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The death toll from floods and landslides unleashed by a tropical storm in the Philippiones jumps sharply to 98

The death toll from a storm that battered the Philippines has jumped to 98, the national disaster agency said Monday, with little hope of finding survivors in the worst-hit areas.

Just over half of the fatalities were from a series of flash floods and landslides unleashed by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which destroyed villages on the southern island of Mindanao on Friday.

Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year, but storms that do reach the region tend to be deadlier than in Luzon and central parts of the country.

“We have shifted our operation from search and rescue to retrieval operation because the chances of survival after two days are almost nil,” said Naguib Sinarimbo, civil defence chief of the Bangsamoro region in Mindanao.

The number of fatalities is likely to rise, with the national disaster agency recording 63 people still missing and scores of others injured.

The Philippine Coast Guard posted pictures on Facebook showing its personnel in devastated Kusiong village, in Maguindanao del Norte province of Mindanao, wading through thigh-high mud and water, using long pieces of timber in the search for more bodies.

Kusiong was buried by a massive landslide, which created a huge mound of debris, just below several picturesque mountain peaks. 

Meanwhile, survivors continued the heartbreaking task of once again cleaning up their sodden homes.

Residents swept muddy water from their houses and shops as their furniture and other belongings dried in the now sunny streets of Noveleta municipality, south of the capital, Manila.

“In my entire life living here, it’s the first time we experienced this kind of flooding,” said Joselito Ilano, 55, whose house was flooded by waist-high water.

“I am used to flooding here but this is just the worst, I was caught by surprise.”

Perfidia Seguendia, 71, and her family lost all their belongings except the clothes they were wearing when they fled to their neighbour’s two-storey house.

“Everything was flooded — our fridge, washing machine, motorcycle, TV, everything,” Seguendia told AFP.

“All we managed to do was to cry because we can’t really do anything about it. We weren’t able to save anything, just our lives.”

– More rain on the way –

Nalgae inundated villages, destroyed crops and knocked out power in many regions as it swept across the country.

It struck on an extended weekend for All Saints’ Day, which is on Tuesday, when millions of Filipinos travel to visit the graves of loved ones.

Scientists have warned that deadly and destructive storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

The state weather forecaster warned that another tropical depression was heading towards the Philippines even as Nalgae moved across the South China Sea.

The new weather system could bring more heavy rain and misery to areas badly affected by Nalgae.

Landslides and flash floods originating from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by storms in the Philippines in recent years.

In April, deadly landslides and flooding triggered by another tropical storm smashed farming and fishing communities in the central province of Leyte. 

The death toll from floods and landslides unleashed by a tropical storm in the Philippiones jumps sharply to 98

The death toll from a storm that battered the Philippines has jumped to 98, the national disaster agency said Monday, with little hope of finding survivors in the worst-hit areas.

Just over half the fatalities were from a series of flash floods and landslides unleashed by Tropical Storm Nalgae, that destroyed villages on the southern island of Mindanao on Friday.

Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year, but storms that do reach the region tend to be deadlier than in Luzon and central parts of the country.

“We have shifted our operation from search and rescue to retrieval operation because the chances of survival after two days are almost nil,” said Naguib Sinarimbo, civil defence chief of the Bangsamoro region in Mindanao.

The number of fatalities is likely to rise, with the national disaster agency recording 63 people still missing in its latest report.

Scores were injured. 

As rescue teams searched through mud and debris for more bodies, survivors continued the heartbreaking task of cleaning up their sodden homes.

Residents swept muddy water from their homes and shops as their furniture and other belongings dried in the now sunny streets of Noveleta municipality, south of the capital, Manila.

“In my entire life living here, it’s the first time we experienced this kind of flooding,” said Joselito Ilano, 55, whose house was flooded by waist-high water.

“I am used to flooding here but this is just the worst, I was caught by surprise.”

Nalgae inundated villages, destroyed crops and knocked out power in many regions as it swept across the country.

It struck on an extended weekend for All Saints’ Day, which is on Tuesday, when millions of Filipinos travel to visit the graves of loved ones.

Scientists have warned that deadly and destructive storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

The state weather forecaster warned that another tropical depression was heading towards the Philippines even as Nalgae moved across the South China Sea.

The new weather system could bring more heavy rain and misery to areas badly affected by Nalgae.

