Lost
In the Valley of Excess
California's
wealthiest growers, poorest workers, and the water between
them...
By John Gibler
Earth Island Journal
Read Online
A newcomer arriving into
California's San Joaquin Valley - the most lucrative and
industrialized agricultural region in the United States - might
think that the entire place is burning. On the horizon in all
directions the brown hue of the air suggests a distant fire. As the
traveler advances along, say, Highway 99, the fire appears to peel
away, a deep stain floating off in the distance, as if forever
clinging to the edges of the sky. Upon moving farther in, one
slowly realizes that the blaze does not recede. The traveler does
not move toward the fire, but within it.
The arid San Joaquin Valley has some of
the worst air pollution in the country, a daily cloud of smog and
soot that rises from interstate automobile traffic, the belching of
a few million cows packed into mega-dairies, the incineration of
toxic waste, and the constant fueling of irrigation pumps and food
processing plants - all weaving a faded yellow curtain that hangs
in the air.
In a region where so much is burning,
nothing is more valuable than water.
No one knows this better than Stewart and
Lynda Resnick, owners of one of the biggest privately held
agribusiness corporations in the United States - Roll International
- or, as their website proclaims: "the largest privately held
company you've never heard of." Roll's holdings include Paramount
Farming, the largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios
in the world; Paramount Citrus; Fiji Water; Suterra, a pesticide
brand; Teleflora; PomWonderful; and the Neptune Pacific Line, a
global shipping company.
A large part of the Resnicks'
billion-dollar business entails growing more than 5 million trees
in the cracked and dry Westside soil of the San Joaquin Valley,
where rain doesn't fall and rivers do not flow. Kern County
receives only five inches of rainfall a year and most of its
aquifers have been depleted, contaminated, or both. None of
Paramount's pistachio or almond trees would survive without the
daily application of irrigation water pumped through the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and down the length of the California
Aqueduct.
Over the past two decades, the Resnicks
have been at the heart of the most controversial moves in
California water politics. When the Resnicks began buying land here
in the 1980s from Mobil and Texaco, they acquired contracts for
California State Water Project deliveries from the California
Aqueduct. From far behind the scenes they helped rewrite the
contracts that govern the California State Water Project,
commandeered a $74 million dollar state water bank, and encouraged
Senator Dianne Feinstein to intervene on behalf of agribusiness in
the conflicts over the ecological collapse of the Delta.
The Resnicks' political involvement is
driven by a simple force: money. The Resnicks have made a lot of it
over the past 20 years by hoarding state water resources in ways
now being challenged in court. In a land of outrageous poverty, the
Resnicks have built a billion-dollar fortune by growing trees with
water from an artificial river while the migrant workers who tend
the irrigation pumps don't have access to potable water in their
homes.
The ecology of the entire Central Valley,
from Redding to Bakersfield, has been remade over the past 150
years by the engineered movement of water for large-scale
agriculture in the valley and real estate development on the coast.
"The Westside contains very marginal land that never should have
been irrigated," said Richard Walker, professor of geography at UC
Berkeley and author of The Conquest of Bread: 150
Years of Agribusiness in California. "The California Aqueduct was for the
Westside, toxic land."
The Eastside was subdivided and sold in
the 1880s for small, lucrative, irrigated farms, Walker told me.
"The good water was developed early," he said. "The post-1940 dams
and big canals are to make up for dry areas."
Started during the Great Depression, the
federal Central Valley Project contains 20 dams and 500 miles of
canals able to store and move about 9 million acre-feet of water.
(An acre-foot is the amount of water necessary to cover an area of
one acre to a depth of one foot, roughly the amount of water
consumed by two families of four in a year.) Advocates at the time
argued that the Central Valley Project would enable farmers to pump
less water from underground. Instead, growers used the subsidized
federal water to bring 3 million new acres into irrigated
production, and continued pumping all the same.
Jealous landowners of vast barren tracts
on the Westside of the southern San Joaquin saw the bonanza of the
Central Valley Project and demanded a project of their own. The
result of their lobbying efforts is the California State Water
Project. Constructed in the 1960s, the project includes 19 dams, 10
energy plants, 20 pumping stations, and a 444-mile concrete river:
the California Aqueduct.
