THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION
OF
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ASSOCIATIONS
From Fishermen's News of June, 2001
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PCFFA Home Page The water conflicts plaguing the Klamath Basin (as well as many other federal water projects) these days have only one possible resolution for salmon fishermen: more water must be left in the rivers. Without that additional water, the great salmon runs of the Klamath Basin, once the third most productive salmon rivers system in the lower U.S., will never recover from near extinction, and Klamath Management Zone ports will forever be a salmon fishermen's ghost town. On the other hand, once we restore something more like normal water flows to the Klamath River, as is beginning to happen, those great salmon runs will one day return and people in those ports will once again have a salmon season worth pursuing.
Recently PCFFA was part of a coalition that successfully sued the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to get more water back into the Klamath River (see: www.pcffa.org/klamath) to prevent salmon extinctions there. And, gradually we are making headway in restoring those flows. Over the decades the irrigators had simply taken too much. Now, thanks in part to the Endangered Species Act, they are being forced to give enough of it back so that coho salmon in the river can at least continue to exist. That water also will keep the Iron Gate Hatchery functioning and benefit the Klamath River's depressed chinook fisheries. Too little water released from the Klamath Project at Iron Gate Dam means major downriver salmon kills. Too little water left in the Klamath River means the slow economic strangulation of fisheries, fishing families and coastal communities.
However, real water reforms always come at a price for irrigators who have become dependent on bloated and federally subsidized water projects. These growers who now find themselves with less water for irrigation are blaming federal laws and fishermen for 'stealing' water they themselves have stolen from the ecosystem and lower river fisheries over many decades. It's a little like the owners of a chop shop and the bad cops they had on their payroll complaining after a bust about the cars and their parts being returned to their rightful owners.
In most cases, however, the farmers caught in the middle were enticed to be there by federal incentive programs, land giveaways and promises of unlimited water by federal agencies that could never realistically be delivered. Sound familiar?
One solution to this dilemma is the same one proposed the overcapacity in our groundfish fleet: buybacks. Whether water contracts or fishing vessels and their permits, demand reduction through buybacks is clearly part of the solution. This article looks at the similarity between the Upper Klamath Basin Irrigation Project water problems and our own problems with too much harvest capacity for the available resource in the west coast groundfish fleet. The overcapacity problems faced by both farmers and fishermen are much the same. In both cases, stupid and short-sighted federal policies got us into this mess. It is time the federal government takes responsibility, instead of shirking it behind budget excuses, and provides the financial assistance to get us out of the mess they created.
ORIGIN OF THE KLAMATH RIVER WATER WARS
One third of the Klamath Basin lies in Oregon, with two thirds in California. Most of the Upper Basin (the Oregon portion above Iron Gate Dam) is by necessity farmed with irrigation. The Upper Klamath Basin is naturally a very arid region, with normally less than 12 inches of rainfall a year, but originally contained at least 350,000 acres of shallow lakes and wetlands that provided natural water storage.
The Klamath Irrigation Project was started by the federal government in 1905 to turn these wetlands systematically into irrigated croplands using massive federal taxpayer subsidies. During the 1920's, and again in the 1940's, large parcels of farmland were distributed for free by lottery by the federal government to would-be homesteaders on the promise of nearly unlimited water for farming. Eventually the Klamath Project grew to take roughly 30% of the total historic flow of the entire Klamath River for irrigation, which in a dry year amounts to nearly 90% of what would naturally have flowed into the lower Klamath River from above what is now Iron Gate Dam. In the process, the Klamath Project blocked passage for salmon to the entire Upper Basin (Iron Gate Dam has no fish passage), seriously damaged water quality and provided far less water than lower river salmon runs really need to survive. The water released below the dam today is essentially agricultural waste water, laced with nitrates and pesticides, and in some years is so hot it remains lethal to salmon for months at a time for as much as 80 miles downriver.
Klamath River coho salmon below Iron Gate Dam are now so near extinction that they have been listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. Iron Gate Hatchery (just below Iron Gate Dam) has serious fish kill problems nearly every year for lack of water flowing through the dam.
