It’s hot under the midday sun in Hierro Viejo. The small village lies nestled in a valley, about a two-hour drive north of Santiago de Chile. Cacti grow on the barren mountain slopes. Magdalena Morgan walks along the main street. As a truck roars past her, she says, almost casually: “Ah, that’s a truck bringing us drinking water.” Everything points to this being a dry region. Yet at the edge of the mountain slopes and throughout the valley stand lush green avocado plantations, for which the province of Petorca is known worldwide.

A conflict over this thirst-quenching fruit has been smoldering in this arid region for years. This is not just about access to water—an essential human right—but also about structural issues of power and distribution. The documentary“Who Owns the Water? Chile’s Struggle for This Vital Resource”by Fabian Kulle explores these issues.

Magdalena Morgan is one of the voices featured in the film. She works for a drinking water collective and advocates for a fair and democratic distribution of the scarce water supply.“This shows what it means to feed humanity. Water is being diverted to export fruits like avocados to the international market, at the expense of rural communities and the province of Petorca, which are being deprived of their water,”she says, summarizing the situation in Petorca.

From a geographical perspective, this distribution conflict raises fascinating questions that are the subject of research in political ecology. Conflicts over natural resources are always examined in the context of socioeconomic conditions.¹ Chile follows an economic model tailored to extractivism and exports, based on a neoliberal logic that has long been unparalleled globally. An intriguing context for a geographical field trip. In the spring of 2025, we traveled to Chile together with Prof. Dr. Jessica Budds and Dr. Johanna Höhl as part of the master’s field trip organized by the Department of Geography at the University of Bonn.

The focus was on examining the impacts of the neoliberal economic model—introduced under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship—on society and nature. In Petorca, these effects became particularly clear to us. The local avocado industry serves as a prime example illustrating the severe consequences of a market-based approach to a resource that is both natural and essential to life. Under the Water Law passed in 1981, groundwater in Chile became a freely tradable commodity. At the time, political connections and money determined who could obtain water rights and thus access to groundwater.² To this day, these structures shape water distribution in Petorca.³

As part of the field trip, we spoke with farmers, drinking water collectives, and political institutions about the conflict over water distribution in the region. This gave us different perspectives on the tense water situation in Petorca. Following the field trip, Fabian Kulle, together with our fellow student Antonella Kania, delved deeper into his research and produced the approximately 25-minute documentary “Who Owns the Water?” The film explains how water rights reinforce the neoliberal economic model. It also examines the impact of avocado cultivation on the region’s water resources and critically discusses the potential of technological solutions, such as desalination plants.

The film illustrates the socio-ecological consequences resulting from the radical restructuring of organizational and institutional frameworks driven by neoliberal globalization processes.⁴ What was originally intended to promote a more efficient distribution of water has now resulted in the majority of water rights being held by a few companies or, as in Petorca, a handful of family-run farms, which use most of the limited natural water resources for avocado cultivation.⁵ Toward the end, the documentary also examines possible technological solutions in the form of desalination plants, which are intended to alleviate the problems in the water supply. However, it becomes clear that without addressing the socioeconomic power imbalances that shape access to water, technological advancements will only further exacerbate the marginalization of the rural population.⁶

Magdalena summarizes the situation from her perspective as follows: Conflicts over natural resources cannot be attributed solely to external environmental factors such as drought, climate change, and natural water resources; rather, they are embedded in the political and economic conditions that determine the unequal distribution of resources in society:

“It’snot about how much water nature gives us. Nature already ensures that we have enough. We have mountains and rivers. The problem is human greed—capitalism’s endless hunger for more.”