This shift coincided with a rising conflict between the “agro-economic coalition” represented mainly by the Ministry of Agriculture which wished to maintain the subsidised water prices for the agricultural sector, and the “economists coalition” represented mainly by the Ministry of Finance which advocated for an economic-based scale of tariffs as well as a mechanism to regulate the demand and increase the sector’s efficiency (Menachem and Gilad, 2013). This dispute caused years of stalemate between these power centers, which left the pricing system for agricultural uses as low and subsidised as possible. The main agreed principle was to relate the sector’s freshwater price to the average production and supply costs (including desalination), throughout Israel (Feinerman et al.,