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A section of Lake Oroville, in California, is seen nearly dry. As the severe drought continues for a third straight year, water levels are reaching historic lows.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images    

Which would you rather have: lettuce and carrots for your salads, or affordable gasoline for your car? Affordable food prices or affordable electricity?

You’ll have to make the choice. In fact, if you like a ready supply of tasty, affordable produce – and low food prices generally – this may be the time to start worrying. And not just about the drought in California, where desperate, panicky farmers are responding to the years-long dry spell by hiring dowsers – water witches – to scour their land for hidden wells, or the the south-west, which is in the grip of a “megadrought“.

Even in areas where drought isn’t a problem, the stress on limited water resources is approaching perilous levels, according to a new report from MSCI Inc. Rainfall levels may be just fine in areas like Boston or Long Island, but these regions rely heavily on irrigation to keep crops growing, and competition for those water resources just keeps growing from big industries.

There are simply too many water-intensive industries competing for increasingly scarce water resources. “And now there are conflicts looming,” says Linda-Eling Lee, global head of ESG research for MSCI Inc in New York, who has delved into what this means for all of us.

“Right now in the United States there is a lot of attention to the problems that water shortages are causing for farmers and for residential users,” says Lee. California farmers have stopped growing avocadoes; house-proud residents of drought-stricken areas are banned from watering their lawns. “But there’s less attention to the conflict looming between industry and agriculture.”

Consider Kern County, California. It is home to the North Belridge and South Belridge oil fields, the country’s sixth largest oil areas. A lot of the production in the Belridge fields has come from fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a process that involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into shale rocks containing oil and gas to break them open, enabling the well operators to extract them.     
There are simply too many water-intensive industries competing for increasingly scarce water resources. “And now there are conflicts looming,” says Linda-Eling Lee, global head of ESG research for MSCI Inc in New York, who has delved into what this means for all of us.