Joe Del Bosque Quotes
Conservation programs are great but when you’ve already done all the conservation and you got no water, how does that help you? It doesn’t. The only thing that could help us now, is water.
The nest year California Governor Jerry Brown imposed a form of water rationing.
Joe Del Bosque, California Farmer, Quoted in Marina Gaytan,, “Farmer Joe Del Bosque speaks about his meeting with President Barack Obama”, Merced Sun-Star, February 21, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Even before the drought the California (and other Western States’) water distribution system has been unfair, inefficient, wasteful, and irrational. There is only so much to go around and the demand it greater. Farmers sometimes pay only 1 percent of the cost the state incurs for the water they us. And far less than poor city or suburban dwellers. Few California farmers use the efficient drip irrigation system developed in Israel. Some farmers get most of the water they want while others get nothing. The taxpayers in the rest of the country pay for the California cheap water while they themselves pay many times the cost of the water. Ironically, Conservatives who almost always want market based solutions oppose it in the case of water as then the large corporate farms would not have the huge water subsidy that they have now.
Water has always been in short supply in the Middle East. For thousands of years in the past water rights and possession was the cause of many conflicts. The rapid increase in fertility and population in the Muslim countries of the Middle East has placed even more stress on the water supply while waste is common. Fortunately Israel and Turkey have developed many techniques of using water efficiently. However, the rest of the Middle Eastern nations are slow to adopt these methods of water conservation, water generation and production, and agriculture that requires much less water than in the past. Politics, religion, and culture can be barriers or facilitators.
There are many American communities where this is the case. However there are others where there is not enough water (especially in drought conditions) for the large agricultural use and a growing population. In Denver, they have enough water, but not a sufficient infrastructure to distribute the water to all.
Agriculture, in most of the country, uses much more water than the human population does for personal drinking and hygiene, but in a number of places there is just not enough water to support all the uses in our growing nation. Agriculture has been organized and has been willing to spend large amounts of money to bribe and/or lobby legislators to block many efforts to develop water supplies for cities large and small under the theory that the more water that went to cities, the less there would be for agriculture.
