California drought affects poor disproportionately

MERCED, CA — Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in the rich agricultural state of California, which is enduring the fourth year of an historic drought. He demands a 20% reduction in water use, while exempting farmers who consume 80% of the state’s water. The Governor is most responsive to corporate interests, including billionaire farmers growing almonds for export to China and oil company executives who use millions of gallons of water drilling for oil in the midst of a drought.
To make matters worse, the water thirsty crops, almonds, pistachios, alfalfa, and cotton, are planted and grown in the desert Westside of the Valley. In the last two years, record planting of almonds on the west side has pumped more water than Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco combined use in a year.
Residents of East Porterville, an impoverished community of farmworker families, go without water to shower, cook, and clean. Dependent on groundwater, their wells have gone dry as agricultural interests with deeper wells shift to intensive pumping of groundwater.
To make matters worse, some unscrupulous landowners have been selling or diverting groundwater out of the county. They take advantage of the fact that, historically, there have been no state regulations on groundwater use in California. A recently enacted law is weak and does not go fully into effect until 2040.
During drought years, allocations of surface waters from rivers are significantly reduced or eliminated to protect fishing, prevent environmental damage to the Delta and to protect agriculture in the Delta, which normally drains the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.
Not surprisingly, the drought has exacerbated long-standing tensions about water use in the state. It has pitted environmentalists, fishermen, Delta farmers, Valley farmers, and city dwellers, north and south, against each other. As usual, it is the poor who suffer disproportionately. Farm workers and other rural poor are used as pawns in a propaganda war to convince the public that private interests can manage the scarce resource of water best, when it is the moneyed interests who are exacerbating the problem.
A total of 17 Central Valley communities like East Porterville had to have bottled water trucked in during the recent drought years. It is anticipated that this summer will be worse. It does not seem to matter that many of them live adjacent to the Kern Water Bank, the world’s largest reservoir of water in the world, subsidized by tax dollars and run for a profit. Meanwhile, water rates go up in the San Francisco Bay Area and are projected to increase even more in Southern California.
We are all in this together. The water crisis in California highlights the need to make water a human right and not something to be sold to the highest bidder. In the process we protect the environment for future generations.