Landslides and flash floods originating from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by storms in the Philippines in recent years.

In April, deadly landslides and flooding triggered by another tropical storm smashed farming and fishing communities in the central province of Leyte. 

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said she will skip next month's COP27 talks in Egypt "for many reasons"

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said on Sunday she will skip next month’s COP27 talks in Egypt, slamming the global summit as a forum for “greenwashing”.

“I’m not going to COP27 for many reasons, but the space for civil society this year is extremely limited,” she said during a question and answer at the launch of her latest book at London’s Southbank Centre.

The 19-year-old activist had previously expressed solidarity on Twitter with “prisoners of conscience” being held in Egypt ahead of the UN’s 27th conference on climate, opening in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on November 6.

“The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing,” she said.

The COP conferences, she added, “are not really meant to change the whole system”, but instead encourage gradual progress.

“So as it is, the COPs are not really working, unless of course we use them as an opportunity to mobilise.”

Released on Thursday, Thunberg’s “The Climate Book” includes about 100 contributions from various experts, including economist Thomas Piketty, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the writer Naomi Klein.

Thunberg’s royalties for the book will go to her eponymous foundation, which will distribute them to charitable organisations working on environmental issues.

The activist said she wanted the book to “be educational, which is a bit ironic since my thing is school strikes”, referring to her protests in front of the Swedish parliament starting in 2018.

Again and again on Sunday, Thunberg called for more people to get involved in climate activism, saying the time had come for “drastic changes” to the status quo.

“In order to change things, we need everyone — we need billions of activists,” she said.

Sun setting on the Tigris: Iraqi fisherman Naim Haddad plys the Shatt al-Arab near Basra

It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself.

But today the Tigris is dying. 

Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where — with its twin river the Euphrates — it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.

Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.

Battered by one natural disaster after another, it is one of the five countries most exposed to climate change, according to the UN.

From April on, temperatures exceed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and intense sandstorms often turn the sky orange, covering the country in a film of dust.

Hellish summers see the mercury top a blistering 50 degrees Celsius — near the limit of human endurance — with frequent power cuts shutting down air-conditioning for millions.

The Tigris, the lifeline connecting the storied cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, has been choked by dams, most of them upstream in Turkey, and decreasing rainfall. 

An AFP video journalist travelled along the river’s 1,500-kilometre (900-mile) course through Iraq, from the rugged Kurdish north to the Gulf in the south, to document the ecological disaster that is forcing people to change their ancient way of life.  

– Kurdish north: ‘Less water every day’ –

The Tigris’ journey through Iraq begins in the mountains of autonomous Kurdistan, near the borders of Turkey and Syria, where local people raise sheep and grow potatoes.

“Our life depends on the Tigris,” said farmer Pibo Hassan Dolmassa, 41, wearing a dusty coat, in the town of Faysh Khabur. “All our work, our agriculture, depends on it.  

“Before, the water was pouring in torrents,” he said, but over the last two or three years “there is less water every day”.

Iraq’s government and Kurdish farmers accuse Turkey, where the Tigris has its source, of withholding water in its dams, dramatically reducing the flow into Iraq.

According to Iraqi official statistics, the level of the Tigris entering Iraq has dropped to just 35 percent of its average over the past century.  

Baghdad regularly asks Ankara to release more water. 

But Turkey’s ambassador to Iraq, Ali Riza Guney, urged Iraq to “use the available water more efficiently”, tweeting in July that “water is largely wasted in Iraq”.

He may have a point, say experts. Iraqi farmers tend to flood their fields, as they have done since ancient Sumerian times, rather than irrigate them, resulting in huge water losses.

– Central plains: ‘We sold everything’ –

All that is left of the River Diyala, a tributary that meets the Tigris near the capital Baghdad in the central plains, are puddles of stagnant water dotting its parched bed.

Drought has dried up the watercourse that is crucial to the region’s agriculture.  

This year authorities have been forced to reduce Iraq’s cultivated areas by half, meaning no crops will be grown in the badly-hit Diyala Governorate. 

“We will be forced to give up farming and sell our animals,” said Abu Mehdi, 42, who wears a white djellaba robe.  

“We were displaced by the war” against Iran in the 1980s, he said, “and now we are going to be displaced because of water. Without water, we can’t live in these areas at all.”