When the Resnicks went shopping for
agricultural land in the late 1980s - looking for a "passive
investment" Stewart Resnick told one reporter - the Westside is
where they went. Soon after the Resnicks bought into the Westside,
multiple drought years between 1987 and 1994 proved that the
artificial bounty of the California Aqueduct would not be enough to
protect their investment. They needed a back-up plan.
Executives and lawyers working for
Paramount thus engineered the takeover of nearly 20,000 acres of
state property where the California Department of Water Resources
had invested $74 million to turn a depleted aquifer alongside the
Kern River into an underground reservoir, or water bank, capable of
storing one million acre-feet of water. After a series of backroom
negotiations, the state signed over the Kern Water Bank to five
water districts and a private company. The private company,
Westside Mutual Water Company, is a paper company owned by the
Resnicks, and the water districts are controlled by agribusinesses,
including Paramount.
The Resnicks' water grab hasn't gone
unopposed. On June 3, 2010, the Center for Biological Diversity
and a group of six plaintiffs filed
a lawsuit in state court challenging the private control of the
water bank. A separate lawsuit filed by a smaller pistachio grower
alleges that the Resnicks sold water from the Kern Water Bank for a
profit, a violation of state public utilities law. Still another
lawsuit filed by Kern County water districts asked the court to
halt pumping from the bank and investigate how much water can be
drawn without drying up local wells. The Fresno Bee
reported that the water table has fallen by 115 feet in just three
years, an unprecedented drop. Three of the last four years were
dry, and almond and pistachio trees cannot go that long without
water.
Beyond the legal technicalities lie larger
questions of how vital natural resources should be managed. With
the takeover of the Kern Water Bank, a public asset that could have
been used to supply clean water to nearby farmworkers' towns - and
as a drought-relief water bank for both small towns and farmers -
was instead used to safeguard the water supply of almond and
pistachio trees in the desert for a Beverly Hills billionaire
couple. Since taking over the Kern Water Bank, Paramount has more
than doubled its production of almonds and pistachios, becoming the
largest grower and processor of the nuts in the world. And the
Resnicks made the Forbes list of billionaires.
Paramount Farming lists two
headquarters: Los Angeles and Lost Hills. The contrast could not be
sharper. The Resnicks' Beverly Hills home looks more like an
embassy than a house and the couple controls more water than any
other single agribusiness in the state. The farmworkers of Lost
Hills live in mobile homes and cannot drink the water from their
taps. The crops they tend drink better, and cheaper, water than
they do.
Lost Hills is entirely flat. There are no
hills there, lost or otherwise, though the Coastal Range foothills
can sometimes be seen through the valley haze some 30 miles off to
the west. But to the casual traveler the place would probably seem
lost.
"There is nothing here," Ana Chavez, who
works at the Lost Hills Utility District, told me. "This is a
forgotten community. And you know why? Because it is a community of
all Hispanics."
A visit to the town reveals the
intertwined fates of water and migrant laborers in California
agriculture: Both are pulled hundreds of miles from their places of
origin and used to extract wealth from the land. Lost Hills, which
stretches for about two hundred yards on either side of Highway 46
in the northwestern corner of Kern County, is a twenty-first
century company town.
During the pounding heat of a summer day
most people here are out working in the fields; those at home take
refuge indoors from the sun. Only children seem to venture out,
spraying each other with garden hoses and seeking out patches of
shade in which to play. Around 4 p.m., cars and vans start rolling
back into town: Men and women emerge, shoulders hunched, carrying
small coolers, and walk, exhausted, to their doors. Many stop off
at the Village Market store to buy bottled water or fill up
five-gallon jugs at a vending machine.
Bordered by oil fields to the west and
surrounded by thousands of acres of almond and pistachio orchards
to the south, north, and east, Lost Hills has a population of
1,938, according to the 2000 census, and about double that
according to those who live here. There is one traffic light in
town; postal service consists of a small trailer with P.O. boxes.
There is no bank, no pharmacy, and no local government. All public
affairs must be conducted in Bakersfield, about 40 miles to the
southeast. A small community health clinic, elementary school,
local utility district, and county fire station make up the social
services available. Two small food stores, a barbershop, an auto
repair shop, and three taco trucks, called loncheras,
comprise the local commerce. The nearest place to deposit a check
or go to a supermarket is Wasco, 20 miles away.
