Fresno County, left in the dust: Drought, water politics and tough economic times

[phantom power]

Acouple of years ago, were you to have swung by Westside Grocery in the town of Mendota on a Thursday or a Friday, you probably would have had to linger for a while in the sizzling Central Valley heat. The little store was so busy that the line of customers waiting to cash paychecks and make purchases would often spill out the door and halfway down 7th Street.

But now the paychecks have dried up, along with the farmland in these parts, thanks to a cruel confluence of drought, environmental regulation and years of political neglect.

...

the realities of water shortages -- and water politics -- have taken a huge toll. Riofrio says that things began to slip away about five or six years ago. That's when he began noticing the effects of farmers in the 600,000-acre Westlands Water District fallowing and permanently retiring more and more cropland as a way to cope with too little irrigation and major drainage problems that have led to salty soil.

About a year and a half ago, well before Mendota started making headlines, things had gotten bad enough that Riofrio stopped selling fresh milk at his store. Too few could afford it anymore. In the last few months, the downward spiral has greatly accelerated. Farmers in Westlands, who've yanked about 100,000 acres out of production since 2000, say they may now be forced to idle as many as 150,000 more for lack of water.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wartzman19-2009jul19,0,4411825.story

[pinto]

1. Good article. Drought and the "politics" of water allocation are hitting the Central Valley hard.

This was a perfect storm long in the making.

[tularetom]

2. These "farmers" wasted the water they got for free from the taxpayers

And basically poisoned their own land. They poured the free water on the ground and leached out minerals that permanently contaminated the root zone of the crops they were growing. So don't waste your sympathy on them. They will still receive generous subsidies from the government for not growing the crops anyway.

The farm workers on the other hand are basically fucked. They have no recourse.

The sorry history of irrigated agriculture repeats itself once more.

[pretzel4gore]

3. bush and greed was supposed to save them, wasn't it?

everywhere one looks, you see same thing: the collective energy represented by 'government' and honest tax system to maintain it, got lost in the scramble to empower non-entitries like corporations and allow them to buy up/control mass media, which fed the 'greed is good' demon. Greed was never good. No more then jealousy, or apathy, or sex perversity(lust) or any of the other '7 deadly sins' were good. Yet for an entire generation, the idea that 'greed is good' (re ayn rand, greenspan, norquist, straus, victorhansen, rush limbah, foxnews, cnn, dick cheney and soon ad nazism) was the ONLY basis of community! No wonder humanity is in trouble.

[depakid]

4. I suspect we'll see this repeated many times in many places over the next two decades