The farmer went into debt to dig a 30-metre (100-foot) well to try to get water. “We sold everything,” Abu Mehdi said, but “it was a failure”. 

The World Bank warned last year that much of Iraq is likely to face a similar fate. 

“By 2050 a temperature increase of one degree Celsius and a precipitation decrease of 10 percent would cause a 20 percent reduction of available freshwater,” it said. 

“Under these circumstances, nearly one third of the irrigated land in Iraq will have no water.”

Water scarcity hitting farming and food security are already among the “main drivers of rural-to-urban migration” in Iraq, the UN and several non-government groups said in June.

And the International Organization for Migration said last month that “climate factors” had displaced more than 3,300 families in Iraq’s central and southern areas in the first three months of this year.

“Climate migration is already a reality in Iraq,” the IOM said.

– Baghdad: sandbanks and pollution –

This summer in Baghdad, the level of the Tigris dropped so low that people played volleyball in the middle of the river, splashing barely waist-deep through its waters.

Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources blames silt because of the river’s reduced flow, with sand and soil once washed downstream now settling to form sandbanks.

Until recently the Baghdad authorities used heavy machinery to dredge the silt, but with cash tight, work has slowed.

Years of war have destroyed much of Iraq’s water infrastructure, with many cities, factories, farms and even hospitals left to dump their waste straight into the river.

As sewage and rubbish from Greater Baghdad pour into the shrinking Tigris, the pollution creates a concentrated toxic soup that threatens marine life and human health.

Environmental policies have not been a high priority for Iraqi governments struggling with political, security and economic crises.

Ecological awareness also remains low among the general public, said activist Hajer Hadi of the Green Climate group, even if “every Iraqi feels climate change through rising temperatures, lower rainfall, falling water levels and dust storms”.

– South: salt water, dead palms –

“You see these palm trees? They are thirsty,” said Molla al-Rached, a 65-year-old farmer, pointing to the brown skeletons of what was once a verdant palm grove.

“They need water! Should I try to irrigate them with a glass of water?” he asked bitterly. “Or with a bottle?” 

“There is no fresh water, there is no more life,” said the farmer, a beige keffiyeh scarf wrapped around his head.

He lives at Ras al-Bisha where the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates river, the Shatt al-Arab, empties into the Gulf, near the borders with Iran and Kuwait.

In nearby Basra — once dubbed the Venice of the Middle East — many of the depleted waterways are choked with rubbish.

To the north, much of the once famed Mesopotamian Marshes — the vast wetland home to the “Marsh Arabs” and their unique culture — have been reduced to desert since Saddam Hussein drained them in the 1980s to punish its population.

But another threat is impacting the Shatt al-Arab: salt water from the Gulf is pushing ever further upstream as the river flow declines.

The UN and local farmers say rising salination is already hitting farm yields, in a trend set to worsen as global warming raises sea levels.

Al-Rached said he has to buy water from tankers for his livestock, and wildlife is now encroaching into settled areas in search of water.

“My government doesn’t provide me with water,” he said. “I want water, I want to live. I want to plant, like my ancestors.”

– River delta: a fisherman’s plight – 

Standing barefoot in his boat like a Venetian gondolier, fisherman Naim Haddad steers it home as the sun sets on the waters of the Shatt al-Arab. 

“From father to son, we have dedicated our lives to fishing,” said the 40-year-old holding up the day’s catch.

In a country where grilled carp is the national dish, the father-of-eight is proud that he receives “no government salary, no allowances”.

But salination is taking its toll as it pushes out the most prized freshwater species, which are replaced by ocean fish.

“In the summer, we have salt water,” said Haddad. “The sea water rises and comes here.”

Last month local authorities reported that salt levels in the river north of Basra reached 6,800 parts per million — nearly seven times that of fresh water.

Haddad can’t switch to fishing at sea because his small boat is unsuitable for the choppier Gulf waters, where he would also risk run-ins with the Iranian and Kuwaiti coastguards.

And so the fisherman is left at the mercy of Iraq’s shrinking rivers, his fate tied to theirs. 

“If the water goes,” he said, “the fishing goes. And so does our livelihood.”

Kawit and other neighbourhoods in towns and cities just outside Manila remained under water

Emergency workers scrambled to rescue residents trapped by floods in and around the Philippine capital on Sunday as Tropical Storm Nalgae swept out of the country after killing at least 48 people.

