alt Hacker NewsHmm. I live near some water intensive cultivations (olives, almonds, not USA) in a relatively dry area, but there's dam water at very cheap prices and obviously, for these products it's required, because otherwise you wouldn't have olive oils being sold at current market prices (already quite higher than just some 6 years ago), they would be astronomically higher. But this is to serve global markets. People in the region have done olive oil since forever without dam water, just not at this industrial scale.
But compared to meat and the whole chain of production required for that it certainly pales many moons below. Well, everyone loves their bacon.
> but there's dam water at very cheap prices and obviously, for these products it's required
So yeah, an example of the government coming in and ensuring cheap water for this crop production at the expense of those downstream. You agree, if the government didn't artificially and massively change the hydrology of the area, this industrial level wouldn't really be economically possible. This can make sense and not be terribly destructive depending on the region.
I and the poster above were probably talking about the American Southwest. In this case, its even more extreme. Old land owners got the rights to flood their fields from the river water and dig massive canals to turn extremely arid deserts green. They get the right to have that water for free, forever, because the government gave them the land at one point in time in the past and allowed for that taking based on deeply flawed hydrological models. They use that for agricultural products sold worldwide, including growing alfalfa for Saudi Arabia in the deserts of Arizona[0]. The government won't go in and actually start putting restrictions or calling back their grants to that water allocations, and its resulting in environmental catastrophe for many parts of the region.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...