Stymie a river: the American West dries up

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Cybersecurity experts may have been shocked to find that the snooping software called Pegasus was being used by governments around the world, but they wouldn't have been surprised by its origins. Israel has quite a tidy business in hacking tools. And a traditional Nigerian seasoning called iru was, for a while, displaced by the mass-market stock cubes of foreign firms. But die-hard fans of its funky taste are making sure it can still be found—at home and increasingly abroad. First up, though— This week, for the first time ever, America's federal government formally declared a water shortage in the Colorado River. 40 million Americans in 7 states depend on the massive waterway. The region's farmers will now face drastic cuts. For more than 20 years, one long drought has relentlessly dried out the region. But drought might not be the right word. It suggests something temporary. John Ensminger, the boss of Southern Nevada's water authority, says these conditions are here to stay.

We must adapt to the new reality of a warmer, drier future, where today's Colorado River hydrology is not the same hydrology this basin knew a century ago.

The West's famed Joshua trees are already parched and dying. Making sure that whole ecosystems and citizens don't go the same way will take more than just blunt restrictions on usage. Century-old habits and policies will have to change.

If you travel to Lake Mead, which is very close by to Las Vegas and the biggest reservoir in America, it straddles the Colorado River, you see this white, weird-looking strip around the surface of the lake. It's more than 150 feet tall.

Erin Braun is our Mountain West correspondent and is based in Colorado.

And that immediately shows visitors how far the water level has fallen over the years. Locals call it the bathtub ring, and its sister reservoir upriver, Lake Powell, which is on the border of Utah and Arizona, is similarly depleted. Both of the reservoirs are at the lowest levels they've been since each was filled in the 1930s and the 1960s.

And it's not just the bathtub ring. There was this declaration of a water shortage at Lake Mead and the Colorado River. What are the implications of that?

What that means in practice is that come January, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico will see cuts to the amount of water that they're allocated. But because of kind of a patchwork of laws and litigation over the years and the success that Nevada's had with water conservation, it's really farmers in central Arizona that are gonna bear the brunt of these cuts. And going forward, the initial shortage declaration is important, but it's also kind of a harbinger of things to come. And there's a real risk in the next few years of reaching what is called dead pool at the reservoirs. And that means there's still water there that can be taken, but not enough to generate hydropower for the region. So that's also a big concern.

And I know we've spoken on the show before about the megadrought, but let's wind back a bit. How did these water levels get so low in the first place?

Well, it's impossible to ignore the effect that climate change has had on the region. The waters that fill up the Colorado River come from snowpack that accumulates in the Rocky Mountains over the winter and then melts into the river during the spring. Since 2000, when the Millennium Drought began, the Colorado River's flows have declined about 20%, and scientists have attributed about half of that to human-caused climate change. And then making things worse is the fact that 100 years ago, when the river was first divvied up among 7 states in the Southwest, scientists and officials overestimated the amount of water that they would get for the Colorado River. And so ever since then, the river has never been able to meet those expectations. So folks have gotten used to depending on water that they really shouldn't have, and now they're starting to feel the squeeze as the river keeps shrinking.

And so how to undo the mistakes of policymakers past, then? How to deal with this problem now?

The current rules governing the Colorado River expire in 2026, so negotiations are just starting over what what the next iteration is going to look like. But even while those negotiations are ongoing, there are things that officials and utilities and lawmakers can take to help people and farmers and businesses adjust to the cuts. And that starts really with water pricing. Water, even though it is so valuable, especially in the West, is delivered really cheaply by governments and utilities. And if it was based more on kind of a normal supply and demand structure like everything else, I think it would force people to think more about conservation. Right now, really the only incentive to conserve water is your kind of neighborly instinct to help the public good. But all of a sudden, if you're being charged an arm and a leg for overuse, then you might rethink your habits. And in order to help with that, you would need better metering so Americans can know exactly how much they're using and where they can conserve. Water trading would also help. If farmers can trade amongst each other and with cities, then everybody benefits. And finally, there's really great options for conservation in modern recycling systems. Las Vegas is a great example. The utility there says everything that goes down a drain indoors ends up back in Lake Mead and is recycled.

I mean, it sounds easy enough in principle. What are the issues in implementing those kinds of policies?

