S4E6 - How Water Trading Unbelievably Killed One Million Fishes (and a River)

with 🎙️ Scott Hamilton, Researcher, Policy Advisor and author of "Sold Down the River" 

💧 in "Sold Down the River," Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells explore how Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia’s Water Market.

What we covered: 

🍏 How the Murray-Darling River Basin spreads across 4 states, produces 40% of Australia's food, and creates $24 billion of yearly agricultural value 

🤔 How it isn't really Water anymore, flowing in the Murray River, but liquid money 

🧮 How the liberal breeze of the 1980s induced the creation of the Australian Water Trading Market 

🍎 How the Millennium Drought pushed the Australian regulators to go harder, quicker, and further than any other country when it comes to Water Trading 

🍏 How this is supposed to help Water flow to its best use 

🍎 How instead, it pushes Water to flow where the most money can be extracted from the system 

🙁 How hedge funds can push individual farmers and irrigators to their maximum willingness to pay, and how they do it all the time 

🍏 How the Murray River's 70'000 years-long memoir and how connected it is to Australia's history 

🍎 How the trading of Water completely changed the demography of the Murray-Darling Basin 

🧮 How financial players were invited into the market to provide liquidity - and how that failed 

🍎 How the water market, unlike traditional commodity markets, is totally deregulated 

🙁 How farmers did not stand a chance against professional traders with bots, information, and deep pockets 

🍎 How the best soils now dry out and how the government had to step in to buy low-flow Water on the market 

🍎 Dying fishes, moving indigenous graves, influence of Climate Change, Environmental & cultural impacts... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥 

➡️ Get the Full Story (including an infographic and full transcript) here: https://dww.show/how-water-trading-unbelievably-killed-one-million-fishes-and-a-river/

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