By:
Badlands Journal editorial board
Now, even with new legislation that will determine the future viability of Westlands’ critical import irrigation infrastructure, it seems inevitable that the political clout of the nation’s most powerful irrigation district will somehow prevail to perpetuate this culture of social, economic and natural inequity. – Carter, p. 40.
“Reaping riches in a wretched region: Subsidized industrial farming and its link to perpetual poverty,” by Lloyd Carter, Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal, Symposium Edition, Fall 2009
http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvol3/attachment/Carter.pdf
Lloyd Carter provides us an excellent article on agribusiness on the west side of California’s San Joaquin Valley, one that works on three levels simultaneously:
· a review of the relevant legislative and court decisions that have created what US District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen S. Trott described, saying: “The pieces are strewn over half a century, and they appear to have been cut by Congress from competing pieces of wood with no reference to a coherent design. We have been left with pieces that cannot be assembled to produce any picture at all, much less the one on the box …” p. 24;
· the article provides exhaustive footnotes, useful to scholars from several academic disciplines in a region where rural sociology in the University of California was robustly discouraged by the state Legislature as a result of the 1947 publication of Walter Goldschmidt’s As Ye Sow, on the relationship between agribusiness and rural poverty;
· the general reader, particularly literate urban voters who will very likely be called upon in the near future to vote for billions in bonds to once again “fix” the San Joaquin Delta, possibly including a new plan for a peripheral canal, Carter’s brief, coherent history of west-side agribusiness, particularly Westlands Water District, will be the best article on the subject they will have a chance to see. Without prejudice against editorialists, commentators and reporters who have been reporting and commenting on California’s “water crisis” for the past year, few if any have the experience with the issue that Carter does, and few write as well about it.
Carter wrote the article at the beginning of this season’s unparalleled, year-long onslaught of political propaganda by the state’s richest, most powerful water purveyors and agribusiness corporations to defeat environmental regulation in the San Joaquin Delta and promote a new peripheral canal. His series, called “PR firm from Hell,” along with many other articles this year that can be found on: http://www.lloydgcarter.com .
To indicate the timeliness of Carter’s article –
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/31/18627331.php
Environmental Groups Around State Oppose Scary Legislative Water Package
Stop Zombie Bills from Creating the 'Delta of the Dead' ...Dan Bacher…10-31-09
Like a crowd of brain-eating zombies just in time for Halloween, dangerous Delta and water bond bills have proliferated over the past week in the California Legislature, creating a mind-numbing stench throughout the State Capitol.
As of Friday, October 30, there were no less than 20 water bills introduced and "few of them are any good for California rivers," said Steve Evans, Conservation Director of Friends of the River. Many of the new bills are over 100 pages long and the Legislature is expected to vote on them by Monday, Nov. 2!
'Leading the pack of scary Halloween-weekend bills is Senator Darrell Steinberg’s SB4, a bill that purports to solve California’s supposed water crisis," said Evans. "Friends of the River is concerned that the bill will result in the fast-track approval of a large Peripheral Canal capable of diverting fresh water from the Sacramento River around the Delta for export to corporate agribusiness in the southern Central Valley and urban developers in southern California. The bill would also encourage the construction of new or enlarged dams that would harm the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Mokelumne, and Bear Rivers."
In the last few decades, Carter begins, well over a billion dollars in taxpayers’ aid has been provided to a few hundred growers in the Westlands Water District (Westlands), which is part of the San Luis Unit of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project (CVP) in Central California. The CVP is the largest publicly funded water-management system in the United States, and Westlands is the biggest agricultural irrigation district in America. At nearly 1000 square miles, the Westlands is still dominated by a few pioneer dynastic families although congressional backers of the San Luis Unit a half a century ago promised that 6100 small family farms would be created if Northern California river water was brought to the desert on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley (Valley). The promise was never kept and the larger landowners are still in control…
The thesis behind Carter’s brief history is that federal farm-subsidy and water policies since the 1960s have “exacerbated grinding poverty while enriching a few dozen of the factory farming dynasties to the detriment of the environment, the human population of the region, small farmers, and the public …” In fact, it is nearly impossible for even Valley residents – perhaps particularly for them, and certainly for residents of the west side involved in the deal -- to gauge the magnitude and extent of the social, economic and environmental injustice on the west side of the Valley, starting with the hunting to near extinction of the Tachi Yokuts, the native farmers of the land.
By the mid-1940’s, west-side farmers had begun to seriously deplete their underground aquifers, pumped from the beginning of the 20th century, and so formed Westlands Water District (400,000 acres), later annexing West Plains Storage Area (214,000 acres), to begin political promotion of construction of the San Luis Reservoir in western Merced County. Ground was broken on the reservoir in 1960 and completed by 1968, along with a massive canal carrying water south.
