Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...here's the good news: because agriculture now consumes 85% of the West's available water, a mere 4% saving by farmers would provide enough for new uses, even if the cities continue to splash water at the current rate. Says Thomas Graff, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund: "The West has plenty of water to meet the future of its cities and industries as well as for environmental values, but its farmers must be given incentives to use less water...
More good news: the opportunity for conservation is considerable, considering the scale of profligacy now encouraged in Western agriculture. Throughout the region, scarce but subsidized water is inefficiently flooded onto marginal soil to raise crops like cotton and rice that are already in surplus and must often be bought at a loss by the Federal Government. A recent study, commissioned by Democratic Congressman George Miller of California, showed that fully a third of the Government's $535 million annual spending on irrigation water flows to farmers who receive other agricultural subsidies. Miller has introduced legislation to halt this double dipping...
...farmers waste water by choice. Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, an incisive history of water development in the West, observes that subsidized water is "so cheap the farmers can't afford to conserve it." Ten miles west of Phoenix, for example, Mike Duncan, 38, would have to spend considerably more to irrigate his cotton if he were to use water-saving drip tubes. "If I farmed in the Coolidge area, where water is $80 an acre-foot," Duncan says, "I'd most seriously look at using drip irrigation." Instead, Duncan gets water at the federally subsidized rate...
Like natural gas a decade ago, water is in short supply only because of outmoded laws and customs that prevent its sale to willing buyers in most states. The doctrine of prior appropriation has in practice meant "use it or lose it." Thus Utah, for example, diverts Colorado River water for which it has little present use. Other obstacles to water marketing are bureaucratic: muscular interests like Southern California's metropolitan water district and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation tend to view water marketing as a threat to their present service monopolies...
...farmers could freely sell or lease their water rights, profit motives would provide a powerful incentive for conservation. In Arizona, where such "water ranching" is widespread, farmers are drawing top dollar and, in the words of former Governor Bruce Babbitt, "retiring to beachfront condos in La Jolla ((Calif.)) to raise martinis instead of alfalfa." If water rights were widely traded, proponents say, cities and factories could assure their needs for posterity. Agriculture would still receive four-fifths of the West's water and would thrive, despite the increased costs...