After making a few rounds of Nanohana Port, Xie Wen gained a general understanding of the Alabasta Kingdom's current situation.
Since they had arrived a few years early, things here had not yet become as bad as they were in the manga.
Although it had already been a year since rain had fallen anywhere in the country except the royal capital, this was a desert kingdom to begin with, and the people of the Alabasta Kingdom had plenty of experience dealing with drought.
And with the broad, lengthy Sandora River, if they spent some time transporting water, there would actually still be enough fresh water to supply the entire country... After all, the Alabasta Kingdom only had a handful of cities, and none of them were particularly large.
The truly fatal problem was that Crocodile had already had people use Dance Powder to pin the blame for the drought on the royal family. Even though King Cobra had personally stepped forward to refute the rumors, some of the Alabasta Kingdom's people had still lost trust in the country, and as long as the drought remained unresolved, more and more people would become disappointed in, or even hate, the royal family.
As a result, crime rates across Alabasta had been rising rapidly lately. Bandits ran especially rampant in several places suffering severe drought, and on top of that, pirates would occasionally come to cause trouble, deliberately lured there by Baroque Works-or possibly even Baroque Works members in disguise.
The Alabasta Kingdom's army had been working very hard to maintain order in the country, but the island was simply too large. And because cities in the desert had to be built around oases, they were quite far apart. Traveling through the desert was inconvenient too, so Alabasta's army often could not arrive