ABSTRACT

The first federal water policy was introduced in the USA with the Reclamation Act voted by Congress in 1902 (Pisani, 1982, 2002; Cortinas et al., 2015). This legislation has been promoted and steered by agro-industrial enterprises of California, bankers of San Francisco and business lawyers well connected with politicians in Washington (Reisner, 1985; Gottlieb, 1988). Their objective was to address problems concerning the distribution of water in order to support economic growth. Originally, most of the western land was in the hands of the state, but some private lands were owned by railway companies, banks and other large landowners who sold it to farmers (Pisani, 1984). The fall in the price of farms however destroyed the confidence supporting the speculative market of agricultural products (Hofstadter, 1955: 57). As a consequence, land prices dropped in an unprecedented manner, people left the country for the city in droves, and many farmers were unable to repay their debts. The region’s economic forces began to promote federal irrigation projects in order to support the local economy. They were also aware that another sector, namely mining, despite its profitability, could not ensure their continued expansion, and they viewed the arrival of new occupants as the most effective way of transforming the West into a new economic El Dorado (Hundley, 2001).