Who is stealing Bali's water? Tourism drains the island dry

Bali's rice farmers are running out of water. Hotels, villas, and restaurants built on once-green rice fields are drilling deep wells that drain the island's groundwater faster than rain can refill it. The Guardian reports that Bali has lost more than 6,500 hectares of rice fields in the past five years, as tourism eats up farmland and the water that feeds it.

The problem goes beyond lost land. The island's ancient irrigation system, called subak, treats water as a shared gift that flows through a network of canals and temples built over a thousand years. When a hotel drills a deep borehole, it pulls water from the same aquifer the farmers depend on, and the subak canals run dry. Bali's rice terraces, famous around the world and protected by UNESCO, now face a slow death from the bottom up, as the groundwater their farmers need disappears beneath the villas and pool bars.

Farmers like I Putu Partayasa, who farms near Canggu, say the change is dramatic. "Fifteen years ago, we have water every day. But today it's getting less," he told the Guardian. He points at the hotels around his field and says companies take the water for tourism. In the dry season, his neighbour's plot is completely dry. Meanwhile, in Uluwatu on the southern tip, water trucks now bring bottled supplies to locals who once drank from their own wells. Tourism is eating the very thing that draws visitors to Bali: its green rice terraces and living culture.

Why it matters

If you live in Bali or rely on what the island produces, this is about your water and your way of life, whether you are a farmer watching your field go dry or a local buying bottled water because your well has run out. For the rest of Indonesia, Bali is a warning: tourism and development can grow so fast that they eat the resource they depend on, and once the groundwater is gone, no amount of hotel rooms will bring it back. Watch whether the provincial government enforces its own ban on new hotels in water-scarce areas, because that will tell you whether Bali can save what is left.