Wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns, the gendarmes appear suddenly in the middle of farm fields misted by morning rain. They stand behind two fences equipped with security cameras and overhead lights, looking every bit like prison guards. But there is no prison for miles, reports The New York Times.
Instead, they guard a large pit intended to serve as a gigantic reservoir. Welcome to the front line of France’s water wars.
World leaders gathered for two weeks at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, debating ways to mitigate the effects of climate change and the conflicts it engenders. But while the competition for scarce water is associated more with arid regions in the Middle East and Africa, Europe is not immune.
After a scorching summer that climatologists called a harrowing postcard from the future, with record heat waves, wildfires and droughts that dried up rivers, France is now embroiled in a widening battle over who should get priority to use its water and how.
The French government has embarked on a plan to build large reservoirs around the country to serve farmers during the increasingly arid spring and summer months.
But what the government calls an adaptation, opponents deem an aberration — what they consider the privatization of water to benefit a few, outdated industrial farmers.
Confrontations between the two sides have grown increasingly ugly — a taste, perhaps, of the water wars predicted to worsen around the world as temperatures rise.
Thousands of activists opposed to the latest reservoir under construction, in the western region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, recently faced off against some 1,600 military police officers in the middle of fields of rapeseed and the dried-up remains of wheat.
That normally picturesque countryside was transformed into a scene from a dystopian novel — police officers wearing riot gear, armored trucks shooting tear gas canisters, smoke billowing and helicopters roaring overhead.
The protesters later paraded with two sections of water pipes they had dug up and dismantled so they could not later feed the reservoir — the latest sabotage of many, which they consider civil disobedience.
Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, described the scene as “eco-terrorism.”
“It’s them that are eco-terrorists,” responded Jean-Jacques Guillet, a former mayor of three villages, watching diggers claw at the red earth on the site days later. “They are terrorizing the environment.”
“They sent 1,600 gendarmes to protect a hole full of pebbles,” he added, looking at four armed military police officers standing nearby.
There are hundreds of thousands of water reservoirs across France that farmers have used for generations, stirring little controversy. To environmentalists, what makes the newest ones different is their size and the source of the water they collect.