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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