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Most of the West is headed into six years of drought, with experts estimating that it would take perhaps 15 years to refill Lake Powell on the Colorado River with normal rainfall. Colorado River upper basin states must deliver 75 million acre feet of water to lower basin states every 10 years, and without water stored in Lake Powell, there may be cut backs in Colorado, an upper basin state.

Some farmers will not get water in 2004, there is a risk of more fires than usual. Researchers say that weather patterns in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are similar to those in the 1930s and the 1960s, periods of severe drought. Washington, D.C.-based American Rivers called the Colorado River the most threatened US waterway in 2004.

The Central Valley Project, administered by the US Bureau of Reclamation, was authorized by Congress in 1935 to route water from the Cascade Mountains near Oregon and the Sierra Nevada on California's eastern flank through 20 dams and more than 500 miles of canals. Farmers are not charged interest on the water they draw from the $3.6 billion CVP, but cities do- some 5.6 million of the 7.2 million acre feet of water available are used to irrigate crops.

This means that San Jose pays about $80 an acre foot for CVP water, compared to $10 for farmers in the Central Valley. An acre-foot is 325,800 gallons, or roughly as much water as a family of five uses at home in a year.

Many of the contracts under which CVP water is delivered are up for renewal in 2004, and critics want farmers to pay more for their water, which they say would encourage rational changes in crops. For example, alfalfa hay consumes roughly a quarter of California's irrigation water, but generates only four percent of California's farm sales. Charging farmers more for water, critics argue, would end the practice of growing water-intensive crops in arid areas.

J.G. Boswell is the world's largest private farmer, has the right to use 400,000 acre feet of water or 15 percent of the flow from the Kings River- water rights worth $300 million- to irrigate about one million acres.

If water is moved from one area to another, as when water districts sell water to urban areas, who should receive the windfall between the price of water to farmers and the price that cities will pay? Water-selling farmers say they should keep the proceeds from water sales, while critics say that water sales revenue should go to the government, which paid for the dams and canals.

A long-running lawsuit known as Sumner Peck v. Bureau of Reclamation ended in December 2002 with a settlement under which the federal government agreed to pay $107 million and the Westlands district agreed to pay $32 million in order to retire 34,000 selenium-laden acres from farming. The land became contaminated because the federal government did not build the drainage system to remove excess irrigation water as promised.

The San Joaquin River, the state's second longest, was dammed in the 1940s, and the river's water helped to create a $4 billion a year farm industry on the east side of Highway 99.

The U.S. Geological Survey http://www.usgs.gov/) reports on Americans' water use every five years, and reported that Americans in 2000 used 408 billion gallons of water a day, about the same as in previous surveys but down from the 1970s. As measured by the USGS, most US water is used for the generation of electricity (48 percent) and in irrigation (34 percent); homes and businesses used 11 percent of US water. Across the US, the percentage of the water supply used for crop irrigation has remained relatively unchanged for more than half a century, but irrigated acreage more than doubled from 1950 to 1980, and rose again in the late 1990s.

Jim Carlton, "Is Water Too Cheap?" Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2004.