This is misleading. Most of California, and even most of the Central Valley specifically, is not a desert. The southern part of the central valley is naturally quite dry, but even that is generally considered a semidesert.
None of this is to say that California shouldn't address how, where, and why water is being used for agriculture, but they cries of "They're irrigating a desert" are a distraction at best.
If we priced water appropriately, low-value high-water-use crops like rice, cotton, and alfalfa, which really have no business being grown at the expense of draining our reservoirs and aquifers, would be priced out of production, and the land could be devoted to more valuable or less water intensive crops.
1. It has limited feasibility given the amount of rainfall in the area and investment required to create infrastructure to gather, process, and store.
2. It is unnecessary as the current infrastructure is sufficient if agricultural use, which contributes a relatively small amount to GDP for its large water footprint, was not prioritized were curtailed by reforming the riparian rights system.
This is not exactly correct. Water rights in the west are governed by prior appropriation. It's in a sense first-come, first-served, but has to do with who first made "beneficial use" of the water, not who is farther upstream.
"Disputes arose when newcomers made diversions upstream from existing operations, because water was so scarce that dividing the flow among multiple miners could make it useless to all. Early farmers faced identical conflicts. The solution, through much of the West, was a new conception of water rights whose central tenet was “first in time, first in right.” Proximity to the source counted for nothing, because miners and farmers sometimes had to move water long distances. The critical factor was the date of first use."[1]
[1]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...
California is probably overpopulated. You can tweak agriculture policy all you want, but we can't pretend there isn't an inevitable problem with trying to support ever more people in a mostly arid region.
The point is that California is not overpopulated by the "enough water for its people" metric. Most of the water use in California is to grow crops that are sent out of state.
Agriculture consumes the vast majority of the state's water. Distribution of water is governed by a system of "riparian rights" that (in brief) have an all-you-can-use first-come-first-served basis, giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water. The result is that this system gives many farmers no incentive to minimize water use.
Currently, agriculture consumes most of the output of the state's vast water engineering projects, especially to irrigate the Central Valley. This has not been helped by the farmers growing monocrops that are not suited to the area's environment, such as fruit and rice.
For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!
Now these same farmers are drilling ever-deeper wells that are draining the aquifers beneath them at pace greater than their recharge rate. As a result, household wells are going dry, the river is dust, and consumers are being asked to cut back water usage by 25%.
But you cannot fight a drought in this manner when residential water use makes up barely 14% of statewide water consumption.
Like most resource crises, California has more than enough water to supply itself, but the problem lies in distribution. Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.
Californian water, even in these drought years, is plentiful, but due to legal strictures, a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of its supply.
Efficient distribution cannot be achieved until the arcane system of riparian rights for agriculture is abolished, and water is recognized as a truly public resource.
The solution to the crisis must be political as much as environmental.