Several neighbourhoods in towns and cities just outside Manila remained under water after the storm raked across the main island of Luzon overnight, cutting power supplies and inflicting damage.

The death toll from the storm rose to 48, the national disaster agency said on Sunday, most of them from a series of flash floods and landslides that destroyed villages on the southern island of Mindanao on Friday.

In the Manila suburb of Paranaque, rescuers swam through three-metre (10-foot) floodwaters overnight to reach 60 people including children marooned on an upper floor of a building, a local official said.

“They were shouting and crying in panic because they really have no way out” after floodwaters rose as they attended a party, village chief Noel Japlos told AFP.

“We did not expect the water to go this high. If we weren’t able to rescue them all, some of them could have died,” he added.

Video footage taken by the rescue team showed emergency workers in life vests using a rope to lead them out of the building while children were put on improvised floats.

In nearby Kawit town, a corpse in a white coffin floated on a flooded street, an AFP photographer saw.

Residents said a flash flood overnight likely carried it off from a nearby cemetery.

Kawit residents emerging from receding floods were cleaning up and trying to dry their wet belongings.

“It’s so difficult because we can’t move around due to the flood and we have a two-month-old baby who can’t sleep because there’s no electricity,” Andinor Cairme, a street sweeper, told AFP.

The storm slightly weakened as it roared out into the South China Sea, the state forecaster said. 

Port operations have also slowly resumed as thousands of stranded passengers travel in time for the All Saints’ Day holiday on Tuesday, when millions of Filipinos visit the graves of relatives.

The civil defence office said 22 people were missing and 40 were injured with bridges, roads and crops also destroyed.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms hit the Philippines annually, killing hundreds each year and leaving vast areas of the country in perpetual poverty.

Iraqis have drilled hundreds of new wells at ever greater depth as the groundwater table below keeps dropping

Iraq has long drilled the desert for oil, but now climate stress, drought and reduced river flows are forcing it to dig ever deeper for a more precious resource: water. 

The war-scarred nation and major crude exporter is one of the world’s five countries most impacted by key effects of the climate crisis, says the United Nations.

Compounding the water stress, upstream dams, mainly in Turkey, have vastly reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates, the once mighty rivers that gave birth to Mesopotamian civilisation.

One of Iraq’s millions of hardscrabble farmers bearing the brunt of this ecological crisis is Jabar al-Fatlawi, 50, a father of five with a rough beard and wearing a white robe.

Like his father before him, he has grown wheat and rice in the southern province of Najaf — but not this year, he said, blaming the “severe water shortage”.

To help him keep alive at least his date palms and livestock, he has paid local authorities to dig a well on his dusty patch of land near the town of Al-Mishkhab.

Fatlawi watched as a noisy drill churned up the ground and eventually hit the water table far below, sending up a jet of muddy water that will allow him to battle on, for now.

As Iraq endures its worst drought since 1930, and frequent sandstorms turn the sky orange, he hopes the precious water will allow him to at least grow dill, onions and radishes.

His well is one of hundreds recently drilled in Iraq — at ever greater depth as the groundwater table below keeps dropping.

Fatlawi said he had once dug his own, small-scale well, before the government declared it illegal. 

At any rate, he recalled, “sometimes the water was bitter, sometimes it was salty”.

– Vanished lake –

The short-term solution for farmers like Fatlawi exacerbates a long-term problem as frantic competition heats up for ever more scarce water, experts warn.

Another southern farmer, Hussein Badiwi, 60, said he had been planting barley and grass for livestock on the edge of the Najaf desert for 10 years. 

Like his neighbours, he relies exclusively on water drilling and said the area had seen “a drop in the water level because of the multitude of wells”. 

“Before, we used to dig 50 metres (165 feet) and we had water,” Badiwi said. “Now we have to go down more than 100 metres.”

Iraq, a country of 42 million, is seeing a race to the bottom for the precious groundwater.

The Sawa Lake in the south, a pilgrimage site, this year vanished for the first time in recorded history as some 1,000 illegal wells had sucked away the water table below. 

In a country where one in five people work in agriculture, water shortages have destroyed livelihoods and driven a rural exodus into crowded cities, heightening social tensions.

