Gov. Schwarzenegger, is $10 billion a year enough to solve the budget crisis?

The California budget crisis has forced lawmakers to bring their toothbrushes and prepare for a long day as 20,000 layoff notices were set to go out to state workers Tuesday.  

California is also facing the most significant water crisis in its history as the drought causes the state's agriculture industry to disappear while residents continue to water grass they can’t eat or smoke and eat animal products subsidized by the California Legislature.

So instead of laying off 20,000 workers and cutting off services to solve California’s budget crisis, why not eliminate the state water subsidies that allow McDonalds and Colonel Sanders to market burgers and chicken for a dollar?  

Reducing the consumption of water by the livestock industry would benefit almost every economic facet of the California economy including Central Valley farmer John Harris who said that he “laid off about two-thirds of his workforce and had stopped cultivating most vegetables in order to concentrate on permanent crops.”

A recent analysis done by the Pacific Institute,  “More with Less: Agricultural Water Conservation and Efficiency in California - A Special Focus on the Delta,” was presented at a briefing to legislators in Sacramento along with recommendations on how farmers can grow more food and use less water.

What the report doesn't mention is the dramatic water saving that could be realized by limiting livestock production in California.

Our federal and state governments subsidize the meat industry's water consumption at every stage of the process. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) consume particularly egregious quantities of water.

Cornell economists, David Fields and his associate Robin Hur, have studied the fiscal consequences of water subsidies to the meat industry:
“Reports by the General Accounting Office, the Rand Corporation, and the Water Resources Council have made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to livestock producers are economically counter productive. Every dollar that state governments dole out to livestock producers, in the form of irrigation subsidies, actually costs tax payers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs, and reduced business income.

The 17 Western states receive limited precipitation, yet their water supplies could support an economy and population twice the size of their present ones. But most of the water goes to produce livestock, either directly or indirectly. Thus, current water use practices now threaten to undermine the economies of every state in the region.”

You might think that all this water consumption would at least create jobs. But no other industry comes close to the meat industry’s paucity of jobs created per gallon of water consumed.  Every job created by livestock production in California uses 30 million gallons of water a year, far more than any other industry.

Economist Douglas McDonald estimates that if water subsidies were withdrawn from California livestock producers, the income of the state’s other businesses and workers would rise over $10 billion annually (1987 figures).

Other economists have exposed the cost of water subsidies to the meat industry that are hidden in the state’s rising prices for water rights, and thus, housing. Fields and Hur calculate the overall price of subsidizing the California meat industry’s water to be $24 billion (1987 figures).

And if the health of the California economy is not enough to convince us to reduce or eliminate meat from our diet, consider that the beef industry produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane per year--the two major greenhouse gases that together account for more than 90 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions, substantially contributing to global warming.

Additionally, rainforests are being cut down to both pasture cows and grow soybeans to feed cows.  Rainforests have been called the “lungs of the Earth” because they filter our air by absorbing CO2 while emitting life-supporting oxygen. Many geophysicists have concluded that changing our meat-eating habits to a vegetarian diet would do more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car. Quite simply, you can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist.

The editors of World Watch state that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.”

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