[env-trinity] Bakersfield Californian

[Byron]

Environmental Working Group Response to Westlands' president's Op-ED

 

Westland's Water Subsidies More Corporate Welfare

 

Posted: Friday October 28th, 2005, 10:00 PM Last Updated: Friday October
28th, 2005, 10:00 PM

 

In his recent Community Voices column, the president of Westlands Water
District blasted Environmental Working Group's investigation of the
district's proposed federal water subsidies contract.

 

We agree with Jean Sagouspe on one point: Our agenda -- to price federal
Central Valley Project water more fairly and equitably -- should concern
every taxpayer. But a number of his assertions demand correction:

 

EWG has "a long history of anti-farming activities." Only if that means we
believe water and crop subsidies should go to the family farmers they were
meant to help, not well-off agribusiness corporations. Our investigations
have exposed that the great majority of subsidies go to the biggest and
richest farms, and that these billions in corporate welfare are helping push
small farmers off the land.

 

Making irrigation districts pay more for water would "make California more
dependent on foreign-grown food." Fewer than 10 percent of California
farmers receive federal water subsidies, yet the state is by far the
nation's largest food producer. About one- third of Westlands' acreage is
not in food crops but cotton -- a commodity in such surplus its price had to
be propped up by $1.6 billion in subsidies last year.

 

Under the new contract, Westlands will be entitled to receive exactly the
same amount of water." It is true that the old and new contracts promise
Westlands 1.15 million acre-feet a year. But that is far more than the
state's precipitation and the CVP can reliably provide. New long-term
contracts were an opportunity make contracted amounts conform to reality.

 

Instead, the Bureau of Reclamation has drawn up a detailed schedule showing
how it will deliver the full contract amount by 2030.  Westlands is promised
"full delivery" even though drainage problems could force hundreds of
thousands of acres to be taken out of production.

 

Westlands is made up of "600 family farming operations." There are small
family farms in Westlands. There are also dozens of large, diversified
operations that divide their holdings to get around the law that says farms
larger than 960 acres are ineligible for subsidized water. According to UC
Berkeley farm economist David Sunding, the 10 largest common ownership
groups in Westlands hold one- sixth of the district's 600,000 acres.

 

For example, the Woolf Enterprises empire includes 10 or more companies
controlled by two dozen family members spanning three generations. By our
calculations, Woolf-controlled operations received $3.5 million to $4.2
million in water subsidies in 2002, and about $4 million in federal crop
subsidies from 1995 to 2003. It is a family operation, but so is Ford Motor
Co. Why should this family expect taxpayers to prop up a business model that
depends on artificially low rates for water and artificially high prices for
its products?

 

Sagouspe closes by warning that EWG's "falsehoods and fallacies" hurt the
credibility of the environmental movement. Maybe he should ask whether
Westlands' disingenuous attempts to hide its dependence on corporate welfare
behind the image of the family farmer are hurting the credibility of
California agriculture.

 

(Bill Walker is vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a
nonprofit research organization with offices in Oakland and Washington, D.C.
Community Voices is an expanded commentary that may contain up to 500 words.
The Californian reserves the right to reprint commentaries in all formats,
including on its Web page.)

 

 

Byron Leydecker, 

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

Consultant, California Trout, Inc.

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://caltrout.org

 

 

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