It’s one thing to write about the four freedoms, and another to protect them. What’s eroding them? More than any foreign threat or “invasion” of immigrants, I think it’s the power of the wealthy to craft legislation and litigate legal interpretations in their favor, disadvantaging everyone else.
My favorite example is in California’s water codes, where the voting privileges granted to absentee landowners in water and water storage districts result in local suppression of free speech, inhibit faithful Christian action, induce fear and impose economic hardship on our resident growers, their irrigation districts, and the communities that depend upon them. Overturning those unfair voting privileges would be a step in the right direction.
I’m not the originator of that idea, but the inheritor. Changing this century-old fact of California life was the dream of Merrill Goodall, a modest, kind man who taught political science at Claremont. He’d been a student of Paul Taylor’s at UC Berkeley in the 1950s, but his call to action came in 1973. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed those unfair voting privileges in a case now called “Salyer.” That ruling was a tipping point for him: no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Merrill began research with multiple colleagues over several years studying the impacts of this voting structure in special districts managing water. He contrasted them with irrigation districts controlled by resident farmers, one-man, one-vote. Then he began his campaign (including serving on the California Water Commission) to change the laws which grant terrible water advantages to the wealthy absentee landowners, disadvantaging resident growers.
I had the privilege of watching Merrill deliver the keynote address at the UC Sustainable Research and Education Program conference in Davis in 1991. Speaking to folks whose hopes and dreams were bent on reforming California Agriculture to become sustainable, he defined a major impediment to that goal. Calling it “California’s new political economy,” he detailed the influence of wealth over and above the needs of resident farmers, food, environment, jobs, rural economies and small towns. Merrill said:
“California’s new political economy is so far not studied extensively by social scientists. We haven’t learned to ask: Who benefits from the development of land and water resources? Who pays the costs of development, who is hurt? What economic and political mechanisms facilitate the control of benefits and costs? What are the social effects of large-scale, absentee-owned agriculture? What regional benefits and costs are associated with water transfer systems? Who should vote in a democratic polity — the resident and registered or the nonresident owners of property?”
After further elaborating on the mechanisms used in this “new political economy” to keep political control, Merrill posed the question of what to do. “Given the conflict of interest and power,” he said, “we have limited options.” He then proceeded to name those options: full-cost water pricing for the largest farms, impact studies prior to water sales and transfers, nationwide examination of the Bureau of Reclamation’s failures to implement the purposes of publicly-supported water development projects, and greater public oversight and access to water and water storage district decision making. He knew the time window for these options was small: in the 35 years since he spoke those words, most have dissolved or disappeared — but not the most important one.
“Now, what are we left with?” he asked those sustainable ag intellects. “It seems to me that you don’t give up, you follow the dictum of Joe Hill, who told us to go on and organize.” He ended:
“Family farming may be an endangered species, but that practice has important allies, the labor movement for one. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the basic political support for family farming in this state came from the Central Labor Council in Oakland, in San Francisco, and the statewide AFL-CIO. It came also from the religious community, and not only from mainstream denominations. And it came from many ordinary residents of our urban communities. So what to do? You go on and you organize.”
It was easier to organize family farmers in their own interest then, easier to believe in the value of family farms, easier to support your neighbors when you knew they were suffering. It may be, however, that the time has come to recognize their essential difference from the agribusiness/investment interests skewing the groundwater game, time to recognize their essential value to us all — and start to organize. Merrill would applaud.
Trudy Wischemann is seeking resident farmers ready to stand up for themselves. Contact her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
