For sale? An old water tower in Hachita, New Mexico.Photo: Ryan Thomas

The history of the West is peppered with water cowboys. Just recall William Mulholland, whose role in Los Angeles’ secret grab of water from Owens Valley, Calif., was made famous in the movie Chinatown, or Colorado’s contemporary water baron, Aaron Million, who’s pushing a $3 billion, privately funded scheme to funnel water to Colorado’s Front Range. Experience has shown that with water comes power.

The unique properties of water — the fact that it is a limited resource required for survival and that it has no substitute — have made it a bitterly fought-over asset in the arid West. Westerners who want to protect their limited water supply realize how important it is to keep this public resource out of the hands of the water cowboys.

But a threat different from diversion has come to town. As communities struggle to balance their ever-shrinking budgets, investment firms and large, predominantly foreign companies are seizing the moment. Across the country, communities are being aggressively courted to sell or lease their drinking water and wastewater utilities to private companies. Since 1991, water utilities interested in profit have seduced at least 144 cities and towns into privatizing their domestic water systems. Most were in the nation’s Rust Belt. But this year, a record number of communities are considering it, including some in the West: Tulsa, Okla., Fresno County and Rialto, Calif., and Comal County, Texas, are all considering privatization.

But before they answer the siren call of private water companies, Western cities should heed the experiences of other communities. Because after the jolt of cash that comes when a city leases or sells its water utility, benefits drop off — sometimes precipitously. In the 10 largest cities around the country that have sold or leased their water systems, companies have raised consumers’ water rates by an average of 15 percent a year. Residents of Fairbanks, Alaska, saw their water and sewer bills jump from $543 a year before the utilities were sold in 1997, to $1,197 today, an increase of 9 percent annually. Residents of East Palo Alto, Calif., have seen their bills rise by 10 percent a year since their water system was leased to the for-profit company, American Water.

Luckily, as in all good Westerns, rebels abound. In the last two years alone, at least 18 cities across the country have terminated contracts with private water companies, usually because of poor service or increasingly high rates. The cities have learned that private companies often cut costs by eliminating jobs and delaying maintenance. Inevitably, this leads to service problems, while pressure to boost shareholder returns often leads to an increase in water rates for residents.

In every one of these 18 cities, bringing the utilities back under public control saved big money — an average of 21 percent of operating costs. After Petaluma, Calif., terminated its water contract with the Veolia company in 2008, the estimated savings amounted to nearly $1.6 million during the first three years of public operation.

Some Western cities have refused to be roped in by the new water cowboys. Last November, San Jose, Calif., ruled out privatizing its water system after determining that it would be 30 percent more expensive to do so than to keep the system public. In 2008, Reno, Nev., rejected a bid from Goldman Sachs to lease its water system, which serves over 300,000 people. Yes, that Goldman Sachs: The company whose executives welcomed the subprime mortgage crisis with the line, “Sounds like we will make some serious money,” is also getting into the water business, as are other investment firms.

As low-risk investments go, water is gold. It will always be needed and will inevitably become more valuable as population growth and climate change deliver their one-two punch. Buying utilities outright or urging cities to sign long leases — some as long as 99 years — is one way for investors to secure control over limited water supplies.

But when for-profit companies commandeer our drinking water and sewer systems, they take control of all the key decisions: How much will consumers pay for water? When will the pipes, reservoirs and treatment plants be upgraded? Will conservation efforts cease because they’re too expensive?

Western cities should not be fooled by the promise of quick cash that comes with water privatization. They may not wear black hats, but water cowboys are easy to spot. It’s up to the honest citizens of the West to keep their hand on the spigot.

This post first appeared in High Country News’ Writers on the Range series, republished with permission.

What’s HACCP-ening?: Egg-washing practices at small farms like this one come under scrutiny in Congress’s current food-safety bill. Photo: Bart Nagel

Those rumors aren’t true, but they’re based on a real concern for how the bills will affect small farms and food businesses — businesses that face enough challenges without having to worry about new federal regulations. So here’s the conundrum. We have serious food safety issues in this country. When the Senate takes up the Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), in a few weeks, how can it protect eaters without throwing small and midsized farms and businesses under the bus?

