The Boot on Our Necks
Photo: DWR
This is the second of C-WIN’s new opinion column and
was first published on Maven’s Notebook on July 2, 2025
The Great Inequity of California Water
By Carolee Krieger, C-WIN Executive Director
Year in and year out, decade after decade, through gubernatorial administrations of both parties, Californians have endured a great inequity: our water has been stolen from us. Even worse, we’ve had to subsidize the handful of corporate power brokers who’ve committed this crime.
California’s water is a public resource held hostage. Its storage, distribution and use involve its transfer from the rivers of the North State and the Sierra Nevada to corporate farms in the Central Valley and Southern California cities. Two behemoth public works initiatives – the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project – have made this possible.
The twin projects were completed in the mid-20th Century and heralded as the definitive solution to California’s water woes. Both draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, once the most productive estuary in the western continental United States. Through the CVP and the SWP, it was declared, water insecurity was a thing of the past. Yes, the Delta’s water quality, fisheries and wildlife might suffer, but the price, urban ratepayers were assured, was worth it: they would always have enough water.
But the real beneficiaries, it turned out, weren’t ratepayers – the millions of people who live in California’s cities, small towns and suburbs, who go to work and pay their taxes. Instead, the benefits flowed to a handful of powerful business interests, most notably corporate growers in the Central Valley.
From the beginning, the SWP and the CVP were classic bait-and-switch cons. Promoted as a boon to the commonweal, there was never any doubt among its promoters who would profit and who would be the suckers. Ratepayers and taxpayers supported – and still support – the debt and operating costs of the SWP, massively subsidizing the 25% of the project’s water that goes to corporate agriculture. Developers who want to build more suburbs in the Southern California desert also benefit from the water diverted by the SWP without having to pay any of the environmental costs.
For the taxpayer-supported CVP, it’s even worse: 90% of the water is used by agribusiness, including in the western San Joaquin Valley, a region characterized by toxic seleniferous soils. When “Westside” croplands are irrigated, poisonous selenium leaches into state waterways, a process that has wreaked environmental havoc for decades.
Proponents claim these two massive projects benefit all Californians through the “spectacular” economic activity they generate. That’s hogwash. Despite its control over most of California’s developed water, agriculture contributes only 2% – that’s right, 2% – to the state’s GDP. Worse, most of the crops grown are anything but essential to national food security. Corporate growers are businesspeople, not philanthropists, and they grow what is most profitable for them at any given time. Over the past two decades, that has been almonds and pistachios – luxury crops that have extreme water demands, are anything but staple foodstuffs, and are mostly sold on the export market.
Meanwhile, “water security” has proved a chimera for California ratepayers. The SWP and CVP, after all, cannot create more water: they can only deliver water that exists, a supply that is steadily dwindling due to climate change. A prime example: the Coastal Branch, an ancillary project of the SWP that sends water to the Central Coast, has never met its target deliveries since its completion in 1997. Meanwhile, the region’s ratepayers have been saddled with ruinous debt; their grandchildren will still be paying off this white elephant of a public works project decades from now.
It’s no mystery how we’ve arrived at this sorry pass. Indeed, it’s an old story, one that has long characterized American politics: follow the money. Despite its meager contribution to California’s economy, agribusiness reaps extravagant revenues from its ongoing water grab, and it puts its profits where the returns are greatest: with legislators and lobbyists working in Sacramento and Washington.
Corporate growers have rained cash on the people who make and influence legislation, and their rewards have been spectacular. The CVP and the SWP are cash cows for Big Ag, while ratepayers and taxpayers are the shorn sheep. Despite the crushing financial burden on working citizens, the ongoing water insecurity, the environmental devastation and the sacrifice of our fisheries and living rivers, the scam continues – all so wealthy agricultural grandees can keep sending almonds to China – 69,718 metric tons in 2023, to be exact.[1]
Meanwhile, regulators blithely ignore the obvious: there isn’t enough water in California to satisfy existing demands, let alone accommodate corporate agriculture’s clamor for more deliveries. Everyone knows what’s going on: in a recent report, the State Water Resources Control Board noted that total permitted water rights – existing claims on California’s developed water – amounted to five times the “…average unimpaired outflow for the entire Bay-Delta watershed…” In other words, there is a 500% disparity between water that is claimed and water that exists.
A term coined by former legislative staffer Dennis O’Connor in a 1994 report on the financing of the State Water Project neatly summarized this bizarre and unsustainable dynamic. O’Connor called water that’s found in government documents – but not in our streams and rivers – “paper water.” It’s a phantom, a mirage. You can’t drink it, but you can use it to justify expensive boondoggles that serve the few and the powerful at the expense of the many and disenfranchised.
Corporate agriculture’s influence also extends well beyond regulatory capture. Its tentacles creep into all aspects of state polity – even to our educational and research institutions.
The University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, for example, emphasizes “sustainable” practices in its press releases. But it never openly opposes the seizure of our public trust water by narrow and powerful agribusiness interests – the first and most obvious step in creating a truly sustainable agricultural policy. Invariably, the UC Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources is someone with deep ties to the industry and a vested interest in maintaining water diversions.
The University of California, Davis, is widely considered one of the world’s top agricultural schools – but again, its emphasis is on the business of wresting maximum profits from the soil regardless of consequences, not sustainable farming. Its endowments reflect this. In 2024, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the country’s largest producers of almonds and pistachios,[2] bequeathed $50 million to UC Davis – the largest contribution by individuals made to the school.[3] The Resnicks, not coincidentally, own 57% of the Kern Water Bank, a gigantic aquifer that is regularly recharged by the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project.[4]
Many so-called independent think tanks are also largely funded by corporate agriculture.
Big Ag, in short, has its boot on the necks of California’s ratepayers and taxpayers. But as big as that boot is, Governor Newsom is determined to only make it bigger. Specifically, he’s pushing the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP), a new name for an old and bankrupt idea – the Peripheral Canal, the loony scheme Jerry Brown promoted during his first term as governor.
The Peripheral Canal would’ve shunted vast amounts of water from the Sacramento River around the Delta to Southern California. Voters properly perceived it as the economic and environmental nightmare it was and voted it down in 1982. But Newsom has proven as beholden to agribusiness as his political predecessors of both parties – not just Jerry Brown, but Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like the Peripheral Canal, the raison d’etre of the DCP is simple: expedite water deliveries from the beleaguered Delta to the industrial croplands of the San Joaquin Valley. The interests of ratepayers and taxpayers are less than “peripheral;” as far as the pols and growers are concerned, they’re nonexistent.
The lesson is clear: California will never reach its full economic and civic potential until we break free of the yoke of corporate agriculture and gain control of our public trust water. Until then, we’re all just serfs on the master’s farm.