A Challenge to the News Media
By Felice Pace
July 2001

However, we must condemn for dereliction of duty Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger and the Klamath Falls Police Chief. These officials have been reported as asserting that "since no state or local laws were being broken" they could only "watch and handle crowd control."

Since when does trespass and destruction of public property not violate state and local laws?

If I, or members of the Klamath Tribes, were to go to Clear Lake or Gerber Reservoirs and attempt to shut off the water being delivered to irrigators, would the sheriff stand by and watch? You can bet your boots he would not.

This sheriff - Mr Timothy Evinger - and the Klamath Falls Chief of Police should be investigated by the Oregon Attorney General for willful dereliction of duty. Is this any way to teach our children respect for law, the courts, property and law enforcement officials?

Meanwhile local, regional and national news outlets continue to parrot the Water User's line - "farmers sacrificed and land laid barren by an uncaring government in the name of a worthless suckerfish." This propaganda is peddled from lush offices in New York City by one of the highest priced public relations firms in the country. Where do these working family farmers get the money to pay this firm?

The answer is that those running the show in the Klamath Basin - the agricultural elite that lords it over the small farmers - and the irrigation districts they control have plenty of money to finance attack on The Endangered Species Act, Native American rights, and the federal courts.

I challenge the media to get out into the Klamath Basin to view the greenery. Everywhere - throughout the Basin--there are fields being irrigated. As viewed from any location the area served by the federal Klamath Project is predominantly green with crops. A good first cutting of alfalfa has been completed, potato and onion fields are progressing nicely and other fields have cover crops which farmers (not ducks) will harvest even though the US Natural Resource Conservation Service paid the farmers to do the planting.

For example, the State of California has give the Tulelake Irrigation District $5 million dollars to drill irrigation wells. Some of these wells are already irrigating fields most of which were not on the NRCS list of fields "at risk from wind erosion" (the official reason they were authorized).

In addition, over one hundred private irrigation wells are operating within the project area and farmers all along the Lost River are pumping water directly from it to meet their irrigation needs.

Most remarkable of all, California's Regional Director of Water Resources, Dwight Russell, has stated that the wells California's taxpayers have financed - and the pumps and other equipment associated with them - will be the property of the Tulelake Irrigation District for perpetuity. There will be no payback to the State of California. The water accessed will belong to the "overlying landowners" where the pumps are located. California's taxpayers are even paying the cost of pumping water from these deep wells.

Based on this information, it is safe to conclude that those farmers on whose property the wells have been located, will enjoy improved profit margins this year. This all makes one wonder who decided where to drill these wells and if the locations bear any relationship to political donations to California's ambitious governor, Grey Davis.

As part of "drought relief," Tulelake farmers are asking that their fields be laser leveled and fitted with expensive tile drains. This would not help anyone affected by the drought but would be another huge windfall for the big irrigators who farm that land?all paid for by taxpayers in the name of "drought relief."

So I question the drought relief program and I challenge the press to investigate the drought relief process in California. Reporters should start by reviewing the drought emergency requests which Siskiyou and Modoc Counties submitted to Governor Davis. I have examined the Siskiyou County request. It reports that a large acreage of sugar beets has been planted and will be lost. However, the market for sugar beets has evaporated and the last producer has moved off shore. As a result very little if any acreage of sugar beets was planted this year.

Again taking their line from the irrigation elites public relations firm, the press continues to report that the economic loss from non-irrigation within the federal Klamath Project Area will be $250 million. This is a number generated by the irrigators. The State of Oregon's Employment Development Department, however, estimates that the entire farm economy of the area served by the federal Klamath Project is $35 million per year. This is not small change. However, it represents about 1% of the regional economy - an impact which the local area will barely notice. Why has the press not asked the irrigators to justify their figures in light of those produced by Oregon's Employment Development Department?

However, there clearly are farm and farm worker families that have and will be impacted. Chief among these are the small family farmers who can't afford to drill wells and don't have the political connections to get a government-financed well on their land.

Many of these farmers - recognizing that the only way to bring water supply back into balance is to reduce the size of the 200,000 acres irrigated within the federal Klamath Project - have offered their farms or their claims on federal water rights - for sale and retirement.

The best thing the government could do for these small family farmers is to appropriate funds to buy their lands in order to reduce the demands on over-allocated irrigation water. However, the irrigation elite oppose these sales!

Since these larger farmers would benefit from reduced competition for federal water, this may seem hard to understand. Consider, however, that an estimated 30% of the 200,000 acres served by the Klamath Project is not farmed by the owners of the land but by others who lease this farmland for a pittance.

In other words, it is in the economic interest of the irrigation elite that dominates farmer politics to keep leasing these lands. Thus they oppose sale of these lands by willing sellers. And these are the very irrigators who yell loudest about their property rights being violated!

The Third Estate is failing the public miserably in the Klamath Basin. The press - through intention, lack of investigation and blind reliance on the irrigation elites well financed propaganda machine - has misrepresented the impact of the federal government's water decision, rendered the Native Americans and fishermen who stand behind the fish nearly invisible, continually misreported the economic impact of the decision, failed to investigate the details of a drought relief effort that seems politically driven and corrupt, ignored the massive kills of salmon and steelhead occurring elsewhere in the Basin (where the State of Oregon and the State of California are allowing streams to be completely dewatered while fields are fully irrigated), and misreported actual conditions on the ground, giving the public the impression that the Upper Klamath River Basin has been rendered a barren desert when in fact it is green and growing.

And so the Klamath Forest Alliance is issuing this call today. We are looking for real reporters and news organizations dedicated to providing fair coverage and reliable information, to come to the Klamath Basin to find out what is really going on.

There is an important story to be told here. It bears on the entire relationship between white and red folk in the Klamath River Basin and on the key issues facing agriculture today? the erosion of markets in a global food economy, the increasing dependence of American Farmers on the federal government, the dominance of agricultural interests over western water policy, the scapegoating of fish and wildlife species and the federal Act which was designed to be their lifeline when they are on the ropes, the stratification of agriculture into an elite of big farmers and corporations and an underclass of struggling family farmers, and a local press that refuses to publish the "other side of the story".

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