Soaking Agriculture? : WATER WATCH: Suddenly It’s Oh-So-Tense

During much of the 1980s, well-meaning citizens from the cities, environmental organizations and agriculture met often to talk about water. Because there was neither a deadline nor tangible urgency about putting the talk to work, the meetings were models of civility--and futility.

The interest groups are still talking, but the drought has forced abrupt changes in the tone: There’s less concern for hurt feelings than for getting results. Cities are running scared. Agriculture is on the defensive. Government, passive about water for so many years, is moving to change basic rules of the life-and-death water game.

This should have happened years ago but, as in so many things, democracy shows its human face in the way it “will never face the truth . . . until it is right up against it,” as Stanley Baldwin put it when he was British prime minister.

One sign of change came in a recent speech by Carl Boronkay, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies 15 million people in Southern California, to his board of directors.

He had earlier said that the State Water Project “is essentially inadequate in all but the wettest of years.” He told the directors that the only way left to make up for the shortcomings was to buy water from farmers, even if that meant taking some land out of production.

Another sign of change is in legislation that would give California water meetings more bite. It is a bill that says that farmers who grow subsidized crops with subsidized water must give up one of the subsidies. The bill is sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who became chairman of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs last Saturday with the retirement of Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.)

Miller is a dedicated reformer of the rules that the federal government sets for its Western water projects, including the Central Valley Project in California, which distributes 7 million acre-feet a year, mostly to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. The chairmanship strengthens Miller’s hand, not only for his own bills but for those like Sen. Bill Bradley’s plan to allow San Joaquin farmers to sell water to urban areas or other farmers, something now prohibited.

Miller’s legislation, which left committee last week by a lopsided vote, not only would phase out double subsidies, but also close loopholes that have made it possible for corporate farms to use subsidized water.

Making farmers choose between subsidized water and subsidized crops is bound to lead to more efficient farming and may even free up water for sale when the Bradley bill passes.

Although the drought has forced urban areas into the most severe water-rationing programs in memory, it is hardest on farmers and rural communities for a number of reasons.

One has to do with political muscle. Farmers’ organizations have known for years what they wanted and how to get it in Washington and Sacramento. So did the agencies with which farmers contracted for their irrigation water.

Now they interpret Boronkay’s speech as a warning that they are, one way or another, going to lose some of their water. Bradley is even more blunt, questioning the basic judgment of a state that floods pasture and rations water in cities.

All this will sound like “No more Mr. Nice Guy” on the farm, and it may make political waves at the meetings of cities, farmers and environmentalists. What could keep things running smoothly, despite the tension, is an understanding that nobody will force agriculture to take prime land out of production in order to free up water that would be left in place to preserve habitat and wildlife, or even delivered to thirsty cities.

That won’t be necessary. Agriculture can sell millions of acre-feet of water without ever having to turn off the irrigation pumps that water prime land. The reason: Lots of water is now being wasted on marginal crops and marginal, polluted land.

When that fact becomes clear, California’s grand water compromise will be within reach.