SalmonAid Director Responds to 60 Minutes Report on California Water

Hello Andrew,

my name is Mike Hudson, I'm the President of the Small Boat Commercial
Salmon Fishermen's Association http://www.sbcsfa.com , a Director of the Pacific
Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations http://www.pcffa.org and the Executive
Director of the SalmonAid Foundation http://www.salmonaid.org .

I'm writing to voice my disappointment with yesterday's 60 Minute segment
about California Water.

1. Mrs. Stahl did not include any of our hard stricken fishermen and fishing
related businesses in her report, and to produce a balanced report that
would have been necessary (and interesting too). Please read the recent LA
Times article "For salmon fishing port, the future is as murky as its
waters" at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fishing1-2009dec01,0,3780297.story
and view the related pictures at
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-1fishing-pictures,0,5768539.photogallery

2. Mrs. Stahl showed an Almond grower grinding up some of his "valuable"
trees that took 20 years to grow.... Just the slightest bit of research will
tell you that Almond trees live for 20-25 years, and that's it. So the trees
this grower ground up were at the very end of their lifecycle, and drought
or no drought - they would have been ground up anyways to make room for new
ones.

Almond orchards are routinely pulled down, ground up and replanted (His
almond chips were probably heading for a bio-gen power producer, who will
pay a premium price for oily almond fuel).

3. The same Almond grower pointed out that food prices will rise in the
future and that more food will be imported from China unless more water
flows to CA farms. This is just total bogus and a fine reporter like Mrs.
Stahl should have seen right through this empty argument.

Look at the facts Dr. Jeffrey Mount was able to point out briefly on the
sidelines: He said "don't grow permanent crops (Almonds, etc...) unless you
want CA water to be consistently scarce in CA."

We grow around 800,000 acres of Almonds in CA - almost all of them for
export. Almonds take 3 1/2 feet of water per year, and they cannot be
fallowed because they are a permanent crop - 2.8 million acre feet of water
go into production of a luxury export crop, not into the production of food
for domestic purposes.

We grow 1.1 million acres of Alfalfa Hay in CA (Alfalfa uses 4 feet of water
annually for a total of 4.4 million acre feet of water). Most of this hay is
exported to Japan on container ships, essentially encouraging Japanese
growers to raise their luxury Kobe Beef on CA water.

If you're still with me.... we also grow around 1/2 million acres of Cotton
in some of the worst drainage impaired farmland on the face of the earth,
right here in CA. At 3 1/2 feet of water, this crop also accounts for 1.75
Million acre feet of water.

Please do the math: 2.8 + 4.4 + 1.75 = 8.95 Million acre feet of water, or
close to 1/3 of the entire State's water use (approx 30 million acre feet
annually), and I haven't eaten ONE thing yet.

And if that isn't enough drain on our water supply, please look at the fact
that Wine Grape orchards have tripled over the last decade, and you will see
that our water is eaten up very quickly by non-essential crops that produce
little or no benefit at all to CA or US citizens, but only to a handful of
corporate operators with a major PR budget trying to pull the wool over the
eyes of the likes of Mrs. Stahl.

If anything takes water away from our staple foods and forces us to import
these from other countries, it's these crops above, not a lack of water to
our farmers. We are today exporting 25% more water from the Delta than ever
before in history. Why did Mrs. Stahl not find out during her research for
the segment, that last year for example, the CA Central Valley produced an
all-time record crop of Tomatoes even though the farmers were crying
"Drought" and "Government produced Dustbowl" at this time?

4. Why was there no mention at all of CA Water-Supervillain Mr. Stewart
Resnick who made hundreds of Millions of $$ over the last few years
reselling his farm water to southern CA water districts at mindboggling
profits?

5. CA Salmon are food too. The recreational and commercial fisheries for
this important fish have been totally shut down for 2 years now because of
the overdraft of water by Central Valley growers. Our commercial fishery for
this fish is a multi million $$ industry by itself. If you also take into
account the money recreational Salmon fishing produced in the past and add
it all together, we're talking about sums of money our economy lost, that
rival the output of the Central Valley - except it's all produced by small
family-owned businesses, thousands of them.

Anyways, as far as the quality of segments "60 Minutes" has produced in the
past goes, this one must be somewhere on the lower end of the scale.

My regards to Mrs. Stahl, Have an excellent day, Mike Hudson ~ ~ ~
<*)((((((<><

I can be reached at (510) 407-2000 or mike [at] sbcsfa.com . Should you decide to
follow up on this story, I would be glad to point you in the necessary
directions.