I'm fine with American taxpayers subsidizing water so that American food is cheaper for Americans.
I'm less fine with American taxpayers subsidizing Saudi Arabian food.
Perhaps any water used to grow something that is exported could be priced at market value, while water pricing for products consumed domestically can remain the same.
This also works as a signal to help water-thirsty industries to locate or relocate themselves.
There's a balance to be struck between using an unsustainable amount of desert water, and using none of it.
If you have a counter-example, I'm interested.
But I do see the possibility of solving the problem by using photovoltaic energy (though maybe not optimally, because not having to move the water would allow to use the electricity for other usages).
Bear in mind that the alternative is to grow crops in countries where it is raining most of the time.
Plants fare really really well in rainy countries, they don't mind at all that the sun is less present.
The only real drawback is the shortened growing period, if the country is too far north or too far south.
If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that. It might be counterintuitive to a lot of people, but if you want to stop farmers from using their water to grow crops, raise the price of potable water.
The farmer understands markets very well. They buy and use water based on market values. What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets and think that they can dictate market prices just by word alone. Markets don't usually work that way.
Because farmers can't take their water and sell it for more money to someone else, and they have no incentive to economize on water usage. Water prices are not set by supply and demand, they are set by government regulation. The "market" that farmers buy water in is not a free market.
Governments can absolutely buy out water contracts from farmers on the open market.
In the cases where water is tied to land title, it can be separated, as is common with other natural resources like natural gas and minerals
ELI5 Where I can buy me some water rights. Imagine I represent a consortium of commercial salmon fishers and we want (need) to buy the water to keep salmon healthy. We'll pay fair market value. Who do we pay? How much?
How am I supposed to secure this additional unconstrained water flow the entire width and breath of the Columbia Basin water shed by buying water retail in Spokane? If I buy a cubic hectare of water in Spokane, what's to guarantee it'll reach the ocean, vs slurped up by farms along the way?
Apologies for being thick, but this doesn't much seem like buying eggs.
Please explain it so I can understand.
It's a legal arbitrage. The valuable thing is the water because it can be used to make relatively expensive plants. The only permitted delivery mechanism is plants. So he follows the incentives.
> If a farmer could take their water and sell it for more money to somebody who would then treat it, transport it, and resell it to the public, the farmer would do that.
They can't do that. It's not a market issue, it's a water rights issue. The farmer is "entitled" to a quantity of water each year by virtue of owning the land they are on. If they do not spray that quantity of water onto that land, then they lose the right to get any water in future years.
> What you're hearing is a lot of complaining from people who do not understand markets
Thus, it is not markets, but water rights, that are not understood by the people that I hear complaining.
Secondly, where there exist rights there is usually a market for those rights. For instance, people buy and sell publishing rights or the right to first refusal. So it is with water rights. If I need more water than I have the right to use, I talk to my neighbor to see if I can buy her rights. If she won't sell them, maybe she'll let them. I can tell you exactly what the market price is for a share of water (a water right) where I live in the American West. I can tell you what it was last year and what it was 20 years ago. And there is a very active market to buy or lease water. My local municipal water company can require somebody wanting a new meter to sign over an irrigation water share to the company. The company pumps water from a well, processes the water and delivers it to the meter for a fee.
It sounds like where you are, the irrigation water and the municipal supply is also co-mingled in pipes? Where I am the systems are entirely separate, there's the potable municipal supply, and separately a series of surface canals operated by irrigation districts that bring water directly from the Deschutes river to fields.
For this reason (canals delivering irrigation water from source to destination via gravity), irrigation rights are fully tied to the land as they require adjacency to these canals. Properties may not sell their rights, even to other users of the same canal. Either they use it themselves, or they lose it and the rights revert back to the management of the irrigation district who may sell those acre-feet to a different user of the same canal.
It's not a great system, but unfortunately as the irrigation districts here are privately owned rather than public, the people required to change this are those currently benefiting from the status quo.
And you know there's a huge power imbalance between employer and employee that's at work here as well. Magnify that times a bunch when that employer is a rich, overseas company that can offer what would be starvation wages at home, but princely wages for the folks in Asia, South America, or Africa.
Labor prices are not subsidized by china.