Case Study 1: Matarraña River Basin - Euwareness

of the affected by the expropriations for the pumping project. The association also
looked for additional support among other municipalities within the basin and the
Mancommunity of Municipalities of the Matarraña river basin. It also asked the Superior
Court of Aragon to block of the project.
The conflict by this time showed a confrontation between two coalitions of actors: those
located at the higher basin and those located at the middle-lower basin. Whereas the
irrigation communities and municipalities at the lower basin insisted in the need for
water in order to save their crops, irrigation communities, neighbours and
environmental groups at the higher basin were opposed to the projects for its
environmental negative impacts and its inefficiency in covering the water demands.
Actors located at the higher river basin managed to mobilise actors against the project
and issued several reports against it. Some studies reveal several technical problems
associated to the pumping project. Firstly, the limitations upon the quantity of water
which could be pumped out —the maximum pumping flow (0.75 m 3 /s), the real flow of
the river and the ecological flow— led to the practical impossibility of pumping the 2
hm 3 per year flow that was planned. The reason for that is that when the Pena river —
which feeds the Pena dam— has no water, neither has the Matarraña. As a result,
during the last 3 irrigation seasons, even without respecting the established pumping
period (from November to March), only 0.90 hm 3 have been pumped up to the Pena
dam. Secondly, the Major Irrigation Ditch of the municipality of Valderrobres has a
water concession of 0,624 m 3 /s between the pumps and the Pena mouth. This
concession, which is destined to irrigation, population supply and industrial uses from
1953, cannot be granted if the ecological flow is to be respected. In this sense the
pumping conditions represent an important restriction in the flow conceded to this
historic use right, which could only use 0.29 m 3 /s downstream. Thirdly, a study
published in 1997 estimates a final pumping efficiency of 32%. Such estimation
considers a 20% loss due to evaporation and filtration phenomena, a 20% loss in water
transport from the Pena dam to the irrigation systems and also takes into account an
efficiency of 80% of the pumping system and the 70% efficiency of the irrigation
systems. And inally, the pumping project presents a negative cost-benefit analysis. The
same study calculates that benefits in agriculture produced by each m 3 are about 5
pesetas whereas the cost of the infrastructures and the costs of its functioning where
about 38 pesetas per m 3 . In addition to that, as some reports point out, the main
environmental impacts of the project include (Sostoa, 1996):
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