California's Drought
By Allysia Finley in
the Wall Street Journal
The U.S. Department of
Agriculture on Wednesday predicted that fruit and vegetable prices will rise by
5% to 6% this year due largely to lower production in California's Central
Valley. While California has just suffered one of its driest years on records,
extreme environmental policies deserve much of the blame for the forecasted
spike.
California produces
more than half of the country's fruits and vegetables, including the bulk of
its lettuce, berries and tomatoes. Federal water regulators this year slashed
farmers' water allocations to zero due to a prolonged bout of dry weather. As a
result, farmers had to triage their crops and pump groundwater. Many reserved
their limited groundwater supply for high-value nuts and fruit trees, scaling
back production of row crops.
All in all, California
farmers fallowed about 500,000 acres of land this year. But here's the thing:
much of this land could have been productive had the state stored up more water
from wet years and not flushed 800,000 acre-feet into the San Francisco Bay
last winter and an additional 445,000 acre-feet this spring to safeguard the
endangered delta smelt. That's enough for roughly three million households to
live on and to irrigate 600,000 acres of land.
The problem is that
federal regulators, prodded by environmental groups, have ruled that pumping at
the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta threatens the smelt. Ergo, under the
Endangered Species Act, the three-inch fish must be protected at almost any
economic cost. After 300 smelt were ensnared in the pumps last winter,
regulators ordered that a deluge of melted snowpack—which threatened to flood
northern California reservoirs—be discharged into the ocean rather than
exported to farmers in the Valley.
The effects of this
insane water rationing are just beginning to show up in food prices, according
to the USDA, and "the ongoing drought in California could potentially have
large and lasting effects on fruit, vegetable, dairy, and egg prices." The
California Farm Bureau has issued a conservative estimate that the average
American family will spend about $500 more on food this year as a result of the
government-exacerbated drought.
Californians already
pay dearly for their government's green sanctimony, primarily in gas and
electricity prices. Maybe the feds have decided that the rest of the country
should pay their fair share, too.
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