> The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Water pricing via water trading would help move these considerations of trade-offs to the private sector.
> Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive.
Just as a silly nitpick: you can make food without agriculture. And it's not just via wild fishing, but also by directly producing edible substances from minerals, like producing margarine from coal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
In general, you are obviously right, though.
Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive. There are optimizations you can make with regards to which kind of agriculture is done where.
If the only way you can grow almonds is by mining water out of an aquifer that will deplete in a decade, maybe we should go without almonds. The juice is not worth the squeeze.