Red tape for leafy greens

In the town where I grew up, my neighbors are something of a local legend. Owners of one of the first certified organic farms in the region, they helped launch our farmers market, paving the way for four others in nearby towns. If you miss them at the market, you can pick up some produce at their farm stand on our road — self-serve, with an honor-system cash box — or head down to our town’s one restaurant for a serving of their greens.

By all measures of local-foodism, they’re a success. But two winters ago, they were distraught. A new supermarket opened in the adjacent town and when they inquired about selling produce there, they were handed a hefty application. To sell to the store, they’d have to implement the company’s detailed food-safety protocol on their farm and get an audit to show they were in compliance with the company’s rules.

The protocol was a nightmare. It prohibited them from having “any animals near the growing area,” which meant that their sheep pasture — separate from but adjacent to a field where crops were planted — would probably not pass muster. The vegetation lining a stream that cuts through their property was also probably not OK, since it could “harbor wildlife.” (Which wildlife were food safety problems, or why, the rules did not say.) The company’s requirements seemed directly to contradict things they had to do to earn their organic certification. And the time and money necessary to implement the plan, fill out the paperwork, and get audited were totally overwhelming.

These kinds of requirements are the new reality for small farmers looking to expand beyond the Saturday market and sell to grocery stores, wholesalers, or institutions. In my neighbors’ case, if they had wanted to sell to the supermarket, a local hospital, and a produce distributor, they would’ve had to follow three different sets of food safety rules along with their organic certification requirements. 

And so for now, they’re not selling to any of them.

The gulf between large and small

Our country has a polarized food system. On one side, industrial farms and processors churn out food for the masses — food that is increasingly linked to scary contamination outbreaks. On the other side, so-called “micro farms” and processors sell directly to consumers through farmers markets, farm stands, and Community Supported Agriculture programs.

Somehow, we need to fill in the middle. Small farms like my neighbors and small processors should have every opportunity to expand beyond the farmers market. At the same time, institutions, grocery stores, and wholesalers are asking for some assurance that the food they buy — from whatever source — has been produced in a way that minimizes food safety risks.

Is it too much to ask for both? That’s a question sitting before Congress right now, and it could be answered before the year is through.

It’s high time — past high time — to do something about the dreadful state of our food safety system. We won’t soon forget the half a billion eggs recalled for salmonella contamination last month, nor the 2009 peanut product recall that affected nearly 4,000 products, nor the E. coli-contaminated spinach that sickened hundreds in 26 states in 2006. I don’t want to die of death by peanut butter. If there’s salmonella in 4,000 products on my grocery store shelf, I want the FDA to be able to recall them fast.

The food industry’s approach to dealing with these problems has been for individual companies to develop their own food safety rules, often claiming they are “better” and “safer” than their competitor’s — science and farmers be damned. That’s not doing much to address food safety problems, judging by the stream of recent outbreaks. Bad actors are not being caught before they release pathogens into the marketplace.

What this industry-controlled approach to food safety is doing, though, is keeping small and midsized farms and processors from expanding into these markets if they cannot or will not comply with the companies’ requirements. That’s why many organizations (including the one I work for), have urged Congress to get involved and set some consistent, reasonable food safety standards — and by “reasonable,” I mean standards that will protect consumers while also ensuring that small farmers and processors don’t go out of business because of them.

Last year, the House passed its food safety bill, H.R. 2749, which strengthens standards for products regulated by the FDA (produce, processed foods, eggs). As soon as mid-November, the Senate could vote on its version, S. 510.  Both bills have come under fire from all sides. Big processors don’t want to be regulated or inspected as frequently as Congress is proposing, while consumer groups want them inspected more frequently. Big farms want food safety standards that work for them, which inevitably don’t work for the smaller guys; sustainable ag and family farm groups want rules that work for small, midsized, and diversified operations.

At this point, both the House and Senate bills have some good stuff in them. They also need improvement to ensure that both consumers and small farms and processors are protected. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s in the bills, and what else needs to be:

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Did you see that movie Flash of Genius? It follows the unlucky Robert Kearns, played by Greg Kinnear, as he spends his life (and his savings) perfecting the intermittent windshield wiper, only to have his idea snared and used without credit by the Ford Motor Company. He pursues lawsuits against Ford and other car companies out of principle, he says: It is simply not fair that all of his hard work enriches Detroit’s Big Three while leaving him and his family virtually penniless.

