Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus (2016) begins with the claim that pandemics, among other human scourges, are behind us. An emergency plan allows local authorities to contract water tankers.'Bring Out Your Dead,' depicting a death cart and mourners in 17th-century London, by Edmund Evans (Wikimedia Commons) There is a ban on using drinking water to irrigate parks and gardens or for street cleaning, and plans to increase the amount of recycled water that can be introduced into rivers. “If the drought continues, in the case of fruit trees we can irrigate enough to save the trees but not enough for them to bear fruit.”Īt the end of February, a number of measures were agreed by the Catalan government, including a 40% reduction in water used for agriculture, a 15% reduction for industrial use, and a cut in the average daily supply for each resident from 250 litres to 230 litres.

It’s vital that we don’t just improvise from day to day. “If we decide that this year we can only cultivate a quarter of the available land then we have to decide what crops to prioritise. “The question is how to manage the resources we have,” says Josep Carles Vicente, an olive farmer in Priorat, 60km south-west of Verdú. In Catalonia as a whole, water reserves are down to about 26%. In Catalonia as a whole, water reserves are down to about 26% and Samboda and his neighbours are running out. Standing on the bridge over the reservoir there is no sign of water but rather an improvised race track for trail bikes. The problem is the water for the canal comes from the Rialb reservoir, 75km away. A series of small reservoirs are supplied with water from the Segarra-Garrigues canal. “If it doesn’t rain in April and we have another year like last year, the vines won’t survive,” says Juan Samboda, a member of Pagesos o conills (Farmers or rabbits), who grows cereals, vines, olives and chickpeas near Verdú.ĭrought is endemic in Lleida, says Samboda, but he points with pride to the area’s modern irrigation system, which is driven almost entirely by gravity. In an effort to reduce the numbers, the government has permitted the use of aluminium phosphate, which releases toxic phosphine gas when introduced into burrows. The Catalan government has said that more than 250,000 rabbits need to be killed by September to contain the population, according to reports, but it is a task beyond the means of the region’s disappearing breed of aged hunters. Samboda checks his crops for damage caused by rabbits.

A plague year