Who Does the Rain Belong To?

This story was originally shared at Stockholm International Water Institute's (SIWI) Global Showcase of Water Stories (Water in Communication 2026)

There is a kind of silence only those who know how to listen to the countryside can recognize. It is not the absence of sound — it is the absence of what should be there. My neighbour Antonio Bastía has been a beekeeper for thirty years. He started as a boy and came to have a hundred and twenty hives. The honey was enough for the family, with plenty left over to sell to the neighbours who knew where to knock.

Antonio Bastía, beekeeper, beside a swarm — Uco Valley, Mendoza. Photo: courtesy of Antonio Bastía.

Today he has four hives in the neighbourhood. And the last time he checked the frames, he found honey in only one. So little that he decided not to harvest it. He left it for the bees to eat.

A beekeeper feeding his bees their own honey.

The change, he says, began five or six years ago. The wild flowers that sustained his production — milk thistle, sweet clover, chicory, fennel, arugula, wild turnip, storksbill, and bindweed — have vanished from the roadsides. The herbicides that agriculture applies to clear away spontaneous vegetation — what Antonio simply calls matayuyos (weed-killer) — burned those strips of land. What agriculture calls weeds was, for the bees, a pantry.

Since 1959, the province of Mendoza has intervened in storm clouds, releasing silver iodide from generators installed in the foothills of the Andes. The goal: to reduce hail and protect the crops.

In 2024, the government itself admitted that the system "has no reliable efficiency." More than sixty-five years of atmospheric intervention, without anyone able to prove that it had worked.

Generador antigranizo de superficie, RNN 188 km 441. Foto propia.

The weather data from the Tunuyán station, a few kilometres from Antonio's hives, tells another story. Between 1997 and 2009, the Uco Valley received an average of 402 millimetres of rain per year. Between 2010 and 2022, that average fell to 300 millimetres — a 25% reduction that the natural variability of the Pacific cannot account for.

Annual precipitation in Tunuyán (1997–2022) by ENSO phase, with an estimate of hives in the neighbourhood. Source: Directorate of Climatic Contingencies, Mendoza; testimony of the beekeeper neighbour.

And yet, no one has measured what happens to the silver iodide after decades of raining down on the same territory.

"Before, everything that was spring, spring flowers, bloomed in spring, because the climate and the rain were different too," Antonio recalls.

But when the soil's seed bank was depleted by years of accumulated drought, when the roadsides were treated with herbicides that wiped out the spontaneous vegetation, when the irrigation channels that give water to the bees built up years of contamination — at that point, a season of better rainfall is no longer enough to reverse what was lost. Some losses do not wait for the rain to return.

Mendoza has managed its water since 1884. For more than a century, the dispute took place on the land — over the rivers, the aquifers, the canals, and the irrigation rights. What is happening now is harder to see: the dispute has moved to the sky.

Antonio knows nothing about silver iodide or provincial budgets. But he has spent thirty years watching the sky from his neighbourhood, and something has changed.

The hives Antonio keeps on productive estates — where water arrives by irrigation turns, where crops bloom under contract — are still working. The problem is here, in the neighbourhood, where the flora is wild and the water depends on the sky.

Who does the rain belong to? In Mendoza, as in so many other places in the world, the practical answer seems to be: to those who can pay to decide when it falls. The rest — the small producers, the rain-fed ecosystems, the flora that trades on no market — learn to live with what is left over. Or learn to disappear.

I live in this valley, in the province of Mendoza, Argentina. It is a landscape of intimidating beauty: vineyards that climb toward the mountain range, estates producing some of the world's most celebrated wines, and an irrigation system that learned to make the desert bloom. What is not always told is what falls outside that system. The wild flora has no irrigation turn. The small beekeepers are not listed on any stock exchange. And the rain — that old democratic way of distributing water, which required no turn — no longer falls with the same generosity as before.

When the State intervenes in the water cycle for the benefit of one productive sector without assessing the impact on the others, it is not making merely a technical decision. It is deciding who deserves the water.

As I write this, my neighbour keeps going out to check his four hives. He has not dismantled them, even though any reasonable calculation would tell him it isn't worth it. He is still there, waiting for the missing flowers to decide to come back, or for some human decision — not necessarily his own — to make way for them. It is not naïveté. It is a form of resistance so quiet that almost no one notices it: to keep betting on something alive, in a territory that seems to have decided that only what is harvested in March matters.

I don't have hives, but I have this question, and I choose not to keep it to myself. If this essay reaches ears in Stockholm, in Mendoza, or simply at the table of whoever reads it, it will already have done the only thing within my power: to say aloud what the valley murmurs between neighbours but rarely writes down. Sometimes, hope is not a promise of change. It is the refusal to stay silent while you wait.

I write this in 2026, the year the world of water converges in Stockholm to speak of collective action. I have no solution to offer that table. What I have, instead, is a small and stubborn certainty: that the stories that are not told cannot be part of any collective action. This is only one. There are thousands more, in valleys like mine, waiting for someone to write them.