This was a federal Bureau of Reclamation project. According to the Reclamation Act of 1902, federally subsidized water could not be delivered to farms of more than 160 acres, theoretically requiring west-side farms to sell off land to accommodate the law. In the Westlands Water District, the Act was completely perverted. Around that time the average ownership was 2,200 acres. It was calculated that the average water subsidy in Westlands was $1,540 per acres or $770 million for construction of the reservoir and canal system. In the mid-1970’s, a group called the National Land for People tried to buy 160-acre parcels from Westlands growers and were “rebuffed.” NLP brought suit in 1976 against the Bureau. Despite case law as high as the US Supreme Court, presidential and congressional concern, about a decade later the Bureau established a 960-acre limitation, elimination of the residency requirement, and with so many more loopholes in it, one congressman described the final rules as “a double-cross, an outrage, and a horrible insult to Congress.” Reorganization into partnerships, corporations and trusts were the principle means of avoiding the acreage limitation for federally subsidized irrigation water to Westlands. The Bureau came under suspicion of improper use of public funds in allowing, without congressional review, annexation of West Plains, development of a drainage canal to drain ag waste water laced with salts and heavy metals, and addition of evaporation pools at Kesterson Reservoir, which later became a national wildlife refuge in western Merced County. The ultimate plan, to build another drain from Kesterson to the Delta, failed for lack of congressional appropriations, resulting in the wildlife disaster at Kesterson discovered by US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists in 1983 – massive bird and fish kills and a high incidence of deformed baby birds, along with cattle death and the creation of a nearby cancer cluster.
There is a zip code in the wealthiest part of Fresno CA that receives the highest amount of agricultural subsidies in the United States, yet the congressional district that includes Westlands Water District is ranked the poorest in the nation and has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in California. Nor does the entire 1,000 square-mile Westlands Water District contain one high school. Yet, due to ironies pertaining to the oil industry, the elementary school in Taft CA (just outside of Westlands), had the highest per capita expense on students in California before Standard Oil of California, headquartered there, relocated in San Ramon in the mid-1960’s. Third-grade teachers in Taft had private airplanes before the “fall;” yet as late as 1970, “Negroes” were warned by a sign at the city limits not to be in town after dark.
As far as the promise of the Bureau of Reclamation and Representative B.F. Sisk to increase the population of the west side and fill it with small farms (6,100 farms and 87,500 people), in the mid-1970’s there were “216 large farming operations” in Westlands and its largest town, Huron, had a population of 2,348, a large number of illegal aliens, bars, and whorehouses. The population of Huron has not swollen since, except at harvest, when illegals are crammed into residential garages for incredible rents, as they are on all other west-side towns. The largest four “family farmers” in the 1970’s were Southern Pacific Railroad, Standard Oil, Boswell Co. and Harris Ranch. It hasn’t changed so much you would notice since.
A few years after the incredible political fandango required to get the surface-water irrigation to the west side had been achieved, the drainage crisis erupted. As anyone who ever drove Highway 33 before either I-5 or the San Luis Canal knew, Westlands is alkali flats, home for oil derricks, coyotes, road runners and a lot of white stuff spread out on the land amongst the sage brush. But, the big, subsidized cotton growers slapped the water to the salt/heavy metal-laden land, installed perforated pipes below the surface of their fields, collected the ag runoff and shipped it to Kesterson, where it killed wildlife. As if the soil itself were not enough of a problem, the surface water, originating as far north as the Trinity River, picked up salts all the way to the Delta and south of it, bringing in as much as 64 railroad carloads of salts a day in irrigation water. Congress has never approved money to build the second half of the drain to the Delta and the scandal of dead wildlife closed Kesterson and a halfway destination, so the salts and heavy metals are pretty much bottled up on the west side. Yet, the intrepid bigshot growers are still succeed in dumping ag wastewater into the San Joaquin River, which runs north to the Delta and would dump more, through various “bypasses,” always presented as perfectly rational projects.
Meanwhile, the social situation on the west side has deteriorated. The Fresno County Grand Jury in its 2007-2008 report, noted that gang activity in the county is “rampant;” gang membership increased by 33 percent from 2001 to 2006 and is five times the national average per capita; during 2005, more than 3,500 gang members were incarcerated; incarceration of gang members costs between $50 and $70 per day; and on a given day in October 2006, out of a county-jail population of 3,510, 1,485 were identified as gang members and the cost for their incarceration was more than $74,250. Teen-age pregnancy rates are highest among Latinas, poverty is also “rampant,” and the education levels in the region are among the lowest in California.
“Reaping riches in a wretched region” is a meticulously researched indictment of the worst example of social, economic and environmental injustice in American agriculture, a huge pustule of agricultural, political, and economic corruption in the heart of the largest, richest, most “golden state” in the country, an object of shame and misery for the many and incredibly unjust enrichment for a few. Lloyd Carter has picked up the gauntlet laid down by John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams and Ernesto Galarza, with a touch of poets like Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel and scholars like Steven Stoll to write, in his modest idiom, the newspaper article (however richly annotated for lawyers and scholars), the true dope on the Valley.
Give yourself a rare treat – read a lucid, historically based article on a simple case of monumental social, economic and environmental injustice at: http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvol3/attachment/Carter.pdf
