‘Water is more valuable than oil’: the corporation cashing in on America’s drought
One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves.Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. … Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land here in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit. More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.
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