Last year more than 300,000 salmon were killed in the river because of too little water that was too hot for their survival. Even the strongest salmon runs in the river (fall chinook) are at less than 10% of their historic numbers because of this and most of those are now hatchery fish.
Federal Incentives to Grow Too Big: The Klamath Irrigation Project is a typical bloated federal water project, providing incentives to use up massive amounts of water by keeping the subsidized water rates way below their true market value. The Project users also have not paid more than about 30% of the total costs of the Project since 1905, amounting to a 70% taxpayer subsidy. Because the Upper Basin is at above 4100 feet elevation, the short growing season means that the majority of crops grown in the Upper Basin are mostly potatoes, sugar beets and onions all of which are classed as 'surplus crops' because there is a worldwide glut of them, and which must therefore be bought up by the federal government's surplus crop program with yet more government subsidies because they have no market. All the while this 'business as usual' federal irrigation program destroys downriver salmon fisheries wholesale and has systematically strangled lower river salmon-dependent communities and economies for decades.
Overuse of a Limited Resource: The Upper Klamath Basin's fragile and limited water supply is, simply put, grossly over-appropriated. Even without fish protections, the Project can now only deliver enough water for its farmers in 4 out of 10 water years. The federal government has actively encouraged the overuse of this fragile water resource. Thus in this current drought, arguably the worst in the Project's 100 year history, it is hardly surprising that the Bureau of Reclamation has had to make major cutbacks in water deliveries. If the Bureau is to follow the law and also keep enough water in the river to prevent salmon from going extinct, these problems will only reoccur because there are too many farmers chasing too little water to be economically sustainable.
Destruction of the Resource Base: Wetlands are natural water storage systems. Thanks to Klamath Irrigation Project policies of wetlands conversion, the natural wetlands water storage capacity of the Upper Basin has been reduced from its original 350,000 acres to just about 75,000, a 79% reduction. One acre of lost wetlands that could have retained one foot of water amounts to 325,851 gallons of water that today is simply no longer there for farmers or fish. In other words, the Bureau of Reclamation, in meeting its mandate to provide water for farmers, has systematically undercut the very fabric of the water system it seeks to use. This is also technically a desert. Wetlands in the Upper Klamath Basin naturally buffered the impact of periodic droughts, but now these protective buffers are mostly gone. Thus in this drought year there are no water reserves left to tap.
Lack of wetlands water storage has also utterly changed the hydrology of the Upper Klamath Basin. This impacts downriver fisheries, changes naturally evolved spawning and rearing timing, and increases the mortality rates of salmon throughout the whole lower river.
Longstanding Policies of Denial and Avoidance: Both the Bureau of Reclamation and the irrigators themselves knew or should have known that the current crunch was coming. However, years of institutionalized denial, foot dragging and poorly funded monitoring and research programs allowed both the Bureau and the farmers to claim for years that there was 'poor science' and thus no need for change. Scientists had been warning of a water crisis in the Upper Basin for years, but were conveniently ignored. Irrigation district leadership (with some notable exceptions) resisted all system conservation improvements because it might increase already rock bottom water rates. Obvious measures such as fish screens on diversion dams that should have been implemented years ago have still not been implemented. No diversion ditch within the Project has ever been screened even today. Instead of a long-range plan, the Bureau has limped along on 'interim' and one year plans for many years. Finally the Bureau's foot dragging became so bad that a Federal Court, in a suit brought by PCFFA and others, actually had to order them to consult with NMFS on salmon protections as required by the Endangered Species Act, and even forbid the Bureau from delivering any more irrigation water until there was a 'concrete plan' for protecting downriver coho salmon runs actually in place.
Sudden Crash When it All Comes Home: Ultimately, denial of basic biological realities carries a very heavy price. This year the farmers depending on the Klamath Project for their water will have to pay that price. Still, in this record drought year, with Upper Klamath Lake inflow at only about 21% of normal, those farmers are not paying more than their fair share. They are in fact getting only about 20% of the 350,000 acre-feet of water they would get in a more normal water year, or about 70,000 acrefeet. Other farmers outside the Project water system have well water.
Though this crisis was foreseeable, the federal government did get them into this mess by promising more than it could deliver, and also by decades of institutional denial and negligence in addressing the real environmental and social costs of water overappropriation and farming over capacity.
