Of course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions.
In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)
In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.
A lot of California has plenty of water - the northern half. The valley used to just flood periodically. It doesn’t anymore because the water is diverted to cities downstream and used for controlled irrigation upstream.
Having Southern California rely entirely on the Midwest for food doesn’t sound very sustainable. Overall it’s not good at all for America’s second largest metro to entirely rely on an area 2,000 miles away, is it?
I agree there are far more sustainable desert farming practices, but simply saying “stop using water to farm” is akin to saying “stop living in the desert and needing more water than naturally occurs there”.
In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)
In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.
[0] https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/...
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...