By Richard S. Quandt / Guest Commentary
There is a dangerous movement afoot in California to force businesses that rely upon natural resources to pack up and leave the state.
This is being done indirectly, through legislative mandates implemented by various state agencies, boards and commissions under the guise of protecting the environment.
Those industries targeted by eco-regulations are farmers, loggers, miners, drillers, truckers and builders. They are some of the oldest and most important businesses that provide us with food, fuel, housing and transportation.
Our state Legislature, dominated by urban environmental interests, continues to pass unattainable environmental mandates on rural business, such as farming. The clearest example of this trend is taking place in the rural San Joaquin Valley, where water deliveries that would irrigate over 150,000 acres of crops and orchards have been curtailed. The pumps that convey this water have been ordered turned off by U.S. Fish & Wildlife, a federal agency, due to concerns over the delta smelt, a finger minnow that is thought to be inadvertently swept into these pumps.
Under environmental mandates, the smelt is to be protected at all costs - even if it means fallowing farmland, increasing food imports and displacing some 40,000 workers who work in agriculturally related jobs.
Those who work in the nation's richest agricultural valley are now standing in food lines, receiving canned and processed items packaged in Mexico.
Central Coast agriculture is not immune from this environmental madness. For example, staff at the Central Coast Regional Water Control Board is seeking to impose numeric standards for tailwater in agricultural drainage ditches. These new standards being discussed are 20 times more restrictive than traditional drinking water standards protective of public health.
The reasoning behind these new standards is they are needed to protect not humans, but aquatic habitat. The data supporting these unachievable standards comes from laboratory toxicity tests run on water fleas that don't even live on the Central Coast. The fleas were selected due to their extreme sensitivity by bureaucrats, so as to orchestrate an arbitrary low water-quality standard that even pure Sierra snowmelt won't meet.
What worries me is that a runaway regulatory agency may use such an unattainable standard as justification to force Santa Maria farmers to turn off their wells and stop irrigating their crops.
Does aquatic habitat have more value than growing food?
If we support environmental policy that precludes farmers from irrigating crops, can we replace that loss with produce grown in other states and countries? Are we safer and more secure if we rely upon foreign countries for our fresh produce?
The public needs to understand that environmental mandates have economic consequences. Food does not come from a supermarket, but is grown by a farmer who is competing with farmers in other states and countries.
Citizens need to understand that many of the rigid environmental laws that have extreme results need to be changed in favor of a more balanced approach.
Finally, voters need to elect individuals to policymaking positions who place more value on nurturing families, instead of protecting fish.
Richard S. Quandt is president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
September 27, 2009