A while back I posted about how Fresno has some deep-seeded problems that need addressing. Well it seems that the entire Central Valley is looking down the barrel of a very long and troublesome gun. An article entitled “The Appalachia of the West” in this week’s Economist details that the Valley’s problems could just be beginning:
Farming will not disappear, but whether it will be as big as it is now is a question, says Mr Phillimore, adding that “If the agriculture goes away, there is nothing.” In the San Joaquin valley agriculture provides almost 20% of the jobs. The alternatives are depressing and scant. For example, many of California’s prisons are sited in the Central Valley’s wide expanses, in what is sometimes called an “archipelago”.
A big problem is that the workforce in the Central Valley is badly educated, says Carol Whiteside, the founder of the Great Valley Centre, a not-for-profit organisation whose aim is to improve the region. The largest farms are often still owned by the families that arrived a century or so ago—the descendants of Portuguese and Dutch immigrants are big in dairy farms, for example. But most of the whites tend to be “Okies” who arrived from the dust bowl of the Great Plains during the depression, such as the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, who drove up and down in search of work on the stretch of Highway 99 where Paramount Farms now sits.
Economically, socially and educationally, their descendants have barely moved up. Nor have more recent immigrant groups such as the Hmong, Thai and Mien, who came to work in the fields during the 1970s and now live in Central Valley cities such as Stockton, Fresno and Modesto—or, of course, the Mexicans, who have been coming since then and are now the majority of workers in the fields, where Spanish is the common language.
These demographic trends, combined with the water shortage, are causing worry. The Central Valley is already one of the poorest regions of the country. And its population, about 6.7m in 2008, is among the fastest-growing; it is expected to double in the next 40 years, as new immigrants continue to pour in looking for farm work.
This has led to comparisons with Appalachia, which has also relied on a declining extractive industry (coal mining) and has suffered from high unemployment, poverty and a relatively unskilled workforce. A report commissioned by Congress in 2005 argued that the San Joaquin valley is in some respects behind Appalachia’s coal country in diversifying its economy.
Sounds depressing, no?
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