Central Valley farmworkers struggle to drink, while megafarms consume rivers of clean water
The people of Flint aren’t the only ones drinking bottled water because their water supply has been poisoned.
That’s also happening in the largely Latino small towns that line California’s San Joaquin Valley, where they supply the labor force for a handful of corporate farms that cover hundreds of square miles each.
Even before the recent drought, those farms were pumping out most of the Valley’s groundwater as well as poisoning the water tables with nitrate fertilizer.
Central Valley towns like East Porterville and Fairmead have run out of water after deep drilling by the megafarms made their wells go dry.
In towns like Seville and East Orosi the water is undrinkable because of the nitrate contamination. The water company serving tiny Tonyville warns its customers, “Do not drink the water or use it to make infant formula.”
Tonyville residents talk about developing rashes and sores after bathing. They report numerous neighbors dying of cancers.
But California pumps rivers of clean, clear water from the Sierra snow pack into Central Valley megafarms every year.
Some 80 percent of California’s available water goes to agriculture, most of it in the Central Valley. But the water projects that were sold to voters as benefitting small farmers and thirsty city dwellers has actually gone to agribusiness billionaires.
Chief among them are Stewart and Lynda Resnick, Beverly Hills glitterati who hold 300 square miles of the southern Valley. They grow water-hungry almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates, largely for export to China.
They have also made a fortune from exporting water, not from the U.S., but from impoverished Fiji, where clean water is a luxury most cannot afford. That’s the pricy Fiji Water sold in supermarkets. But in the Central Valley, they also sell some of their subsidized water back to the state — for a reputed 100 percent profit.
Like the Resnicks, the other megafarm water lords have long since left the toxic dust and heat of the Central Valley to live in luxury on the coast.
The Vidoviches (100 square miles, almonds and cotton) live in exclusive Los Altos Hills. Jimmy Boswell (200 square miles, cotton) in Pasadena. The board of directors of Tejon Ranch (425 square miles, almonds, pistachios, wine grapes) are New York hedge-fund operators and Los Angeles real-estate moguls.
The Resnicks — and other landed oligarchs — are able to make all this happen through large payments (not bribes, campaign contributions) to successive governors, both Republican and Democratic, as well as to Democractic Senator Dianne Feinstein and the bevy of other Anglo politicians who “represent” the Valley’s Latino residents.
As well, they control the water districts that allocate the water and lobby for more in Washington and Sacramento. Voting in the water districts is not one man, one vote, but by acreage — and hundreds of square miles is a lot of votes.
As for the people who bring in the Central Valley’s crops, they are replaceable — and, as tree-shaking automation replaces the almond pickers, perhaps even that won’t be necessary.