It's not just the Klamath, look at Westlands: The problem in the Klamath Basin, as we mentioned above, is not unique, it's just the one that's in the news right now. A very similar problem of an arid agricultural area that was overdeveloped around promises of water that couldn't be delivered (that, is, without destroying fish and the environment) exists on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley with the Westlands Water District. Westlands is the most junior water rights holder of California's large agricultural water districts. Here land speculators got rich when dry farms were turned green by taxpayer dollars - in this case cheap, subsidized irrigation water from the state and federal water projects, coupled with federal crop subsidies for water-intensive crops such as cotton.
The water to supply Westlands' demands, both real and asserted, comes from an already over-appropriated Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta system. This system is home to the fall-run chinook population that supports most of the salmon fishery off California, Oregon and Washington. The system also has two listed salmon stocks - winter-run and spring-run chinook, and also the fresh water inflows from the Delta are critical to maintaining the health of San Francisco Bay which supports important Dungeness crab, herring, oyster and other fish populations. Westlands has been demanding full deliveries of the water promised by the federal and state water projects under contracts but which cannot be delivered without serious harm to fish or more senior water rights holders. Indeed, Westlands has even been demanding Trinity River flows. The Trinity, a tributary of the Klamath, is plumbed into the Sacramento River through the Central Valley Project, but under the law the waters surplus to its basin can only be used for agriculture in the Sacramento Valley. That has not bothered Westlands, however, whose growers also chose to ignore acreage limitations on Reclamation-delivered water and are now clamoring for the water that was recently reallocated back to the Trinity so as to protect its critical salmon runs.
The Westlands problem is compounded by the fact that irrigating the lands where it is located results in a toxic wastewater mix. The irrigation water leeches selenium from these soils and, combined with the pesticides and fertilizers used by the growers, results in toxic runoff that has been responsible for bird deformities and kills in a nearby wildlife refuge. To get rid of the wastewater, Westlands is demanding the federal government build a drain, allowing them to dump their poisons directly into San Francisco Bay. Of course, the problem could be dealt with by simply not irrigating those lands, but then that would affect the profits of these land speculators. At Westlands, the motto could easily be "Chutzpah is us."
Unlike the Klamath Basin irrigators, who are mostly family farmers, the Westland Water District membership is made up mostly of absentee owner corporate farms. But they do wield a mighty checkbook, and if they don't have public sentiment going for them they do have political friends in Washington in both the Administration and Congress. California's Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Ken Calvert, for example, have introduced bills in this session to guarantee Westlands' water demands by taking water from the environment - more specifically, from the fish. It is clear, however, that if the remaining agriculture in that area is going to be sustainable and if salmon fisheries in California are going to survive, then much of Westlands' acreage, like that in the Klamath Basin, has to be retired by simply being bought out.
What are the Solutions? In the short term for the Klamath Basin, immediate economic suffering can be offset by federal disaster relief. Flood and drought disaster relief programs for farmers are well established, and should be brought to bear this year to try to make the Klamath Project farmers stranded without water as whole as possible. Ultimately, however, that will not solve the problems of overcapacity. Reduction of water demand must also be a component of any long-term solution.
Though some reduction of water demand can be achieved purely through water conservation (the Klamath Project is not particularly efficient), it also means fewer farms drawing fewer gallons out of an already overdrawn system. In the process, more water certainty would be created in future years for those farms that remain, and there would be less stress on rivers that support salmon. A managed reduction in farming capacity in the Upper Basin would also help prevent water conflicts in the future and the entire hydrological system would be more sustainable.
Another imperative is reversing the destruction of the fundamental natural water storage systems that once protected against severe drought and filtered pollutants. This means restoring natural wetlands and other important (but often ignored) natural ecological functions of a healthy riparian system. Ultimately, the Bureau of Reclamation needs to acknowledge that some land is much more valuable to society as wetlands than for subsidized surplus crops, and these lands should be identified and converted to wetlands for water storage as much as possible. Other means for developing more total water storage, such as tapping groundwater aquifers in dry years, are also practical, would help reduce water conflicts and should also be federally funded.
