Missing from Matt Jenkins’ article about Metropolitan
Water District’s “kinder, gentler” approach to acquiring
agricultural water is the fact that irrigation districts are
profiting by reselling water they got for next to nothing from
federal taxpayers (HCN, 11/12/07). An
Environmental Working Group investigation found that in 2002 – the
same year Jenkins reports that the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District
struck a deal to sell MWD water for $100 an acre-foot — the
district paid less than $20 an acre-foot for water from the Central
Valley Project, the largest of the 160-odd taxpayer-subsidized
irrigation systems in the West.
Under the state
Constitution, the water belongs to the people of California. But
the federal government sells it for a small fraction of its market
value to irrigation districts, which distribute the great majority
of it to large corporate farms, many of which are growing rice and
cotton that are also subsidized. The government recently renewed
the contracts of most CVP districts for the next 25 years,
promising them even more water that they can turn around and sell
to MWD or other urban suppliers. It’s a taxpayer ripoff that does
nothing to encourage conservation and contributes to the massive
environmental damage that accompanies irrigated agriculture. For
more, see our Water Subsidies Database at
http://archive.ewg.org/reports/ Watersubsidies/.
Bill
Walker
Vice President/West Coast
Environmental
Working Group
Oakland, California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A water racket.
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