The Crop That Drained A City 🌱

If you had enough water for a million people, you would still lose it all, if you grew asparagus. One of South America's largest aquifers sits under the Ika Valley Peru. For hundreds of years it held enough water to supply an entire city. You would use your family's wells to grow food and survive. And because you lived in mostly desert land, it would never really rain. But in the 1990s, the World Bank helped turn your water into water for asparagus farms. So that it could be exported to places like Europe and the United States. One of those farms uses as much water every single day as the entire city of Ika. So your family only gets about 10 liters of water every day. That's one toilet flush when you need about 50 to survive. Asparagus created thousands of jobs. But those jobs depend on draining the only water source that you have to survive. And there's almost nothing you can do about it, which is pretty insane.