All they have to do is cut off the farms and they'll be fine. Consuming 80% of the state's water and only contributing 2-3% to their GDP, something's got to give. But the political will for that will probably take extreme catastrophe to emerge.
I assumed that the state produced a lot of crops? It's not part of the U.S. "bread basket"?
The Break Basket typically refers to the plains states from Texas to North Dakota and a few on either side like Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, where most of the nation's grain is grown. I'm sure there's a popular expression for what California is but nothing that's coming to mind right now... But I know what you meant.
California does grow a lot of produce that the rest of the country benefits from, but they also have Hollywood and Silicon Valley and lots of other things I don't know about to drive their economy. The loss of that food supply isn't California's problem. From California's perspective, the current food export industry is doing far more harm than good. If they just focused on growing enough for local consumption and didn't export, they could probably manage their water sustainably, or at least much closer to it than they are now.
As far as the other states that benefit from the food supply are concerned, even as far north as Minnesota we are perfectly capable of growing everything we need for local consumption, it's just not economical because of California's taxpayer subsidized water. That's how valuable that water is, enough to overcome thousands of miles of transportation and storage costs. Another reason we don't grow more of our produce locally is that the corn, soybeans, beef, and dairy industries that make up our ag economy in Minnesota are also heavily subsidized, making it less economical to grow other things.
Taxpayer investment in agriculture is good. It's one of the better choices of an industry to subsidize in my opinion. Kind of like education and transportation, money invested in agriculture pays back at a great rate of return that benefits everyone. Everyone eats and whether you're rich or poor, human nutritional requirements are generally similar, so the cheap prices benefit the poor as much as the rich, maybe even more. Having massive food stores is handy in case the weather fails some year or an enemy nation carpetbombs our fields.
That said, as with almost everything American, something that could be fantastic in theory is implemented by people who will write in backdoors benefiting themselves, their friends, and their campaign contributors. The whole system is fantastically broken and encourages only the bottom line at the cost of.... everything else important in life. Healthy people, humane food, balanced earth.
The California drought is meteorologically interesting, but it's a desert. This has happened before and it will happen again. This one is particularly severe, I understand possibly the worst in 2000 years. But, we wouldn't be having this level of conversation about it were it not for the massive economic side effects caused by poor centralized planning on part of the government, and naturally emerging behavior from farmers trying to game the broken system. When you put a system like this in place, there's little incentive to try to behave ethically, because it muddies just what ethical is, and you'd only be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage relative to your competitors.
I listened to a guy from Mozambique on NPR yesterday talking about why he poached rhino horns. He said he knew it was wrong, he knew it was horrible, but when it pays $10,000 in a country where people live on $1 a day and there is no employment to be found, it was either that or starve. The situation isn't quite as dramatic here in America, but the principles at work are the same. Perhaps even worse because some of these farmers genuinely believe they're doing nothing wrong, that it's their God-given right to terraform the Earth to suit their needs.
Sorry to just rant about this. If I sound angry it's because I hate what the government has done to ag in this country. I work in the industry, and the same ridiculous government that caused this problem causes all kinds of other problems closer to home. Government is great, I'm not an anarchist, but the plutocracy we have today has got to go.