Anger has flared at a government seen as incompetent and corrupt, and sporadic protests have broken out in the south demanding Baghdad pressure Turkey to release more water from its dams.

– ‘Stolen country’ –

Iraq’s ministry of water resources warned during the blistering summer that “excessive groundwater use has led to many problems” and called for “the preservation of this wealth”. 

To tackle the crisis, authorities have shuttered hundreds of illegal wells.

But they have also drilled some 500 new ones in this year’s first half, with plans for more in at least six provinces ahead of what the ministry predicts will be “another year of drought” in 2023.

Najaf’s head of water resources, Jamil al-Assadi, said fees to drill wells had been reduced by half, and many new ones had been sunk into areas formerly irrigated by rivers and canals. 

The water is intended for “livestock, irrigating orchards and limited plantations”, but insufficient and too salty for wheat fields or rice paddies, he said.

In exchange, “the farmers must use modern irrigation methods” rather than the wasteful flooding of fields they have practised since ancient times.

A United Nations agency has welcomed Iraq’s new regulations, but also suggested water meters on wells and “a pricing system to limit groundwater use”. 

On a national level, Iraq provides “no incentives to encourage the use of modern irrigation technologies,” said the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

Another Iraqi wheat and rice farmer, Salah al-Faraon, complained that the authorities had limited the land he could cultivate “because there is not enough water”. 

“Without rice and wheat, how can we live without income?” asked the 75-year-old. “We can migrate, but to where? The whole country is being stolen.”

Jorge Osiel Lopez prepares wine barrels at the Anatolia winery in Mexico's Guadalupe Valley

When Pau Pijoan began winemaking in Mexico’s Guadalupe Valley it was home to little more than a dozen producers. Two decades later, he fears it is becoming a victim of its own success.

The growing popularity of Mexico’s wine heartland in Baja California has brought an influx of tourists — and with them a proliferation of hotels, restaurants and other development.

“When I bought land, there were 15 to 18 wine producers. Today, there are more than 200,” said Pijoan, a veterinarian by trade.

“We are responsible for this brutal and disorderly growth typical of Mexico,” he said.

Mexico, better known for its tequila and mezcal spirits, is ranked 35th among world wine producers, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV).

The Guadalupe Valley produces around three-quarters of the country’s wine, but vintners fear for the future of their picturesque corner of northwestern Mexico due to tourism and climate change.

They have launched a campaign called “Let’s save the valley,” warning that discos, mass concerts and other leisure activities threaten the vines that bear grape varieties including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Chardonnay.

“Between 2014 and 2019, we lost 18 percent of agricultural land. If we continue on this trend, in 2037 there will be no more arable land,” they said.

Guadalupe Valley must not become a new Tulum, they added, referring to a once-sleepy fishing village in the Yucatan peninsula that has become a tourist magnet.

“Something very curious is happening in the valley: an agricultural activity is combining with a tourist activity, which does not always happen,” said Keiko Nishikawa, spokeswoman for the Santo Tomas vineyard.

“How can we balance this? Obviously we wineries are jointly responsible for what is happening,” she added.

Some restaurants and nightlife venues in the region “offer everything except local wine,” Nishikawa said.

– Industry challenges –

The warnings come as Mexico prepares to host the 43rd World Congress of Vine and Wine, as well as the OIV’s general assembly, starting on Monday.

Ahead of the week-long gathering in Baja California, the organizers symbolically announced that Ukraine would become the 49th member country.

The fallout of the Russian invasion is weighing on the global wine market, after the pandemic saw a boom in online sales.

“Supplies — like bottle tops — arrive later and are more expensive,” as is electricity, said OIV director general Pau Roca.

Even so he feels a “certain optimism” about the industry’s future.

“We are emerging from the crises quite quickly, much more than from the 2008 economic crisis, which was long,” Roca said.

The OIV hopes new technologies will enable producers to cope with economic and climatic challenges. 

Winegrowers have a large amount of data “generated by the sensors in vineyards,” Roca said.

But “we’re not able to integrate them into our decision-making. Artificial intelligence can help us,” he added.

In Argentina, the National University of Cuyo is working on a program “to improve the prognosis of crops” using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

In the Guadalupe Valley, the prospect of worsening water scarcity is among the concerns of locals and winemakers.