THE SIMILARITY TO THE GROUNDFISH DISASTER
The west coast fishing industry's current groundfish crisis is an almost identical analogy to the Klamath water crisis. Many of its solutions are also the same.
Federal Incentives to Grow Too Big: For years the federal government has had programs, such as the Capital Construction Fund, which provide financial incentives to build more and bigger fishing boats. Following the 1976 passage of the Fishery Conservation & Management Act (now referred to as the Magnuson-Stevens Act) federal agencies encouraged building up of groundfish harvesting capacity as part of the program of "Americanization" policy to replace foreign fishing within the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) with our boats (for a discussion of the problem, see PCFFA's recent testimony available at the top of our web page at: www.pcffa.org ). The problem, of course, is this was done with no reference whatsoever to the biological constraints on what those fisheries could actually endure. The concepts of 'sustainability' and 'carrying capacity' are as foreign to those financial programs and the Americanization policy as would be ancient Greek. The result was a bloated fleet that has grown way beyond its ability to support a family wage living for the vast majority of fishing families, even in good years. In bad years, the economics of that fishery are a disaster.
Overuse of a Limited Resource: The result of this fishing overcapacity was the overharvest of many long-lived and slowly reproducing groundfish species about which we still knew very little. When collapse loomed and quota cutbacks finally came from the agencies, they were severe, but came just as the harvesting capacity (sponsored by federal incentive programs) was peaking. Thus we have three times the catch capacity chasing one-third the prior quotas, and no one making a decent living. This is exactly what has happened in the Klamath Basin, as farmers chased diminishing water resources at the expense of fish and wildlife needs downriver.
Farming capacity in the Klamath Basin now far exceeds the ability of the resource (water) to support it, and even in good water years there is still too little water to go around. In a drought year, like this one, the result is also economic disaster.
Destruction of the Resource Base: Some gear used in the groundfish fisheries are also highly destructive of rocky and hard-bottom fish habitat. This is the exact analogy of the plowing under of Klamath Basin wetlands. Using heavy roller gear that damages key reefs and other groundfish nursery areas just makes no sense whatsoever, but has never been controlled by the Councils nor by NMFS. Only now, with the gradual implementation of the 'essential fish habitat' provisions of the Magnuson Act, which had to be enforced in court, are these destructive gear practices coming into question. Likewise in the Upper Klamath it has taken a drought and the near destruction of several important aquatic species to call into question the stupidity of decades of systematic Bureau of Reclamation elimination of the natural water storage capacity of wetlands.
Longstanding Policies of Denial and Avoidance: Lack of fisheries survey data is often used as an excuse for inaction. The fact is that for many years the scientists and fisheries managers did not actually know how much fishing pressure these fish could take, and research was not done property until those limits had already been exceeded. The agencies were in denial, and pursuing aggressive harvesting policies with no basis in science that were sure to crash the resource. Fishermen themselves bought into that denial for too long, though it was an attitude certainly fostered by overly complacent fisheries managers.
Another major culprit here is Congress, which has never seen fit to adequately and reliably fund basic fisheries survey and monitoring programs, forcing managers to guess when no numbers were really available. Likewise in the Klamath, decades of denial were supported by single purpose agency mandates to 'get the water out,' with little attention to the ecological consequences.
Sudden Crash When it All Comes Home: The groundfish crises, in retrospect, was completely predictable. However, when the crunch finally came it hit suddenly and is still hitting fishing families very hard. Families who have invested their life savings are threatened with bankruptcy and many have to face tough choices about getting out of fishing altogether or going elsewhere if there is even any 'elsewhere' to go, with limited entry rules in nearly every other fishery. The sad thing is that many families who went into groundfish were refugees from the collapsed salmon fishery of a few years earlier. For many there is nowhere else to go.
Likewise with many farmers in the Upper Klamath Basin, facing the real consequences of drought for the first time. Agency denial, destruction of other resources, and drying up the lakes and rivers at the expense of others always worked in the past, but is no longer legal. Many are having a hard time adapting to what are real natural limits, and looking for someone or something to blame: in this case, the Endangered Species Act and 'those greedy fishermen.'
