The Chilean Minister of Agriculture, Antonio Walker, said that “the water issue has a fundamental role (…) Chile has water, it discharges more than 10 billion cubic meters into the sea every year and if we only took advantage of 20% we could irrigate one million more hectares and provide irrigation security. What is the problem in Chile? We have water, but a very precarious irrigation infrastructure ”.

The declarations of the Minister of Agriculture were given in the context of the conversation panels held at the last FruitCare2020, organized by the Federation of Fruit Exporters of Chile (Fedefruta), where there was consensus that the country continues with a water deficit "and technically in drought or water crisis ”despite the rains in June and July.

Fedefruta 

Jorge Valenzuela, president of Fedefruta, added that, so far, the State is in debt in the investment for water infrastructure.

“In practice, having a vision of water under the premise of making large reservoirs has caused us a trap, and that has been a mistake in the discussion of public policies. Today we need water matrices by basin, because each one is different due to its configuration, slope, amount of water in the mountains, etc., incorporate desalination plants in the regions whose configurations allow it, and connect them with intermediate reservoirs”, he assured.

The coming debate

Regarding the legal aspect, Rodrigo Vergara, former president of the Central Bank, pointed out that "it is important to make it clear that there is going to be a debate in the Constitution regarding the issue of water, there is no doubt about it, but we must also be clear about what things are in the Constitution, and which ones go into public policies and the Law. In the Constitution we are going to have all the discussion about the concept of national good for public use and the issue of water prioritization. The rest are public policy issues, where we have to work a lot more today”.

In this same perspective, Minister Antonio Walker finally added that "before, one could have water and not use it, but in the future, you will not be able to have water without using it for an objective, then great changes are coming, a tremendous debate that must be be technical.

Mega drought 

Chile has faced perhaps the deepest drought ever suffered in the central area of ​​the country, accumulating more than a decade of water shortages in a consecutive way, so specialists do not hesitate to classify these years as the worst in the country's history.

Although it is true that these phenomena do not occur on certain dates, nor can their intensity or prolongation be determined in advance over time, they generally correspond to cycles that have a maturation that has already been learned to know, so the The historical norm is that dry and wet periods alternate every 20 years or so.

Cycles or permanent reality?

The academic and director of the Center for Agriculture and Environment (Agrimed) of the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences of the University of Chile, Fernando Santibáñez, is the most consulted expert on these issues and explains that these cycles are associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), which is a variation of the climate that alternates phases of warming and cooling of the ocean every 20 or 30 years.

However, he warns that there is a possibility that this state of affairs will be maintained with a greater permanence in time, due to a phenomenon called Abrupt Climate Change, which consists in that in a decade the climate reality can change radically and stop being a cycle to settle as a permanent reality. This climatic phenomenon has already occurred in different countries and regions, abruptly changing the weather conditions in an irreversible way.