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot lately as I’ve pondered what dairy farmers across the country are going through in this period of tragically low prices. Years of investment in land, equipment, and animals; years of hard labor; and what do you get for it? Nuthin’. Or, more precisely, you get about half of what you put into producing the milk you sell to dairy processors. The prices farmers receive right now are so low that they are rapidly exiting the market – or exiting life altogether (farmer-suicides are up this year, reports the LA Times). And just like in the movies, companies are profiting off their misery. Dean Foods, the nation’s largest fluid milk processor, reported record earnings in the first quarter of 2009; profits for Kraft’s cheese division rose 59% in the same period.

The movie ends with Kearns winning court battles against Ford and Chrysler, pocketing nearly $30 million for his hard work (most of which comes right back out again to cover attorneys’ fees for the other 26 lawsuits he pursued). Our nation’s dairy farmers have nothing so vindicating to look forward to. If things continue the way they’re going, reports Farm Aid’s Hilde Steffey, the U.S. risks losing upwards of 80% of its dairy farmers by year’s end, leaving us with just 12,000 dairy farms total. That’s 1 dairy for every 25,000 Americans.

The dairy crisis, and its solution, comes down to a question of fairness. Is it fair that large dairy companies are undercutting U.S. producers by importing cheap milk protein concentrates from other countries and using them instead of U.S.-produced milk? (And is it fair that the FDA does nothing to stop the practice, even though MPCs aren’t approved as a food ingredient?) Is it fair that the dairy industry is so consolidated that a few large companies can manipulate the price of milk to their own benefit, pocketing profits while dairy farmers are left holding the bag? Is it fair that farmers have shelled out more and more for feed and hay in the last few years, but the prices they receive for milk have fallen? Is it fair that consumers are still paying for milk what they were earlier this year, while farmers’ prices dropped 30% in January alone? Hell no!

There are a lot of things that need to be fixed here, but the most urgent task is to keep dairy farmers on the land while we figure out what to do about the rest. That’s where the government comes in. In 1937, when farmers were pouring milk out on the side of the road because of Depression-induced low prices, Congress passed a law that allows the Secretary of Agriculture to adjust the price of milk to reflect the price of feed and other economic conditions that impact their production costs. Well, if there ever was a time for the Secretary to roll out that authority, it’s now.

If Vilsack doesn’t do something, fast, Farm Aid predicts we could immediately lose up to 20,000 dairy farmers. Where does that leave us? With imported milk, empty farms, out-of-work farmers, and a whole lot of dairy cows with a future in fast-food hamburger. And that kind of milk does nobody good.

I understand the calls from some in the sustainable-ag community to veto the farm bill (and thank Tom Philpott and the comment crew for outlining them). The argument appears to be that, while there were important wins, this farm bill does not include most of the bigger reforms we want, and the community would do better to support a veto and try again anew. I don’t happen to agree; some of the reasons why are also outlined in Tom’s post and the comments. But I respect the sustainable ag organizations that take this position.

It all gets more complicated, though, when these groups find themselves on the same side of the veto issue as the Bush administration, which is not known for caring much about sustainability in any sense of the word. It gets extra-complicated when the phrase “subsidy reform” passes the lips of spokespeople from both the farmers-market complex and the agribusiness-industrial complex. This strange coalition of convenience was highlighted recently in a San Francisco Chronicle article by Carolyn Lochhead: “It is the rarest of moments: President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a collision course over a giant farm bill, but it is Bush who is broadly aligned with liberal Bay Area activists pushing for reform, while the San Francisco Democrat is protecting billions of dollars in subsidies …”

Yesterday on Mulch, the Environmental Working Group’s Ken Cook lamented how hard it will be to whip Republican members of Congress to sustain a Bush veto. That has to be a historic first — a progressive enviro group pushing for Republicans to agree with their own administration.

I have a lot of thoughts about the subsidy issue generally, which I happen to think distracts us from the root causes of our current food-system disaster. I’ll leave those for another day, though (or you can read Tom’s Victual Reality column on it, which says it much better than I could). For now: Even if you believe that subsidy reform would bring about substantial change in the food system, Bush’s support for the veto has nothing to do with this goal. As my former boss might put it, he’s got darker aspirations.

