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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim S who wrote (23265)	7/7/2006 6:22:58 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541403

No, I'm not thinking of cities. Irrigation water is often heavily subsidized. cato.org "However, California's real problem (as the PPIC report makes clear) remains not shortages but allocation and pricing. Farmers, who use up to 80% of California's water, deplore the demand that comes with urban sprawl; city-dwellers see no reason to be held hostage by the farmers, who employ no more than a million workers a year; and environmentalists accuse almost everyone in sight of both wasting water and polluting it... ...The most obvious opportunity for better pricing and better conservation, however, is in farming, especially in the vast Central Valley. The federally financed Central Valley Project is the largest irrigation system in the country, supplying some 20,000 farms with enough water to serve ten cities the size of Los Angeles. But whereas the cities have to pay anything from $400 to $600 for each acre foot, a Central Valley farmer may pay only $80. The farmers point out that they are closer to the source and do not have to pay the transport and purification costs that the cities have to bear. But they are also massively subsidised: they pay no interest on the capital cost of the irrigation project, now more than 50 years old. Indeed, given the small amount of principal so far repaid, Barry Nelson of the National Resources Defence Council reckons the valley's farmers are enjoying what amounts to a 500-year interest-free loan—quite apart from cheap energy and subsidies for pasture land and for growing low-price crops such as cotton, rice and alfalfa." economist.com "An exception is water marketing. Irrigation water is rarely priced at its real value, but without a price tag it is often wasted." economist.com ewg.org "Agriculture now uses approximately 80 percent of California's developed water supply, but produces less than 2.5 percent of California's income." nrdc.org "Other revelations of the report include: * CVP farmers get about one fifth of all the water used in California, at rates that by any measure are far below market value * In 2002, the average price for irrigation water from the CVP was less than 2 percent of what LA residents pay for drinking water, one tenth the estimated cost of replacement water supplies and about one eighth of what the public pays to buy its own water back to restore the San Francisco Bay and Delta." organicconsumers.org