Planting Seeds for a Water Harvest : Wrong Alliances Leaving Southern California High and Dry

Los Angeles may be the only great metropolitan region in the world that is gaining people and losing water at the same time. That would be a devastating turn of events anywhere. It is doubly devastating here, in the largest and richest desert metropolis on earth, a semi-arid basin that must import most of its water from hundreds of miles away.

The crux of the Southland’s dilemma is that much of its recent growth has been based on borrowed or wished-for water supplies, while an abundant and nearby source has been rendered invisible by politics.

The borrowed water belongs to Arizona and Mono Lake. With the completion of the Central Arizona Project, the Metropolitan Water District ultimately may have to give up to Arizona enough Colorado River water for 3 million people’s use. And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power faces the loss of tens of thousands of acre-feet from the streams feeding Mono Lake.

The wished-for water belongs, at least in a geographic sense, to Northern California. Ever since the State Water Project was launched in the 1960s, the MWD has assumed that a virtually limitless supply of new water could be tapped from the north. But the voters’ extraordinary defeat of the Peripheral Canal in 1982 showed that Northern Californians are almost unanimously opposed to letting more water flow south. And a lot of Southern Californians seem unwilling to pay for giant new hydrologic wonderworks. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay/Delta hearings, now being conducted under the auspices of the State Water Resources Control Board, may establish that too much fresh water is already being diverted from this great, priceless estuary.

Naturally, these developments have thrown the Metropolitan Water Distirct into a state of near-apoplexy and rekindled hostilities between the “selfish” urban north and the “gluttonous” urban south. Yet neither side seems to be paying much attention to the agricultural sector, which diverts 85% of California’s developed water supply.

In a rural state such as New Mexico, letting agriculture divert 8 1/2 of every 10 acre-feet of the available water might make minimal sense. But California now has more people living in urban areas than any other state and most of our wealth is generated in the cities rather than on the farms. Today, California’s $16 billion in gross agricultural output represents just 2 1/2% of the state economy.

This isn’t to say we should sacrifice agriculture on the altar of urban growth. California’s farm industry is by far the most valuable and diversified in the nation. It is absolutely vital to the rural regions of our state. The state’s growers must be protected against ravenous land development and the loss of their essential water supply.

Essential is the operative word. What, after all, constitutes waste? How about a California rice crop that consumes as much water as three cities the size of Los Angeles--water that is, in large measure, subsidized by the taxpayers even as we subsidize the rice crop itself. (Rice has been a designated “surplus” crop for many years.) What about irrigated grass for livestock, a $94-million crop that uses as much water as the urban Southland and Bay Area combined?

The four biggest water users in California are not cities but (in order of consumption) irrigated pasture, alfalfa, cotton and rice. Except perhaps for cotton, these are all low-value, surplus, or water-demanding crops--sometimes all three. Much of the irrigation water they receive is federally subsidized, sold by the Bureau of Reclamation for about one-tenth its real worth. If just these four crops--forget all the others--could get by on 25% less water, there would be enough, in theory, to satisfy projected urban growth for a couple of decades without building new dams.

Why don’t the farmers use less? Partly because it is cheaper to waste subsidized water than to conserve it. Partly because the doctrine of Western water law says “use it or lose it.” (California has modified its water code so that farmers who save water don’t automatically lose it to the next appropriator, but a lot of growers seem unaware of this supremely significant fact.) Partly because the rural regions of the state are terrified of being devoured by the cities.

How do we get out of this dilemma? The Metropolitan Water District recently negotiated a historic water conservation and transfer arrangement with the Imperial Irrigation District, through which the MWD will pay for super-efficient irrigation methods and then buy the water Imperial no longer needs. A savings of 100,000 acre-feet is all but guaranteed; a savings of 420,000 acre-feet is within the realm of possibility, without retiring an acre of land.

This is the all-carrot and no-stick approach that’s been successfully used by California’s utilities to curb electricity consumption. There is no obvious reason why it couldn’t solve our water dilemma, too. Oddly, however, Metropolitan has not even begun to negotiate with the growers in the state’s agricultural bastion, the Central Valley, where water that would supply a 100 million urban users is poured on crops every year. Some of this land should never have been brought into production in the first place; it is plagued by selenium and poor drainage, which have brought on a mounting environmental catastrophe. Would Central Valley agriculture really suffer if urban Californians financed state of-the-art irrigation efficiency (which can be expensive to install and operate) and bought the water the farmers no longer need? If we paid the growers handsomely to retire a few hundred-thousand acres of marginal land?

One reason, undoubtedly, for the MWD’s timidity with the San Joaquin growers is its secret hope that, in the future, the agricultural water lobby will help push through a Peripheral Canal initiative. But since two of the biggest San Joaquin growers helped defeat the 1982 initiative (they thought it was ridden with environmental safeguards), that is a very long shot.

A water alliance that makes perfect sense today would join urban California, north and south, in a campaign to reduce agriculture’s intolerable consumption of scarce water. But who is willing to predict that the urban south and the urban north will ever be on the same side in a water war?