Sicilian lemon grower Rosario Cognata is furious: his fruit is withering because of the drought, while just a few kilometers away rainwater is pouring into the sea.
The Trinita Dam, built in 1959 in the town of Castelvetrano in the west of the Mediterranean island, has not been tested and therefore has never been officially approved for use.
So once the reservoir is filled with winter rains, the authorities open the floodgates and the blue gold is poured into a canal that leads to the sea.
“Okay, the drought is due to the lack of rain. But we don’t know how to manage the water we have — and it’s not the farmers’ responsibility,” Cognata said as he looked at the dam, the low water level revealing rusted steel pipes.
The dam was intended to feed local irrigation networks, so the farmers’ wells were closed by the authorities.
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But the infrastructure not only never got the go-ahead, it was subsequently neglected.
The pipes are now in ruins, leaving some desperate farmers to dig illegal wells to compensate.
Cognata blames decades of incompetent local and government water management.
“They were never interested,” he said.
It’s a charge repeated often by Italy’s main agricultural body Coldiretti, which owns Cognata.
Obsolete network
Sicilians have always known drought, but global warming is accentuating its frequency and intensity.
This year “rainfall has decreased by around 350 mm compared to an average annual rainfall of 750 mm,” said hydrology professor Leonardo Valerio Noto.
In his office at the University of Palermo, he analyzes satellite images of the island’s 46 artificial reservoirs.
“Many of these reservoirs are already in an almost critical state. Some are practically empty while others, particularly those serving large cities, are facing a significant reduction in resources,” he told AFP.
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The summer of 2025 could be even worse, with withdrawals expected to outpace rainfall.
Some provinces, especially in the south, have a severe shortage of drinking water and cuts are recurring.
Like Cognata, Noto laments the lack of public investment to maintain the distribution network.
Italy is the leading country in the EU in terms of absolute volumes of fresh water drawn from the surface or underground.
But “out of 100 liters injected into the distribution network, 42 ββare lost along the way” because of the poor condition of the pipes, Noto said.
According to the National Institute of Statistics (Istat), the water waste would cover the annual needs of 43 million people — or three out of four Italians.
Sardinia and Sicily are the worst performers, losing 52.8 percent and 51.6 percent of their water, respectively.
According to the Fondo Ambiente foundation, 60 percent of the national network is over 30 years old, while 25 percent is over 50 years old.
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At the current rate of pipeline renewal — just four meters per kilometer per year — it would take 250 years to replace them.
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The Region of Sicily told AFP it was responding to the drought “with the greatest determination, both for agriculture and for the population”.
It signed an action plan with the government in July worth 1.6 billion euros, which includes the goal of “reducing water losses.”
But local water management issues have exacerbated the crisis.
Agrigento in southern Italy lost almost 50 million euros in funding after failing to respond in time to a call for tenders, sparking protests earlier this month.
On his estate in Campobello di Mazara, which he runs with his father, Cognata watches helplessly as his lemon trees rot and fall from trees that have been “stressed”.
The fruit is yellow outside, brown inside: burnt by the sun, when at this time of year it should still be green.
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Cognata estimates his losses at between 30 percent and 40 percent.
“Without water there is no life. It is very serious. Families risk their livelihoods, young people prefer to leave and the countryside becomes empty,” he said.
Despite having one of the highest birth rates in Italy — an aging country — Sicily has been one of the fastest-deserting regions in the past 10 years.
Source: AFP