Lost Hills is 96.7 percent Hispanic
according to the census, which also reports that nearly 70 percent
of the population was born in Latin America. One resident charted
the local demographics this way: "There are only two
gabacho families here." (Gabacho, a term used widely
in Mexico, refers to a person from the United States.)
The homes are small, single story, simple,
and clean, the yards and porches without clutter. There are two
trailer parks, each with over a hundred mobile homes slotted one
next to the other in rows and circles, everything sun-bleached and
worn, and everything impeccably well cared for. If abandoned is the
first descriptive term to come to mind here, it is followed soon by
dignified. These are working people, and their work ethic can be
read in their tidy houses and mobile homes and inside their
spotless kitchens. At the same time, the community is unmistakably
poor. Thirty percent of the people in Lost Hills receive incomes
below the federal poverty level. Nearly everyone labors in the
fields for minimum wage.
Yet Lost Hills is only one degree of
separation from the stuff of fairytale wealth and glamour, for
nearly everyone in town works for the Resnicks.
The Resnicks live in a Beverly Hills
mansion on Sunset Boulevard that has been compared, favorably, to
the Palace of Versailles. Amy Wilentz, one of few writers to gain
access to the Resnicks' home and publish an account of her visit,
described walking through the Resnicks' house with Lynda as "like
taking a tour of pre-Revolutionary France." Wilentz also cited a
"vanity essay" penned by Lynda Resnick that describes her house as
"topped off on all four sides with rows of balustrades through
which a queen might peek out and utter, 'Let them eat
cake.'"
The Los Angeles Business
Journal estimates the Resnicks' worth at $1.79 billion.
During the recession, when the San Joaquin Valley became an
epicenter of unemployment and home foreclosures, the Resnicks saw
their fortune grow by about $300 million. During the dry years,
when pumping from the Kern Water Bank caused the local water table
to drop 115 feet, the Resnicks were making bank. The couple is what
the nonprofit world likes to call "major donors." They've given
over $4 million to political campaigns, according to a
recent California Watch analysis. In 2009, the Resnicks gave $55
million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The per capita
income in Lost Hills in 2000 was $8,317. The Resnicks handed the LA
art scene more than double the combined income of the entire
population of Lost Hills.
Many of Paramount's 120,000 acres of
orchards surround Lost Hills, and the Paramount Farms processing
plant is located about 15 miles away. Everyone I met in Lost Hills
either worked for Paramount, had worked for Paramount, or was
related to someone - or several people - who work for Paramount.
All of the laborers worked for between $8 and $8.65 an hour. No one
made more.
Aurelio (the names of current Paramount
employees have been changed to protect their identities) works for
Paramount seven days a week for a total of 62 hours at $8.65 an
hour, no overtime. Farm labor is given overtime only after a
10-hour day and a 60-hour workweek under a law that State Senator
Dean Florez, a Democrat from the nearby town of Shafter, is trying
to change. Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill at the end of the
2010 legislative session.
Aurelio is an irrigator; there is no rest
for his labor. He has worked at Paramount for 13 years. When asked
about his lack of a day off, he responded: "Those little trees
always have to get their water because it is very hot."
Aurelio, his wife, and three children live
in a small, clean mobile home in a trailer park and pay $450 a
month in rent. Aurelio talks about his work as if recounting tales
of adventure - when he speaks his voice lifts and his eyes widen.
He has followed jobs from Mexico City to Texas, Los Angeles to Lost
Hills. He said of his years of labor: "When one likes to work, it's
very beautiful." He had no harsh words for his supervisors or
employers at Paramount, though he did not know much about the
latter.
"They say just one person is the owner of
all this," he said. "but who knows, because it's a lot."
"They have a runway near the plant," he
said of the Resnicks' private airport. "Sometimes they visit for
New Year's. If there is an employee lunch they get in line for food
just like the rest of us. They seem like good people. They don't
behave like they feel they are better than us. They eat at the same
table."