Yeah, I think one of the things policymakers need to think hard about is in implementing better water pricing, how to best help vulnerable communities like poor rural towns and Native American tribes who wouldn't be able to afford the price of water on an open market. But it also brings up questions of governance. As policymakers go into negotiations, there's a question about what modeling they're looking at. And if they're not looking at scenarios that show the river continuing to decline, then they can't plan for that possibility. And that's not to say that things will get dreadfully worse, but they need the information in order to plan in case it does get worse. And right now we're seeing some evidence of that, but there are also states that hope to build more dams and aqueducts and take more water out of the river, and that just seems slightly tone-deaf at this point. It's important to note that the West as a region has always been hot and dry and inhospitable, but if policymakers and utilities act now, then it doesn't have to become uninhabitable.

And Erin, you've also been speaking with our sister show, Checks and Balance, about water shortages and environmental change in the West more broadly.

Yeah, I was on the last episode and we talked about how things like wildfires and heat waves and drought are affecting and changing the American West, even as more people are moving there. And I get to talk a little bit more about my travels in Las Vegas as well.

Always interested to hear more about your travels, Erin. Thanks very much.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Yesterday, India's Supreme Court agreed to hear more detail on the alleged misuse of electronic spyware by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It's been accused of using Pegasus, a powerful Israeli software tool, to hack into the phones of its citizens. India is far from the only country where Pegasus hacks have raised hackles. Last month, international news organizations revealed that at least 10 governments had used it to hack into the phones of thousands inside and outside their countries. The scandal has cast a spotlight on a wildly successful Israeli export.

Well, both NSO Group and the Israeli government have insisted after previous reports that Pegasus and other cyber tools sold by Israeli companies are only used for the express purposes of counterterrorism —fighting crime.

Anshul Pfeffer is The Economist's Israel correspondent and is based in Jerusalem.

But what we've seen in these reports is that Pegasus seems to have been used also by a number of governments to hack into the smartphones of lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, and politicians.

How has the Israeli government responded to that uproar?

Well, the Israeli government has barely responded. When the reports first came out, there was a very oblique statement saying that the Israeli government has had no access to any data collected by Pegasus and that the export of it is heavily regulated. Most of the people I've been able to speak to, both in the private sector and government, have been strictly off record. Most of them are saying, you know, what do you want? This is the price of doing business. Everybody is at this, as everyone is hacking. You can hire the services of a hacker on the darknet.

Sure, what you can find on the dark web is not regulated, but surely there are regulations in place to stop the misuse of stuff that's being openly sold on an international market.

So the export of cyberware is regulated in Israel under a law which was passed in 2007, which was designed to regulate the weapons sales. Getting an export license is a fairly rigorous procedure. But once an Israeli company has received that license to sell a certain product to a foreign government, the expressed use of the product will be either counterterrorism or fighting crime. But there's no procedure whereby the company actually checks and has any kind of follow-up to see that that is the case. And as we know, many governments will classify dissidents and journalists and activists as terrorists or criminals. They justify it. Israel doesn't do any serious due diligence checking that it's actually being used for the stated purposes.

And how is it that Israel seemingly uniquely got into this business of selling these kinds of tools openly in the international market?

Well, Israel traditionally has always tried to drum up business for its weapons industries as a way also of financing its own weapon development. And this is usually worked through private companies which have close links to the governments, both in the executives and engineers in the companies who have themselves served in Israel's military and intelligence community. What we're also seeing with this new government is that amongst the senior ministers, there are quite a few people who have also themselves been involved in this industry. The new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made his own fortune from companies specializing in online banking security. His right-hand woman, Interior Minister Ayat Shaked, was also in the industry, is close to the NSO executives. Defense Minister Benny Gantz was for a short while the chairman of a company specializing in data mining for counter-terror and fighting crime purposes. So we have a lot of very senior Israeli leaders in bed with the industry, and therefore they're not that eager to shine a light on it.

But now that this has spilled out into the open in quite a big way and other world leaders have been implicated, potential targets and so on, do you think that international pressure could be brought to bear on what seems to be a fairly unregulated industry?

