Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [314]
The effect of everything, according to the economists, is that a few thousand farmers will, over the course of fifty years, receive a billion and a half dollars’ worth of taxpayer generosity that was never supposed to be theirs. (The value of the interest exemption isn’t included in this figure; that was their right.) And the result, according to the NRDC, is that “the repayment of [capital] costs of the CVP is likely to be zero by the time most of the water contracts expire in the 1990s.” The farmers, who were entitled to incredibly cheap water, have ended up getting it nearly free.
Who are the beneficiaries of this vast unintended largess? The report found that the biggest subsidies, on a farm-by-farm basis, are going to the Westlands Water District, which is where the biggest farmers in the CVP service area happen to reside. (The Westlands, in fact, consumes about 25 percent of the water the project has for sale, enough to supply all of New York City.) By the economists’ calculations, the true cost of delivering water to Westlands has now reached $97 per acre-foot; the farmers are being charged between $7.50 and $11.80. Taking the average farm size in the district, this translates into a subsidy of around $500,000 per farm—per year.
That sounds bad enough, but it is even worse than it sounds. Spread across the district, the subsidy to Westlands amounts to something like $217 per acre per year; the average annual revenue produced by an acre of Westlands land is only $290. This means that 70 percent of the profit on what is supposed to be some of the richest farmland in the world comes solely through taxpayer subsidization—not crop production. Not only that, but the main Westlands crop was then cotton, which in the 1980s had become very much a surplus crop. So the same. subsidies that were helping to enrich some of the wealthiest farmers in the nation were at the same time depressing crop prices elsewhere and undoubtedly driving unsubsidized cotton farmers in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi out of business.
It was these same Westlands farmers, incidentally, who, with the help of their good friends Senator Alan Cranston and Representative Tony Coelho, led the successful effort to expand the acreage limitation from 160 to 960 acres in 1982. Even so, when their ten-year “grace” period expires in 1992, many will still be in violation of the law unless they sell off their excess lands; farms of 2,000 and 3,000 acres are commonplace; “farms” of 30,000 acres are not unknown; not a single 160-acre farm exists within its borders. (Why such a group of farmers should have received subsidized water in the first place is a good question.) After saying all this, it hardly seems worth mentioning that the Westlands Water District’s irrigation return flows are the main source of the valley’s high levels of selenium, which have been poisoning tens of thousands of waterfowl in the valley wildlife refuges and, from the available evidence, all the way into San Francisco Bay.
There, in a nutshell, is how one of the nation’s preeminent examples of reform legislation is stood completely on its head: illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve. And what was the response of the Bureau to the NRDC report? It quibbled about the actual size of the subsidies but, strikingly enough, didn’t deny that they are occurring or