Tomorrow is World Water Day - Let's stop exporting Water!

Did you know California exports water? California’s top 10 export destinations for water are the European Union, Canada, China/Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, India, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, and Turkey. How can it be that when we have a drought and are asking residents to conserve water, California is exporting water.

Agriculture is the process of adding certain inputs in this case soil, water and sun to seeds. And while California’s Central Valley has the soil and the sun to add to seeds, it doesn’t really have the water. The only reason farmers or really BigAg can get away with exporting and making huge profits on the soil, sun and seeds is because they enjoy priority allocations priced at subsidized federal rates to produce crops that they then export for billions of dollars. If they paid the same rates as retail customers they would still make money but not as much.

What are the actual numbers? The Central California Irrigation District notified users Feb. 16, 2022 (Water Supply and Rates | Central California Irrigation District (ccidwater.org) that given the Bureau of Reclamation had set CRITICAL rates due to the drought, the new rates would be e tiered pricing allocation as follows: Tier 1 – 2.5 acre-feet/gross acre – $20.00 /acre-foot / Tier 2 – 0.5 acre-feet/gross acre (CCID Well Water) – $50.00 /acre-foot. An acre foot of water is equal to 325,851.427 gallons.

In contrast retail rates from the Assembly District 21 Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency (BAWSCA), the wholesaler that provides most local District 21 users are (Microsoft Word - 8_CurrentResidentialWaterBills_FY19-20_DRAFT (bawsca.org) substantially higher. Let's put it this way are you using 325,851 gallons and paying $20-$50? In fact, in Berkeley where they have a significant number of urban farms, articles have noted the difference in pricing of the water for the purposes of growing your own vegetables and fruit with urban water rates rather than agricultural rates subsidized at the federal level. (The cost of irrigation water and urban farming | Berkeley News)

Clearly there are also other improvements we can make in agricultural water technologies including microbial soil augmentation whereby you add live microbes to the irrigation water therefore increasing microbial activity in soil. This can dramatically improve the water absorption ability of the soil reducing water usage by up to 30%. Nonetheless that doesn’t mean we don’t have an ongoing drought and that we don’t need to differentiate between crops that are of nutritional benefit to residents and can be easily swapped in and out, year in year out versus crops that have are predominantly grown for export and cannot be easily swapped out as they are found on trees that take years to cultivate. In other words, nuts! While almonds and pistachios are regularly featured as the big villains in this domain, California also exports dairy, wine, walnuts, rice (one of the most water intensive crops in the world!), table grapes, tomatoes, oranges and cotton. And that is just naming the top 10 major crop exports (for more details see https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Exports_Publication.pdf )

Now let’s calculate how much water we export via almonds alone. California exports about 2 billion pounds of nuts per year. 16 ounces in a pound and about 23 almonds per ounce. So about 368 almonds per pound.

About 1.1 gallons of water go into making an almond but let’s round it off to 1 just to simplify the math. Keep in mind it is more and at the quantities we are talking about a lot more.

So 2 billion pounds of nuts x 368 nuts per pound = 736 billion gallons of water exported via almonds alone

Now let’s add all the other crops as the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA link above) and as you can see California may have a water problem, but it is further aggravated because we have a big exporting industry. If you are a free market believer and you feel that BigAg should have a right to export whatever they want, just remember that it is your tax dollars that are subsidizing their water rates that allow them to be as profitable as they currently are.

So where are our state legislators? What are they doing to to ensure that everyone in California is paying the same amount and has the same allocation and priority rights? If your legislators can't do the job they were elected to do, maybe we need a new way forward.

I am running for CA State Assembly D21. I work in developing wave powered desalinated water. Sustainability and logical water policies including allocation and pricing are critical to California's ability to prosper. I am also an advocate for truly affordable housing for all and not giveaways to developers that claim to do that while in fact just increasing gentrification and displacement. Finally, I am a strong supporter of universal healthcare.

I welcome your support. Please visit my campaign website at vwww.taniasole.com or email me at tania@taniasole.com

Given our drought in California, for World Water Day, let’s stop exporting water!