“We are forced to buy water”: here, in Sicily, bins and cisterns have become stable elements of the urban landscape, in an emergency within an emergency that has lasted for decades, which never ends, which brings citizens and farmers to their knees, between extraordinary commissioners, who are given powers, and the long hand of the mafias.
Works never completed, never finished due to environmental constraints, technical problems and internal struggles. At least 45 dams, some never completed, others awaiting adjustments. Who pays the price for all this? Who lives and works here, obviously. Sicilian farmers should receive water from reclamation consortia. In theory. In practice, that water is lost before reaching the fields, dispersed by sieve networks, obsolete pipes and infrastructure that has never been maintained. The result is paradoxical: dry fields even when the dams still contain reserves.
This is why more and more farms are forced to buy water. Bins and cisterns have become stable elements of the Sicilian urban and rural landscape. An absurdity in a region surrounded by the sea, but without a public system capable of guaranteeing an essential right. The latest episode of Report, on Rai 3, brings out a devastating picture.
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Emergencies, mafia powers and blood oranges
In Sicily the water emergency seems to exist only when it needs to be declared. States of emergency, as shown Reportsserve above all to appoint extraordinary commissioners, endowed with special powers and huge resources, managed with procedures in derogation of the ordinary rules. The result, however, is always the same: few construction sites completed, many works blocked, no structural improvements.
The case of the Blufi dam is emblematic: a work never completed amidst environmental constraints, technical problems and – as the investigation tells us – also mafia wars.
Against the backdrop of the water crisis, the judicial side also emerges. Reports reconstructs the connections between politics, clientele and suspicious contracts, recalling the investigation that led to the arrest of the former governor Salvatore Cuffaro. A system in which water becomes a commodity of exchange, power and control, while farmers and citizens remain dry.
One of the symbolic products of Italian agriculture was born on the slopes of Etna: the blood orange. Here the water crisis shows its clearest face. On the one hand those who resist, digging wells, rationing every drop and investing their own resources to avoid closure. On the other, those who have already abandoned: uncultivated fields, closed companies, families forced to give up a job that has lasted for generations.
The message that comes from the investigation is clear and uncomfortable: drought is an aggravating factor, but the real problem is water management. Decades of delays, unnecessary works and non-existent maintenance have transformed a climate crisis into a social and economic disaster.
Agriculture towards desertification
If action is not taken immediately and in a structural way, Sicily risks agricultural desertification which is no longer a prediction, but a process already underway. Fields left to themselves, crops reduced or cancelled, companies closing one after another: less water means less production, but also less work, less income and fewer people willing to stay in the area. When agriculture declines, the human presence of the countryside also declines, increasing degradation, hydrogeological instability and abandonment of internal areas.
The investigation of Reports is clear: without an efficient water network, without transparent management of resources and without overcoming the logic of permanent emergency – which produces commissioners, exemptions and waste but not solutions – growing in Sicily risks becoming a privilege for a few large operators or a thing of the past.
As always, small farmers pay the highest price, crushed between unsustainable costs, rationed water and lack of protection, while an entire region loses pieces of its economy, its identity and its food sovereignty.
