For drift waves and related instabilities, conservation laws can play a crucial role. In an ideal theory these conservation laws are guaranteed when a Lagrangian can be found from which the equations for the various quantities result by Hamilton's principle. Such a Lagrangian for plasmas in the drift-fluid approximation was obtained by a heuristic method in a recent paper by Pfirsch and Correa-Restrepo. In the present paper the same Lagrangian is derived from the exact multifluid Lagrangian via an iterative approximation procedure which resembles the standard method usually applied to the equations of motion. That method, however, does not guarantee that all the conservation laws hold.