Truly Nuts

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

We’re spending thousands of dollars of water to grow hundreds of dollars of almonds, Alex Tabarrok notes — and that is truly nuts:

As you may have noticed at the grocery store, almonds are in demand right now whether raw or in almond milk. Asian demand for almonds is also up. As a result, in the last 10 years almond production in California has doubled. That’s great, except for the fact that almond production uses a huge amount of water and water in CA is severely mispriced and thus misallocated. [...] More water is used in almond production than is used by all the residents and businesses of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined. Here’s a chart from Mother Jones:

Water Misallocation in California

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