The last few months have seen a flurry of astroturf protests of federal court decisions to protect the critically endangered Delta Smelt, and California’s marginally less-threatened salmon runs.

Some of the wealthiest individuals in the country, heirs to huge and massively subsidized agricultural holdings on poisoned land that should never have seen a plow, have cast the last-minute move to save the Bay-Delta ecosystem and its inhabitants as a “Congress-Created Dustbowl,” with the usual hacks shilling for them.

And the thing is, they’re right, though calling the present-day San Joaquin Valley a “Dust Bowl” even at its worst is an insult to those who lived through the original, about like calling a round of layoffs at a tech firm a “Holocaust.” A few fields were fallowed this year that might not have been. Many of the “Dust Bowl” signs along I-5 were backed up, within a hundred yards or so, by lush, sufficiently irrigated orchards and row crops. Notably, many of the fields sporting those signs along the highway had been recently farrowed: almost as if the Westlands Growers meant to increase the amount of dust blowing off them onto the highway. It was a Potemkin Dust Bowl. But Congress created the situation. Congress created it by granting, as Lloyd G. Carter says in the article embedded below, “well over a billion dollars in taxpayer aid… to a few hundred growers” over decades, getting them accustomed to the Federal Teat.

In the process, those same growers created the poverty and misery they now wield as a rhetorical weapon.

His article — perhaps the most readable such I’ve ever seen on water politics in a law review — should be required reading for anyone living in California, and anyone uttering an opinion in public on the “Congress Created Dust Bowl.”

Reaping Riches In a Wretched Region: Subsidized Industrial Farming and its Link To Perpetual Poverty

1. 
   Madhusudan Katti 2009 11 28 at 12:30:17 am

   Thanks for pointing out this paper, Chris - I’ll definitely be reading it, and assigning it to my students as well. It really is remarkable how much clout these wealthy “farmers” have in driving the entire debate over water and farming in the valley. I sure hope more people read this paper. I’ll be blogging about it as well.