California, Irrigation: see California.

‘California faces great challenges of water distribution, allocation and pricing in the coming years. (Some think sending 80% of the state’s water to farmers who account for less than 2% of its economy is madness.). Source: ‘The Los Angeles aqueduct: A hundred years of soggy tubes’, The Economist 9th November 2013, p.44).

‘In July [2018] the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal [national] agency that oversees water management [in the USA as a whole], threatened to sue California’s water board, arguing that its plan to keep more water in the state’s two largest rivers would unfairly reduce the amount diverted away for agricultural and urban use. The secretary of the interior then threatened to break off relations between the federal government and state water managers unless the state dropped its plan. At the same time, the bureau said it wanted to renegotiate a landmark agreement of 1986 which governs how much water federal and state agencies may pump out of the delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The California delta is the largest estuary on America’s Pacific coast and the source of water for 25m people. All this seemed straight out of Mr Trump’s playbook: bluster, threaten to rip up an old treaty and try to impose a new one. Three-quarters of the state’s water falls as rain and snow north of the California delta. Three-quarters of the water is consumed south of it. A vast network of dams, canals and pumps shifts water from north to south. The system is an integrated one, but when it was planned in the 1930s (during the Depression), the state could not afford to finance the whole project. The federal government stepped in and built (and still manages) many of the dams and pumps. Operationally, the two sides need to work together.’ Source: Where the water for irrigation comes from in ‘Source of discord’, The Economist, 17th November 2018, p.38-9.