The people living in the semiarid region -- most of whom do not live in a true desert -- are not the ones using all of the water. The water is used to grow food and cotton, which is consumed all over the country, and in many cases, exported.
"An estimated 20% of alfalfa in the American SW, meaning about [20%?] of all water in the Colorado watershed, goes to foreign nations like KSA to feed their dairies. Related: if Lake Mead drops another 75 feet, the Hoover Dam will stop producing power.
#virtualwater"
It's silly to blame the people who buy strawberries and almonds for the water problems in California. If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.
California doesn't merely produce "fun" foods. Most of the agricultural land outside California is being applied to its most economically efficient use case. Plenty of the remaining viable land is ecologically valuable in itself. There's no scenario where agricultural production plummets in CA yet remains steady in the US as a whole.
>If California wasn't growing them already, people wouldn't be buying them from California.
The history of the region begs to differ. Water management in the West was deliberately pursued by the federal government to promote agriculture.
I never said anything about fun foods or whether things were economically efficient. I simply said it's absurd to blame consumers in Ohio for lack of water in California. If you want to blame politicians, go for it. If you want to blame California farmers for it, be my guest. But if everybody in the midwest stopped buying CA food, that wouldn't change anything in CA. It's not up to the OH consumer to fix CA farmer problems.
