Some water intensive crops like alfalfa are simply exported to global markets and are not even used for the domestic food supply. We have a water scarce region and plenty are in the business of exporting this water. IMO using a gallon of water on a lawn you can lay on here in CA is better than watering alfalfa that will be shipped across the ocean to feed a pig for a day in China. We can have an export market but we should set that up where there is plenty of water to export, not where there is currently a drought due to these exports and wasteful (read: cheap and/or highly profitable for the land owner) agricultural practices employed thanks to permissive water rights laws.
In california export figures are different. Among water intensive crops something like 70% of almonds are exported to other countries. Most rice grown is also exported as well.
> Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.
> Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.
> The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.
> Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. And that's just to China, which still trails Japan and the United Arab Emirates as a top destination for American alfalfa.
