure. As the project of expansion began to exhaust the supply of surface water, the province doubled down on the logic of this sociotechnical imaginary, seeking to draw upon groundwater as a solution. Yet this attempt to maintain the larger infrastructure of production would lead to a rapid drawdown of aquifers, an overproduction of grapes, and a combined ecological and market collapse that would unravel the model of irrigated agriculture and the infrastructure it rested upon.