“It’s fine that everyone wants to build their own house, but they should also take care of the water because we’ve almost run out,” said 38-year-old resident Luisa Guerrero.

At an endangered turtle hatchling release in Peru

More than 6,000 hatchlings of three species of endangered turtles have been released into lakes and lagoons in Peru’s Amazon basin to help them repopulate, officials said Saturday. 

To achieve that, wildlife officials collect turtle eggs and transfer them from natural beaches of the Amazon basin, to artificial beaches where they are artificially incubated for 60 days until they hatch.

Gustavo Montoya, head of the Cordillera Azul del Sernanp National Park, told AFP that over 6,100 baby turtles of the taricaya, charapa and teparo species have been released into the waters of the Amazon basin.

“With the release of these species at risk, it will be possible to repopulate the lagoons and rivers of the Amazon,” said Montoya.

Environmental scientists say that preserving the Amazon rainforest and its ecosystem is vital for the planet because of its ability to absorb greenhouse gasses.

Around 1,500 police were deployed to the prefect of the Deux-Sevres department Emmanuelle Dubee

Thousands of demonstrators defied an official ban to march on Saturday against the deployment of new water storage infrastructure for agricultural irrigation in western France, some clashing with police.

Clashes between paramilitary gendarmes and demonstrators erupted with Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin reporting that 61 officers had been hurt, 22 seriously.

“Bassines Non Merci”, which organised the protest, said around 30 demonstrators had been injured. Of them, 10 had to seek medical treatment and three were hospitalised.

The pressure group brings together environmental associations, trade unions and anti-capitalist groups against what it claims is a “water grab” by the “agro-industry” in western France.

Local officials said six people were arrested during the protest and that 4,000 people had turned up for the banned demonstration. Organisers put the turnout at 7,000.

The deployment of giant water “basins” is underway in the village of Sainte-Soline, in the Deux-Sevres department, to irrigate crops, which opponents claim distorts access to water amid drought conditions.

Around 1,500 police were deployed, according to the prefect of the Deux-Sevres department Emmanuelle Dubee.

Dubee said on Friday she had wanted to limit possible “acts of violence”, referring to the clashes between demonstrators and security forces that marred a previous rally in March. 

The Sainte-Soline water reserve is the second of 16 such installations, part of a project developed by a group of 400 farmers organised in a water cooperative to significantly reduce mains water usage in summer.

The open-air craters, covered with a plastic tarpaulin, are filled by pumping water from surface groundwater in winter and can store up to 650,000 square metres of water. 

This water is used for irrigation in summer, when rainfall is scarcer. 

Opponents claim the “megabasins” are wrongly reserved for large export-oriented grain farms and deprive the community of access to the essential resource.

Around 1,500 police were deployed to the prefect of the Deux-Sevres department Emmanuelle Dubee

Thousands of demonstrators defied an official ban to march on Saturday against the deployment of new water storage infrastructure for agricultural irrigation in western France, according to organisers.

Clashes between paramilitary gendarmes and demonstrators erupted with Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin reporting that 61 officers had been hurt, 22 seriously, but giving no toll for casualties among protesters.

“Bassines Non Merci” a pressure group that brings together environmental associations, trade unions and anti-capitalist groups, organised the demonstration against what it claims is a “water grab” by the “agro-industry” in western France.

The deployment of giant water “basins” is underway in the village of Sainte-Soline, in the Deux-Sevres department, to irrigate crops, which opponents claim distorts access to water amid drought conditions.

Around 1,500 police were deployed according to the prefect of the Deux-Sevres department Emmanuelle Dubee who said she expected some 5,000 demonstrators to descend on the village of around 350 inhabitants.

Dubee said on Friday that she had wanted to limit possible “acts of violence”, referring to the clashes between demonstrators and security forces that marred a previous rally in March. 

The Sainte-Soline water reserve is the second of 16 such installations, part of a project developed by a group of 400 farmers organised in a water cooperative to significantly reduce mains water usage in summer.

The open-air craters, covered with a plastic tarpaulin, are filled by pumping water from surface groundwater in winter and can store up to 650,000 square metres of water. 

This water is used for irrigation in summer, when rainfall is scarcer. 

Opponents claim the “megabasins” are wrongly reserved for large export-oriented grain farms and deprive the community of access to the essential resource.