Flowing Downhill to Money

Photo: PGHolbrook

How Corporate Growers Are Using Taxpayer Funds to Seize California’s Water

The Central Valley Project — the sprawling federal complex of dams, reservoirs, and canals that conveys water from the Trinity and Sacramento River watersheds through the San Francisco Bay-Delta to the corporate farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley – is employing massive taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies to support a handful of spectacularly wealthy growers. To enrich the few and the powerful, the CVP has commandeered state water supplies, destroyed California’s once-iconic salmon runs, poisoned hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, threatening public health, fish, and wildlife.

The CVP grew out of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which was established to encourage settlement of the rural western United States. The project’s original subsidies helped family farmers stricken by the Great Depression. But in ensuing decades, a small number of industrial agricultural corporations established control of hundreds of thousands of acres in the San Joaquin Valley, consolidating their grip on the lion’s share of CVP water.

…“subsidy” is hardly adequate to describe the egregious seizure of public funds by Central Valley growers.

Land for People, an activist group of small farmers, sued to enforce federal rules on the scope and scale of industrial agriculture. They prevailed in that lawsuit. But federal lawmakers allied with corporate farmers then passed legislation that bypassed the acreage limitations and other CVP allocation conditions Land for People had secured.

Since then, land consolidation has proceeded smoothly in the regions served by the CVP, particularly in the western San Joaquin Valley. Even as drought has afflicted urban ratepayers and small farmers throughout California, CVP contractors have concentrated on water-intensive crops that yield high returns, such as almonds and pistachios – luxury foods sold for export at premium prices.

Indeed, the term “subsidy” is hardly adequate to describe the egregious seizure of public funds by Central Valley growers. In simplified terms, a CVP contract is an obligation to pay off the debt the federal government incurred to build the project. It is analogous to a 50-year mortgage, but the asset is the water delivery infrastructure – dams, tunnels, turbines, canals, and pumps – rather than a house, and the contract requires no down payment and no interest payments.

If an irrigator declares they are unable to meet the required annual payments, they aren’t […]

Full article: www.c-win.org