Another Paramount farmworker, Fernando,
hails from Chiapas in far southern Mexico and has been in Lost
Hills for seven years, scraping together money to send back to his
wife and son. He works 58 hours a week for Paramount: 10 hours a
day during the week and eight on Saturday. He earns $8 an hour. He
said: "Paramount supports you more than others. They provide
equipment. For example, if you're going to apply pesticides they
provide the gloves and goggles; others don't do that."
Asked roughly how many field workers are
undocumented, he said: "If not 100 percent, then the majority. If
they had their papers in order they would get other jobs. Do you
really think that someone with the proper papers is going to be
killing themselves for $8 when at least they'll get $11 at another
job?"
No one working for Paramount spoke an ill
word of the company, though the family members of employees and
ex-employees I spoke with did. One man who had worked more than ten
years for the company told of being fired after a knee injury on
the job. He had to go to court to force the company to pay for his
surgery. Most other complaints had to do with the company's low
wages.
Throughout the San Joaquin Valley
farmworkers are pushed to the outer limits of labor laws, working
the maximum number of hours for the minimum pay. One can understand
a small farmer forced to pay low wages by the brutal hardship of
the global market and competition with larger growers. But if
anyone could pay living wages to employees and still turn a profit,
it would be Paramount.
One woman - who used to work for Paramount
and whose two sons work there now, and who asked that I not use her
name because, "this is a small town" - said of the Paramount pay
scale: "These are hunger wages."
I walked into Paramount's Lost Hills
office one day last July to see if I could speak to someone there.
I was given a phone number in Los Angeles for Roll International. I
called and was asked to call back. I did and was routed to a
recorded message. I left a message after the tone, as instructed.
No one returned my call.
Years earlier, while working on another
investigation, I also called Roll International to request an
interview. That time the receptionist told me straight: "We don't
give information to the public." When I asked her to whom I should
address my research questions she responded, "I suggest you don't
research us." Then she hung up.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
used to be the region where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers
would meet, pool for hundreds of square miles, and slowly drain
into the San Francisco Bay and out to sea through the Golden Gate.
Not anymore. The San Joaquin River is mostly diverted for
irrigation before it can reach the Delta and the Sacramento is
largely lifted out of the southern tip of the Delta and pumped down
the San Joaquin Valley for irrigation.
Today, the Delta is a work of human
engineering built over 150 years that consists of thousands of
miles of levees, emaciated river flows, immense pumps, bromide and
mercury contamination, endangered species, and below sea level
"islands" housing communities and farms that would most likely be
under water within hours of a major earthquake.
The Delta is the hub of California's water
engineering system and the current focal point of the state's
infamous water wars. Environmentalists and Delta communities want
to reduce water exports. Irrigators in the San Joaquin and their
strange bedfellows in the powerful Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California, which draws water pumped through the Delta,
want to increase water exports. There is one thing all sides agree
on: The Delta is a disaster waiting to explode.
In 2005, populations of several fish
species used to gauge the overall health of the Delta ecosystem
plummeted toward extinction. "The Delta is ill. Gravely ill," wrote
Contra Costa Times reporter Mike Taugher at the
beginning of a five-part investigative series on the ecological crisis in the Delta.
"After decades of decline, the Delta's vital signs have suddenly
plunged to new depths."
Several Delta fish species hang on the
verge of collapse, but the tiny, endangered Delta Smelt has become
the cause c�l�bre for environmental lawsuits seeking to stop Delta
pumping and the b�te noir for agribusiness lobbyists who claim that
attempts to save the inch-long minnow come at the expense of
jobs.
But the idea of a battle between fish and
farmers is a false dichotomy. The fish in question is an indicator
species; its extinction represents full-scale ecosystem failure.
The farmers in question represent the largest agribusiness firms in
the country who face not bankruptcy, but simply a limit on the
amount of water they can rely upon from the Delta. The battle in
the Delta is not one of fish v. farmers, but collapse
v. reliability.
"We have a system where we try to deliver
more water than can be reliably delivered. All the signals tell us
that we have been exceeding the capacities of the system," said
Tina Swanson, executive director and chief scientist at the
Bay Institute. "It is incontrovertible that we have to
expect to export less water from the Delta than we have in the
past; it is unsustainable. We're going to have to learn to make do
with less."
