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Water and a fish - Farming in California's Central Valley

A well written and sobering article on the damage that is being done to America's ability to farm because of a few environmentalists and an insignificant little fish. From the Toronto, Ontario Globe and Mail:

How green was my valley: California's drought
For a perfect view of California's economic ruin, Todd Allen's front porch is a pretty good place to stand.

At first, you would never guess it. Mr. Allen, 46, is a blond, bright-eyed farmer, just like his father and grandfather before him.

When a stranger drives to his homestead, nestled neatly in Fresno County, Mr. Allen doesn't dictate directions by distance. He punctuates them with references to things like American flags, the sweet smell of oleander and the point at which a gravel road disintegrates into dirt.

Ask Mr. Allen what he noticed when he drove along the back roads this sunny Friday morning, and his answer comes in a collage of images attesting to America's new hard times.

The lineup at the makeshift food bank by the old rodeo grounds is almost a kilometre long.

Tent cities for the homeless have sprung up on H Street in Fresno.

The last bank, Westamerica, in the nearby town of Mendota has a new sign in the window saying it will close for good.

In California, authorities have begun to issue IOUs instead of cash.

Unemployment stands at 11.6 per cent and 180 cities are set to sue the state over a budget that proposes to close a $26.3-billion shortfall by taking $4.7-billion from their coffers.

In all of this, Fresno County, where Mr. Allen was born and raised, has the unenviable distinction of being the hardest-hit county in the state.

Its jobless rate reaches 40 per cent in some towns. America's housing crisis was its most pronounced here, with prices almost triple a home's value. Nearly half of all sales these days involve foreclosure.

On paper, the numbers are staggering. For the rest of California, Fresno County stands as a cautionary tale of consequences to come.

It is that bad -- the officials in Sacramento are operating in a vacuum and think that they can spend their way out of the hole they have dug for themselves with all the entitlement programs and not saving money back when the California Economy was booming. The real cause of this story is here:

However, his particular scene of devastation, Mr. Allen argues, has nothing to do with the credit crisis, the housing crash or the downturn that has California in a vice grip.

It has to do with a seven-centimetre-long, semi-translucent, steel blue fish known as the Delta smelt.

This is not a story about fish. Rather, it is a story about how efforts to save the fish through a court-ordered water shortage have pushed a region already brought to the brink by recession over the edge.

And of course, the local businesses that depend on farmers for their livelihood are having real problems too (economist Richard Howitt of the University of California at Davis):

Without water, farmers have left an estimated 200,000 hectares of once-productive farmland fallow. Thousands of farm workers, mainly Spanish-speaking migrants, have been laid off.

Mr. Howitt estimates lost farm revenue in the San Joaquin Valley could top $2-billion this year and will suck as many as 80,000 jobs out of its already-battered economy.

“This is one of the classic, really difficult trade-offs we are faced with in hard times: environmental values versus human suffering,” he says.

“The rest of California should care about this because what's happening in Fresno is a forerunner of the essential environmental and economic debate that we're going to have because our environmental rules were set up before people were confronted with the real effects of an economic downturn.”

The bottom line, Mr. Howitt says, is that “we are going to have to make fundamental choices. ... It's fish versus jobs and communities.”

And of course, people are trying to work around this:

There is also talk of short-term solutions, such as diverting water from other areas to the San Joaquin Valley or rebuilding the pumps so they don't kill the fish.

Environmental groups still maintain that's not enough, and that any form of diversion is ultimately damaging and unsustainable.

Considering the incredible impact this is having on people's lives and the welfare of the state, I wonder how these environmental groups can collectively sleep at night. There are several tens of thousands of new species discovered each year from bacteria to bat and for one fish to be the rallying cry of a group of self-justified asshats beggars belief. These people should be relocated out of the cushy environs of Berkeley and San Francisco and be made to live on a farm for a couple of years. If the farms are forced into bankruptcy, we will loose the infrastructure and if we loose that, restarting will be that much more difficult and we will be forced to import our food. And if you think that this whole state of affairs is just wonderful, now you have an inkling of what is in store when Cap and Trade swings into effect...

Posted by DaveH at July 25, 2009 7:20 PM | TrackBack