Well, the international pressure could result into a higher level of regulation, but since most governments are in on this in some way or another, I think it's more likely that the governments which have some kind of leverage over Israel will insist that they get some kind of immunity from Israel's cyber spying products. And we know that the Americans and the Russians have already some kind of secret deal with Israel on that. So you can expect other countries trying to get that kind of treatment. I don't think we're going to see emerging from this some kind of international regulations.

So it's spilled into the open a bit, but it'll just go back into the shadows and it will be business as usual again, and so, and similar companies will continue to succeed.

So the question really is not so much what governments will do, because I don't think governments are going to want to regulate this too much. I think the question is really whether the wider tech industry is going to try and tamp this down. And we've already seen that Amazon have taken NSO off its cloud service. We've seen that the equity fund that controls NSO is thinking now of selling it. And the bigger worry for Israeli tech companies is that they'll somehow be tainted by this. So I'm already hearing of some Israeli companies which are appointing in-house ethics committees to supervise such deals. And there is a growing concern here in Israel that this could damage them financially Funds may not want to invest in Israeli tech firms anymore. Partnerships that they have with big tech companies could be in jeopardy. So I think the chances are that if we'll see any kind of regulation, it'll come from the private sector rather than from governments.

Anshul, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. The fermented locust bean known as iru is a traditional seasoning in Nigeria. For a while, it fell out of favor. But now, thanks in part to renewed interest from the Nigerian diaspora, the bean is making a comeback.

"Iru has this unmistakable cheesy tang that hits you before you see it.

And this smell is essential to its flavor." Ore Ogunbiyi writes about foreign affairs for The Economist.

"Its aromatic compounds are enriched even further when you toss these beans in a smoky and bleached palm oil." OK, I for one am all in for a punchy aromatic seasoning.

Why was it that iru had a dip in popularity?

After Nigeria got its independence, Nestlé came to Nigeria and introduced its Maggi cube. Maggi then became much more popular as a source of seasoning than iru did, particularly in urban centers. Hi guys, today I'm going to be showing you how to make the popular ayamashi sauce. But iru, despite how smelly it is, is making a worldwide comeback, thanks in part to the revival of a party dish that uses it as a main ingredient. Ayam ashe is delicious. Ayam ashe is a stew that's made with green peppers, which are fried and softened in oil. It is filled with very tender chunks of beef and iru, which gives it a slight bite.

You mentioned this cheesy tang. Where does it come from? How is iru made?

So that pungence comes from this really elaborate process of fermentation. I spoke to Billy Kissu Raji, who lives in Ibadan, and she was taught to ferment iru by her mother-in-law. She buys these yellow-tinged seeds from a market called Bodija and boils them for 12 hours in a cauldron. She then removes the chaff to reveal these black brown beans. Peels them with the balls of her feet, washes them through a sieve, then boils them again for another 12 hours. Eventually, she dry roasts them and covers them with cloths and a raffia tray to let them ferment overnight. Finally, she rubs the iru in salt to conserve it, then rolls it up in dry leaves ready to sell. So a few small wraps weighing about 20 grams each go for ��50, which is the equivalent to 10 cents.

That is a lot of work to make 10 cents. I mean, who is she selling it to? So Mrs.

Raji, like so many other sellers, survives mostly on the patronage of foreign customers who buy as much as $25 worth at a time to use it in ayamashi abroad. Decades ago, you would have struggled to find iru on shelves anywhere outside of West Africa. But as ayamashi and similar dishes have become more popular, iru can be found now wherever Nigerians are. I spoke to Miss Soko, who grew up on her father's really simple iru-based stews. She's lived in the Netherlands and Canada, and she finds iru in shops everywhere.

Village markets are typically annexes of main stores selling what you'd normally find in Nigerian markets. You go there, you'll find frozen iru, you'll find fresh iru, you'll find powdered iru on the shelves in ways that you couldn't 10 years ago.

It's somewhat surprising that she sees it in shops everywhere now, right? That wasn't always the case.

Yeah, iru was kind of touted as this very local ingredient, but now is actually really popular in the Nigerian diaspora. Whether or not Western foodies catch on to this super bean, iru is fueling Nigerian partygoers everywhere. And a once-threatened micro-industry is back with a bang. Aurea, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.