This is just the latest empirical example backing up William Anderson’s arguments showing that water is distributed by political means. But it also shows that very little is used by the suburbs even though one of the central talking points of the environmentalist left for years has been that urban “sprawl” itself a result of government intervention - is using up all the resources. In reality, it is the agricultural interests, who get sweetheart deals for cheap water, who are using up the resources. http://mises.org/daily/1557
As Johnson and Murphy point out, the first users in the western system are agricultural interests, and they are allocated water at subsidized prices that would not be available even in eastern states where there was much more water. At $5 to $15 for an acre-foot (enough water to cover an acre of ground with a foot of water), farmers are able to grow water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, cotton, and rice. (Even with the water subsidies, rice is also subsidized on the price end, as the cost of growing rice is greater than the price that can be obtained for it on the free market.)
More than 86 percent of the water diverted from the Arkansas River Basin in Colorado is used to irrigate crops, even though urban areas have been buying water rights for the past 60 years. The Pueblo Chieftain reported on its website Monday (http://bit.ly/psO3nR ) that the percentage is even higher in four counties east of Pueblo, where about 99 percent goes to crops. The newspaper cited statistics from the U.S. Geological Survey. Only 20 percent of Arkansas River Basin withdrawals in El Paso County are for agriculture, and it Pueblo, it’s 41 percent. El Paso County is the basin’s most populous, with more than 622,000 people. Pueblo County is the second-most populous, with nearly 159,000.