The Solutions Are the Same: The way to make the groundfish fishery truly sustainable is the same way we need to deal with water conflicts in the Klamath. Short-term emergency relief should be applied to prevent immediate economic disaster, but recognizing this as nothing more than a stopgap. In the long run, we must reduce the pressure on the resource itself. We must also increase the total ocean productivity by protecting groundfish habitat, and thus increasing the productivity of spawning and rearing habitat, by reducing destruction of that habitat by inappropriate gear and protecting key nursery areas. These two tools are directly analogous to reducing irrigation demand coupled with restoring damaged wetlands in the Klamath.
We are also badly in need of a rational and comprehensive buyback program to reduce the overall fishing capacity in ways that will make this fishery more sustainable and allow it to provide a better living for those who remain. Likewise, farmers in the Upper Klamath Basin need a similar land purchase and water permit retirement program for the same reasons.
BUYING BACK PERMITS, BUYING BACK WATER
Why buybacks? Sometimes people ask the question, "Why buy them out, why not just let them go bankrupt?" There are several good answers to this sort of Social Darwinian viewpoint, answers which apply just as well to buying back farmer's water permits as they do fishing boats.
First of all, transitions to real sustainability must be managed, they are not accidental. For commercial fisheries there are just too many economic forces pushing us toward the 'tragedy of the commons' to leave things to chance. The economic incentive will always be to fish more, and this can only partially be controlled by limited entry and quota programs. Once a fleet has already reached severe overcapacity, as we have today in the groundfish fleet, the easiest answer to managing for sustainability (and profitability) for the remaining fleet is to completely retire the excess capacity. And we mean, completely retire it, not just push it over to some other fishery to crash that one in what we call 'serial depletion.' No, any buyback program has to be aimed at full biological as well as economic sustainability, and also has to be carefully targeted to get there as quickly and cost effectively as possible. This takes thought and planning as part of careful management and cannot be achieved by random chance. An effective capacity reduction program, coupled with effective habitat restoration and protection, can also have a double benefit -- overharvest of the existing biomass is reduced, and the biomass itself is increased for the future for those who still participate. Sustainability should be approached from both ends.
Likewise, retiring water contracts and buying up Klamath Basin farmland to turn it into wetlands water storage can have that same double benefit. The overall demand for water would be reduced, and the overall supply of water would increase. In that way water conflicts can be reduced in the future, water supplies would be more reliable and farming (as well as fisheries) would be better able to survive inevitable future droughts. Getting there, however, takes planning and carefully targeted purchases.
Secondly, management by bankruptcy would not take either boats or land out of production to reduce resource demand, only allow others to get into the same situation much cheaper by buying those assets at foreclosure auctions. Auctioned boats would soon go back into the fishery. Likewise, letting farms go bankrupt is not a solution; farmers purchasing repossessed farmlands would soon themselves demand water for those lands, and the pervasive problems of farming overcapacity and excess demand on limited water supplies would not have been solved. Worse yet, if you leave it entirely to random market forces those farmlands could be slated for urban development, actually increasing resource pressure and habitat loss in the long run.
Thirdly, there is a real moral dimension to this problem. In both cases huge federal incentive programs created the problem by enticing families into an unsustainable system. Therefore the federal government has a real responsibility to help bail them out. For instance, the Capital Construction Fund, the Fishing Vessel Obligation Guarantee program and other fisheries capacity building programs for many years encouraged more and larger boats to enter the west coast groundfish fishery, and many fishing families invested heavily in those boats. At the same time the federal government also utterly failed to determine how much harvest pressure groundfish could sustainably take. For years the feds failed to fund or do the very basic studies that would have given that information. The combination of federal incentives, federal assurances and federal negligence proved devastating, and when emergency quota cutbacks started biting deep the groundfish fleet justifiably felt like they had been shafted. In fact, they had!
