Water Politics

This is a really outstanding investigation into how California and thus federal water politics work. That agribusiness would create a Latino front group with the message that not delivering more water to the Central Valley would kill Latino jobs is the height of hypocrisy given the horrendous conditions in which those farmers work and live on these farms. But cynicism is the name of the game for agribusiness. The question is whether we as Americans and especially the people of northern California should subsidize the growth of high-profit crops like almonds for huge growers. California agribusiness likes to paint itself as feeding America, and to some extent this is true. But almonds aren’t exactly a necessary crop and as the drought continues, small farmers are being forced out and hedge-fund supported almond operations are replacing them. This is a long-term recipe for disaster given the water requirements of almonds. But the agribusiness lobby certainly knows how to play the game.

Twenty dams big and 500 miles of canals long, the Central Valley Project offered area farmers a boundless supply of Northern California water for decades. But as a second canal system, the State Water Project, began tapping the same northern rivers in the 1970s, problems emerged.

Commercial salmon fisheries collapsed. East of San Francisco, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers unite in an estuary, striped bass, sturgeon, shad and smelt began precipitous declines.

Congress’s solution — a 1992 law reserving at least a minimum amount of water for wildlife — touched off a long-running political backlash by San Joaquin Valley farmers. For 23 years, Westlands has led the mostly losing battle to get that water back: in courts, in Washington and along California roads, where placards condemning a “Congress-created Dust Bowl” blame the government, not drought, for water shortages.

The district comes to the fight well prepared. Mr. Amaral was until this fall the top aide to Representative Devin Nunes of nearby Fresno, a Republican. Mr. Amaral’s predecessor, Jason Peltier, oversaw Western water issues in the Interior Department under President George W. Bush.

Westlands’ pre-eminent lobbyist, David Bernhardt, was the Bush Interior Department’s solicitor before joining a Denver law firm that Westlands retained after President Obama was elected in 2008.

Others have also helped Westlands court federal decision makers. Vin Weber and Denny Rehberg, former Republican representatives from Minnesota and Montana, have been paid more than $550,000 since 2013 to lobby Congress.

These people do not mess around and they have very powerful friends. The question we have to ask is to what extent we will subsidize the transformation of the California environment in order to provide high-profit crops for increasingly centralized farm corporations. Although that’s something of a misstatement because in the present atmosphere of corporate control over politics, the real question is more simply how much influence these corporations can buy and whether it will buy more influence their opponents, which probably only have any chance because they include a lot of other rich Californians who have money and popular support.

Another point. This sort of issue is another facet to the larger trajectory of western natural resource industries as the Bundys. Many of the questions are the same. Whose interests should the government serve in allocating natural sources? To what extent should urban dwellers subsidize rural life? Does the government have the right to regulate or restrict land use and access to public natural resources? The primary difference is that the economics of California agribusiness make sense in the short term and thus they can buy powerful allies whereas the Sagebrush Rebellion types are participating in a failed economy of cattle ranching on public lands and because of their non-corporate economic structures, they can’t access those resources, even if at times both groups can come together in common interests.