According to Jay Lund, one of the report’s five authors and the director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, nearly all of roughly 7,500 lost jobs from direct agricultural employment are from workers in the fields. The other 9,600 lost jobs are from related industries such as producing fertilizer, tractors, or seed. All told, 88 percent of these job losses are occurring in California’s Central Valley. That’s because 409,000 of the 428,000 acres of crops lost due to lack of water are located in the Central Valley, which runs inland down the length of California from Redding to Bakersfield. California is no stranger to droughts, but the current situation is significantly worse than what’s been seen in recent years. According to the report, the current job losses are more than double the 7,500 jobs lost in the last major drought of 2009, and the “combined socioeconomic effects of the 2014 drought are up to 50 percent more severe than in 2009.” Speaking at a Washington, D.C., press briefing on the release of the report, lead author Richard Howitt, a professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis, emphasized the importance of the job losses to California’s farmworkers. “What really hurts is that we’re also losing 17,000 jobs,” he said. “[And] they are from a sector of the population who have the least ability to roll with the punches.”
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:32:40 +0000
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