Palm Trees Burn as Iran's Oil Province Runs Dry

by Sina Ghanbarpour

The flames burned 20,000 date palms in a single day, their decades-old trunks crackling under the July sun as local farmers watched their families' livelihoods turn to ash.

There was no water to fight the fire.

"God is witness, if these palms are destroyed, we have no food to eat," a farmer from Abadan said in a video that circulated online after the July 18 blaze. "It's shameful to say this."

The destruction of the Mani Vahi and Kut Shanuf palm groves in southern Abadan is more than an agricultural disaster.

It is the latest casualty in Iran's escalating water crisis, where ancient farming traditions are collapsing under the weight of industrial agriculture and decades of environmental mismanagement.

In the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, home to Iran's largest rivers and most productive farmland, a bitter competition for water has emerged between traditional date farmers and powerful sugarcane companies backed by state banks.

The palm groves are losing.

"Abadan is next to water, but has no drinking water," Mohammad Hossein Omid, acting president of Tehran University and an irrigation expert, told President Masoud Pezeshkian at a recent academic conference.

He added, "Because you started sugarcane farming and industry there. At the time of establishment, we said this work was wrong."

The warning came too late. From six million palm trees in Abadan during the 1980s, only two million remain today.

Date production has plummeted as farmers abandon groves they can no longer irrigate with increasingly saline water from the Karun River.

Every summer, as temperatures soar near 50°C (120°F), sugarcane companies extract more than 4 billion cubic meters of water from the Karun River during the most critical months for agriculture.

This timing devastates downstream farmers who rely on the same river to irrigate their date palms during the fruiting season.

What reaches Abadan and Khorramshahr from the Karun has lost all vitality and resembles wastewater, according to local reports. Palm farmers say seawater is more tolerable than what flows past their groves.

The water that does arrive contains salt levels exceeding 30,000 microsiemens per cubic centimeter - more than 10 times the threshold for fruit production and 4.5 times what is needed for tree survival.

Hamidreza Khodabakhshi, head of the Water Industry Engineers Union of Khuzestan, said the situation has become desperate for the 8,000 people whose livelihoods depend on date production in Abadan and Khorramshahr.

"This water is more than 10 times the tolerable limit for palm fruit production," he said.

The crisis has deep roots. Since the late 1990s, dam construction and industrial development along the Karun have degraded water quality in the Arvand River and Behmanshir sections.

The first major protests erupted in the summer of 2000, leaving at least three dead, 70 injured, and 400 arrested.

Government efforts to address drinking water shortages, such as the Ghadir water supply system, implemented by the Revolutionary Guards' construction arm, failed to resolve the agricultural crisis. Palm groves continued to die as sugarcane cultivation expanded.

The disparity in political influence explains much about who wins and loses in Iran's water crisis.

Sugarcane operations are backed by two major state banks, each holding a 40 percent stake, with the Ministry of Agriculture controlling the remaining 20 percent.

Palm farmers, by contrast, are mostly ordinary citizens with no political connections.

"The CEO and shareholders of this complex always hide behind the employment of 27,000 people and by helping religious groups," said Ahmad Nouri Zadeh, a Khuzestan environmental activist. "They prevent any decision-making to reduce water consumption or change cultivation patterns."

The sugarcane industry spans 84,000 hectares across multiple companies, from south of Shushtar to north of Abadan and Khorramshahr.

In 2021, the troubled Haft Tappeh Sugar Company was added to the complex after labor disputes and ownership controversies.

Despite official agreements to limit water use to 28,000 cubic meters per hectare for sugarcane irrigation, companies actually consume 38,000 cubic meters per hectare, according to activists.

A water scarcity adaptation plan that would have minimized sugarcane and rice cultivation was abandoned when the current administration took power.

The broader environmental consequences extend far beyond individual farms. Mansour Sohrabi, an agroecologist and environmental researcher, said saving Khuzestan requires dramatic action.

"If we want to return Khuzestan's situation to a standard and sustainable state where marshes and rivers don't dry up and we don't witness dust storms, soil salinization, and land subsidence, the entire area under cultivation of sugarcane, rice, and fodder corn in this province must be shut down," he told IranWire.

Water extraction for agriculture in Khuzestan totals about 12 billion cubic meters annually.

Sugarcane alone accounts for 22 percent of that consumption, despite producing a crop that Iran could import more cheaply than the environmental cost of domestic production.

The crisis also has an ethnic dimension. The most severely affected areas, including the Hor al-Azim marshes and Arab regions around Abadan and Khorramshahr, are home to Iran's Arab minority.

Some researchers believe the destruction of traditional Arab farming communities is deliberate.

"The main problems arising from dam construction and water shortages - whether in the Hor al-Azim area or Abadan and Khorramshahr's Arab regions - have emerged, and in fact, their land is being destroyed," Sohrabi said.

Faced with catastrophe, palm farmers have taken increasingly desperate measures. In Shadegan's agricultural zones, farmers have begun dredging channels and canals themselves with minimal equipment to maintain water flow to their groves.

Others have turned to protest. Videos show farmers gathering outside government buildings, chanting, "Water is our undeniable right."

Their appeals to Friday prayer leaders and local officials show the breakdown of traditional channels for resolving disputes.

While they scrape together resources to sustain dying palm groves, petrochemical companies in nearby Mahshahr continue drawing water through the Karun transfer canal despite being located on the Persian Gulf coast, where seawater desalination would be possible.

The Khuzestan Water and Electricity Organization prioritizes drinking water first, then industrial uses and permanent agriculture like sugarcane.

Traditional date farming, despite its deep cultural roots and lower water requirements, ranks last.

Sohrabi said the country should never have developed such extensive sugar production, whether from sugar beets or sugarcane.

"Iran basically cannot be self-sufficient in agriculture given its climate and water resources," he said. "Iran's main environmental problems and excessive water consumption have resulted from food security being wrongly interpreted."

The date industry, by contrast, represents a sustainable model. Iran produces 1.3 million tons of dates annually, with a retail value of $1.5 billion. Dates require far less water per hectare than sugarcane and provide a culturally significant food that grows naturally in the region's climate.

As summer temperatures rise and water grows scarcer, the pattern seems likely to repeat.

Ancient palm groves that survived centuries of warfare, revolution, and economic upheaval are now succumbing to a more systematic destruction - the redirection of their water to industrial agriculture.