Just so with federally subsidized farmers in the Klamath Basin. When the Klamath Irrigation Project was formed, and then later for several years after 1922 and again after 1946, homestead lands were essentially given away by the federal government to encourage farming, and the project was expanded repeatedly by promises of more water than was really available. Also the Bureau of Reclamation saw its mission then (and largely still does) as solely to provide irrigation water, not as protecting any other parts of the ecosystem. The Bureau did its job admirably, but grew the Project to the point that in 6 out of 10 water years today there is insufficient water to meet all irrigation needs. The Bureau also depleted most of the very water reserves it depended upon by encouraging the destruction of some 79 percent of all the Upper Basin's natural wetlands water storage capacity. With those natural wetlands gone, in a drought year like this one there is almost no water left.
As in most federal water projects, the water system Klamath Project farmers use is also highly subsidized, with federal taxpayers (including you and me) picking up the tab for about 70 percent of total Project construction costs, plus picking up the tab for subsidized power to pump the below cost water, plus frequently picking up the tab for federal crop support subsidies so that Klamath farmers can continue to grow crops like potatoes, sugar beets and onions for which there is now a worldwide glut and no market. In other words, the Klamath Irrigation Project is a bloated creature created and maintained by the federal government through federal taxpayer subsidies. Decades of economic dependence on these subsidies, as well as promises of water that could not be delivered, has gotten many of those farming families (who are family food providers just like ourselves) into an economic disaster. The federal government therefore has a moral obligation to help downsize the Klamath Project to get them out of that dilemma. Fair market federal buyouts are a far more moral and humane alternative than just forcing those families into bankruptcy, especially since their investment was aggressively promoted by our own federal government.
There is also ample precedent for the federal government to lend such assistance. Our government regularly aids private enterprise, from airlines, to agribusiness, to foreign trade missions, to logging roads in national forests, to oil and mineral extraction subsidies, to artificially cheap water and power in the west. As another example closer to home, just a few years ago the American Fisheries Act of 1998 funded the buyout of a number of large factory trawlers in Alaska in an effort to reduce overcapacity there.
Fourth, in the long run, buyouts are more cost effective than bailouts. Selective buyouts (particularly of farmland) would reduce the need for future crop subsidies or future disaster assistance. In the long run, a well structured buyback program can be the best and most cost effective use of federal dollars. For instance, using federal flood insurance funds to purchase or move flood-prone homes along the Mississippi River after the last floods, instead of rebuilding those homes every few years, has already saved federal taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in the most recent floods. Preventing disasters usually makes more economic sense than cleaning up after a disaster that has already happened.
Finally, the reason farmland and fishing vessel buybacks are both good tools for reducing excess capacity is that, if properly structured, they actually work. Strategic farmland and irrigation water buybacks particularly can help put more water in rivers to restore the west coast's damaged salmon runs, and result in more fish (and more fisheries jobs) in many coastal communities. For farmers competing over limited water, they can lead to the water supply stability the farmers need to stay in business. However, in order to work any well structured capacity reduction program must have certain characteristics.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD CAPACITY REDUCTION PROGRAM
Fair Value for the Retirement of the Asset: Anyone wanting out of the fishery, or any farmer willing to sell his or her land and water rights, deserves a fair value for the retirement of that business asset. As a practical matter, unless the price is fair no one will want to sell and the program will fail. Additionally, we are not talking just about the sale of land or a boat hull in a vacuum, we are talking about the retirement of the primary family business, a business that family may have pursued for generations. 'Fair market value' for that buyout then should rightfully include not only the value of the land (or boat) as a physical asset, but also the retirement of the 'good will' and future business potential of the fishing (or farming) business itself. It should also be based not on what the value of a closed fishery or fallow farmland without water may be today in a glutted market, but a realistic appraisal based on the family's total investment, past earnings and reasonable future economic earning potential.
Willing Seller/Willing Buyer Basis: Whether to sell out or stay in should be a personal business decision, not a federal mandate. We have a long history of willing seller/willing buyer buyout programs, and this has always been considered the best approach. However, the buyout program must also be prioritized to offer the buyout to those boats (and farmers) whose capacity or water demand would make the most difference, and which (once retired) move the whole system toward a diversified small family support economy that is fully sustainable.
