Subsidies distort the market. That’s economics 101.

The Environmental Working Group has long contended that subsidies for commodities and Western water have discouraged efficient water use by encouraging farmers to grow alfalfa, rice, cotton and other thirsty crops in arid places.

A 2004 EWG study, California Water Subsidies, concluded that the large agribusiness operations — not small family farmers — were reaping a windfall from taxpayer-subsidized cheap water. The next year, a second EWG study, Double Dippers — How Big Ag Taps Into Taxpayers’ Pockets – Twice, found that one in four Central Valley Project farms received both water and crop subsidies for at least a year.

Today, with the federal government’s deficit soaring to mind-boggling levels and the West gripped by a third year of drought, it’s clear that decades of double-dipping have made a bad situation far worse. In the last few weeks, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has announced major water cutbacks in California, with many farmers denied federal irrigation water during the spring planting season.

The Associated Press reported last week that the federal government has subsidized California and Arizona farmers to the tune of nearly $700 million in the past two years to plant thirsty crops like alfalfa, rice and cotton on arid land.

The AP reporter made highly conservative assumptions, resulting in a subsidies estimate at the low end of the range calculated by EWG. But even AP’s numbers show that taxpayers have paid huge amounts to double-dippers – and for what? Countless farm communities are facing disaster.

So we have to wonder — what if just half of that money had gone towards supporting farmers to implement water conservation practices?

Cotton Isn’t Green.

Subsidies do more than promote wasteful water use. Cotton demands vast quantities of insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers that end up polluting our rivers and streams. Taxpayers have subsidized this environmental damage, paying out more than $600 million in cotton subsidies from 2003 to 2005.

That’s 10 times what the federal government spent during that period to help farmers improve their conservation practices in California.

It’s not too late to turn the situation around.

There are many water conservation and land management practices farmers can implement NOW that would significantly reduce water pressures on the Sacramento delta and avert the need for building costly and environmentally-risky new infrastructure to expand supply. These include:

· Drip irrigation and more efficient pumps

· Farm water storage

· Cover cropping

· Mulching

· Conservation tillage

Certainly, some small percentage of farmers is already implementing many of these practices.

But where is the incentive for farmers to change, if cheap, subsidized water and commodity payments are available even to those who make no attempt to conserve?

Rep. George Miller, D-CA, told the AP:

“With our weather patterns, with climate change, and our population growth, we’ve got to look at how we use every drop. We need to take a serious look at policies that encourage economically inefficient and unsustainable uses of our limited clean water supplies.”

We couldn’t agree more.