Letter To University of California Santa Cruz City on a Hill Press- May, 2007

By Douglas Deitch

UC, UCSC, Our berries, and Our Water Supply, and "Sustainability"

Let's do the numbers.

According to UC President Dynes during his visit here a few weeks back, the UC Strawberry Pomology & Research Facility in Watsonville provides 60% of the technology and strains for our $500 million local Pajaro production here, reportedly one-fourth of our country's total, and more elsewhere.

President Dynes proudly reports that UC yearly earns $5 million royalties from this, its fifth-biggest revenue generator. However, our local costs include 90 percent of our yearly salt water intrusion water resource loss of $300 million (the equivalent of 7.5 new SC Desal plants operating 24/7 at $40 million a pop ... or $270 million) which is effectively exported &and appropriated from our local groundwater supplies in berry product by multinational corporations who sell and ship it worldwide.

Our local massive saltwater intrusion resource loss of 15,000 acre/feet approximates this year's total San Lorenzo River flow of 16,700 a/f. Additionally, our community must bear the costs attributable to helping support the extremely low-income 20,000 undocumented workers and other documented farmworkers and their families who reportedly reside in our county to maintain this production.

Though UCSC and the UC systems talk & sustainability, is this $5 million a year maybe the reason that there is only UCSC and UC silence and nonresponse to our local, massive, and utterly unsustainable annual saltwater intrusion resource loss, the worst in the world according to the late Mark Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, caused by the 90 percent user ... our local berry overproduction?

Please see MontereyBayConservancy.org for the rest of the story!

Doug Deitch Executive Director Monterey Bay Conservancy 501 Mission Street Santa Cruz, Ca., 95060 ddeitch@pogonip.org