And for that reason alone, if not for many others, I am terrified of any veto with his name on it. Passing this farm bill, in my opinion, is cutting our losses while we can.

Distract locally, deregulate globally

The administration’s mainstream message (and yes, I did just link to Fox News, my own historic first) sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric used by some progressive reform groups. Officials take every opportunity to toss around “wealthy farmer” references as rationale for why they think we should limit government subsidy payments. But officials have also suggested that if we don’t reform subsidies, it would “complicate our relationship with trading partners” — in other words, it would majorly piss off the World Trade Organization. Something tells me that they care a lot more about that than they do about the misuse of some ag subsidy dollars. I mean, really — has the Bush administration ever seen a loophole it didn’t like?

Bush’s goals in the free-trade arena look a lot like those of Reagan, who led the first real push for a global reduction in agricultural trade barriers, subsidies, and any other policies that kept U.S. agribusinesses from penetrating too far into other countries’ markets. The World Bank and IMF followed Reagan’s lead, requiring developing-country borrowers to reduce public support for agriculture, including public research, credit, and policies that protected small producers. Over the next 25 years, government support for local farmers and food systems was systematically dismantled around the world. It’s no wonder developing countries are rioting about high food prices: Now largely dependent on food imports, they are at the whim of a global market that in turn is at the whim of a few giant agribusinesses and Wall Street speculators. (For a deeper look, see this excellent report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.)

The WTO’s involvement in agriculture escalated with the start of the Doha Round of trade negotiations in 2001 and a call to further dismantle trade barriers. On its current track, it will bring more of the same. As some analysts have shown [PDF], the gains to developing countries from the Doha Round pale in comparison to what developed-country agribusinesses can get from opening up the globe to unfettered trade on their terms. And here at home, trade agreements that prioritize corporate interests will mean a reduced ability to pass laws that harm those interests in the name of the public good.

The WTO’s agriculture negotiations have been criticized from many corners, from the international farmers’ movement Via Campesina — which calls for governments to refocus on domestic agricultural production and away from global ag trade — to a group of African countries in the WTO, which proposed [PDF] a new WTO approach that would manage the global supply of commodities, check corporate monopolies, and help ensure stable prices for farmers. (Needless to say, the WTO hasn’t gone for it.) The overwhelming consensus among critics is that if the WTO moves forward as intended, we will see more corporate power and less public investment in sustainable food systems globally.

Strange bedfellows can bite

All of this begs the question of why we should support Bush’s agenda by calling for a farm bill veto when it would give the U.S. greater leverage in WTO agriculture negotiations. Do agribusinesses win big under the current farm bill proposal? Yep. Would they win even bigger if we got a veto? It’s entirely possible. Despite how disappointing this farm bill is, siding with Bush seems even more risky.

I realize that this argument puts me in the awkward position of sounding like I’m on the side of subsidies. That’s not my intent. The choice, as I see it, should not be between a subsidy system and unfettered free trade in agriculture. It should be between a system that gives voters the right to choose how and when to protect their environment, their food security, and their rural communities, and one in which multinational companies get to call the shots. We won’t get the former with this farm bill, but we will protect some of our policy space by slowing down the WTO train. That’s space we can use to push through real reform on local and state levels, and nationally with the Child Nutrition Authorization Act (next year) and the 2012 Farm Bill.

In the words of the IATP analysts cited above:

Agricultural deregulation has allowed global food corporations to squeeze farmers around the world out of their own domestic markets in the name of “market access.” The result is that today it is agribusiness, not farmers, who are dominating global agricultural commodity markets. … [W]e need to challenge our current agricultural trade deregulation model, which is one of the root causes of the growing food crisis. We need more appropriate management of agricultural markets on behalf of our common public interests, rather than continuing to defer to narrow private interests.

I couldn’t agree more. We need greater public investment in agriculture — not in the form of subsidies, but in the form of more funding for organic research, stronger protection against corporate power in livestock markets, money to help beginning and minority farmers, laws that allow schools to source local food instead of the cheap industrial stuff, and funding for conservation programs on working lands.

And guess what? We got all of those things, in one form or another, in the 2008 farm bill. We also need a whole lot more that we didn’t get. But hell if I’m going to support handing our wins, limited though they may be, over to Bush so he can push through his version of “reform.”

This post originally appeared in The Ethicurean.