Making do with less is blasphemy in San
Joaquin Valley agribusiness. Every major water development in the
region has been predicated on the idea of staring collapse in the
face and demanding more: the Central Valley Project, the State
Water Project, the Kern Water Bank, and the current drive to spend
another $11 billion in bond funds to build more dams and canals and
gun the motor of an engine already on the cusp of
failure.
Yet making do with less is an unrelenting
reality for the people who work in the fields picking fruits and
vegetables and tending to the almond and pistachio trees of these
same agribusinesses.
"There is this sense that farmworkers
prosper only when the farmers do, but that's not true at all. The
farmworkers don't prosper even when the farmers do," said Caroline
Farrell, acting executive director of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
in Delano. Farrell said that the
fish versus farmers spin "is just one more way of exploiting
farmworkers. There's no talk of paying farmworkers just
wages."
Indeed, the California Farm Bureau
supports the water bond measure to build more dams. It also lobbied
successfully against Senator Florez's bill to overhaul farm labor
overtime rules.
In 2003, I interviewed Paramount Farming's
resource planning manager, Scott Hamilton. At the time I was
researching the Kern Water Bank and its potential use for water
marketing. Hamilton said that water sales were not Paramount's main
interest. "We're in a situation of growing almonds and pistachios
without a firm water supply, so we went into the Kern Water Bank to
secure a water supply," he said.
True enough. When I asked Aurelio if,
during his 13 years working as an irrigator at Paramount a tree had
ever died from lack of water, his answer came without a hint of
uncertainty: "No."
The farmworkers in the region are not so
lucky.
"If you are poor and a farmworker, then
you don't have clean water," said Susana De Anda, co-director of
the Community Water Center in Visalia, an organization dedicated to
advocating for potable water in the valley. "You pay water rates
between $50 and $100 a month for water that you can't drink, and
then you have to spend more on bottled water."
Farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley have
effectively had their water privatized. Their communities have been
left out of the major water projects. The groundwater basins have
been depleted and contaminated by pesticides and nitrates from the
very agribusinesses that employ them. Little to no state funding
makes it to their local water systems, leaving them to buy bottled
water at the store or from a vending machine. Meanwhile, the
Resnicks, in what would seem a scripted irony, own Fiji Water, "the
#1 premier bottled water in the US."
The lack of access to clean and safe
drinking water in farmworker communities speaks to decades of
exclusion from federal and state water development. The exclusion
is not only a question of bitter histories, but also current
policy. The $11.2 billion dollar water bond that Governor
Schwarzenegger shifted from the 2010 to the 2012 ballot targets
less than one percent of its funds for disadvantaged communities in
the San Joaquin and other regions, according to an analysis of the
bond by the Environmental Justice Coalition for
Water.
"The bond does not take the issue of
potable water into consideration," De Anda said. "It is a project
for the growers. Potable water should be first, and priority should
be given to the people who do not have access."
While the residents of Lost Hills are
forced to buy expensive bottled water or suffer the consequences of
drinking contaminated water, the Resnicks, with their control over
the Kern Water Bank, have stored enough water to fill San
Francisco's Hetch Hetchy reservoir - twice. Court records show that
in early 2007, the Resnicks had 755,868 acre feet in the Kern Water
Bank, enough to keep their trees blooming during both a statewide
drought and a global recession.
Standing by the Glacier vending machine in
Lost Hills one day, I met a 19-year-old woman from Michoac�n who
migrated to Chicago at age nine with her family before relocating
to Lost Hills in 2008. She works a night shift, from 5 p.m. to 3
a.m., picking bell peppers for $8 an hour. If she works hard, she
said, in a month she can save $300. Asked if she drinks the tap
water in her home she said no, that "it tastes nasty and they tell
us not to drink it." So every three days she fills up her jug. On a
blazing July day, she pushed her full, 5-gallon jug of drinking
water from the vending machine back to her house in a baby
carriage. About two hundred yards down the road, the California
Aqueduct was full and flowing fast.
John Gibler is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles
of Power and Revolt (City
Lights, 2009) and To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside
the Drug War (City Lights, forthcoming in 2011).
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