For instance, buying out a bigger operation that includes lots of excess capacity, or buying out a large corporate farm that uses lots of water, may be the better and most cost effective options as compared to many small buyouts of people who only contribute marginally to the problem. Also we have policies in this country favoring small family farming as well as small family fishing operations which better support established farming and fishing communities, and these policies should come into the prioritization process as well. A multi-ownership and diversified industry built around small family businesses is more flexible and better able to weather economic change.
Permanent Capacity (Demand) Retirement, Not Just Shifting It Around: It makes no sense for a boat permit to be retired if that boat can just pick up another permit and use what would otherwise be someone else's idle capacity in either that fishery or another. Any buyback purchase should permanently retire capacity, not just permits. Otherwise the unused capacity just takes up the slack.
Likewise, a buyback merely of water contracts without buying and retiring the farmland itself would not reduce the overall capacity for future water demand. Throughout the west, water is seriously over-appropriated. It is the total potential future demand for water, not water use alone, that has to be reduced in the Klamath Project and elsewhere. Likewise, even if you have a water right this does not guarantee that water will be available. In a drought like the current one, many farmers have water rights, but the rivers are dry and there is no water to meet those rights because the whole system is over-appropriated. In a dry year it is total water use that has to be reduced as well as demand, with the water saved dedicated to instream flows for fish and wildlife. Both total water use and total potential demand must to reduced in an over-appropriated system.
Ongoing Mechanisms for 'Right-Sizing:' Finally, both fishermen and farmers are dealing with biological systems that are anything but static. Annual changes in biomass may demand some sort of annual adjustments in fleet capacity as well as quotas, particularly if those changes are rapid. At present there is effectively no such thing as 'harvest insurance' or other mechanisms for fishermen that is similar to federal crop insurance for farmers. In a crash, farmers have disaster relief mechanisms already in place. Fishermen do not. We need to experiment with programs to adjust and either annually retire excess capacity if necessary to reduce capacity (with appropriate financial compensation) or otherwise automatically adjust the harvest capacity to match the sustainability levels of the resource when it fluctuates over time. Likewise, farmers in the Klamath Basin and elsewhere need ongoing programs to automatically retire water contracts (with fair compensation), adjusted annually depending on rainfall, whenever there is simply not enough water to go around.
Providing Better Habitat: Last but not least, better protection and, where appropriate, restoration of fish habitat will make a huge difference. For groundfish fishermen, this may mean better protecting the existing habitat for groundfish, avoiding and phasing out fishing gear that seriously degrades that habitat and providing well designed refuge areas to protect nursery grounds. For Klamath farmers, it means restoring much of the natural water storage and pollution filtration functions of wetlands, as well as augmenting existing water storage systems in ways that help, rather than hurt, the environment. It also means adopting agricultural practices that are themselves more sustainable and that 'fit' with the true carrying capacity of the limited hydrological system as a whole.
CONCLUSION
For both groundfish fishermen and for farmers in the Klamath and elsewhere, the problem is the same: too much is being taken from the natural systems to be sustainable. The remedy for fishing overcapacity also applies to water over-appropriation: retirement of the excess demand on these fragile biological systems. Well targeted federal buyback programs to retire this excess demand are, in the long run, sensible, cost effective and necessary.
None of these changes are going to be easy, for fishermen or farmers, but easy or not these changes must be made if we are collectively going to have a future. Though we may conflict over water issues throughout much of the west, both fishermen and farmers do have considerable common ground because both groups are family food providers making their living from fragile and limited natural resources. It is up to us to make these changes happen as soon and as smoothly as possible.
Pietro Parravano is a fisherman from Half Moon Bay and PCFFA President; he was also a member of CALFED's Bay-Delta Advisory Committee and is a member of the Pew Oceans Commission. Zeke Grader is PCFFA's Executive Director, and Glen Spain is PCFFA's Northwest Regional Director. PCFFA is the US west coast's largest organization of commercial fishing families. PCFFA's Southwest Regional office is reachable at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129- 0370, (415)561-5080; PCFFA's Northwest Regional office is reachable at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, (541)689-2000.
Our web site is at: www.pcffa.org and our email is: fish1ifr@aol.com . For more information on the struggle to reform the Klamath Irrigation Project and save Klamath River salmon, see our web site at: www.pcffa.org/klamath.