Some call it the Father of Waters. Others have called it The Big Muddy.
The name "Mississippi" comes from the Ojibwa name, mizi-ziibi (the Great River). It is the fourth largest river in the world and the first major spelling challenge to grade school students. At its widest, near LaCrosse, Wisconsin, it spans more than four miles across. A series of 29 locks and dams, mostly on the Upper Mississippi (built in the 1930’s to control the flow) maintain a 9-foot deep channel for commercial barges to haul goods in most seasons, but the river can be defiant and willful.
In 1927, it broke its banks and inundated 27,000 square miles of rich Lower Mississippi bottomland, sometimes to a depth of 30 feet. Again, in 1993, it rebelled, flooding 320,000 square miles of the Upper Mississippi valley. We call this flooding, nature calls it renewal. The Army Corps of Engineers has been struggling against the tide since 1837, excavating, damming and otherwise trying to mediate the will of a river that delivers 572,000 cubic feet per second of water from one location to the next, often tempestuously. Science and engineering are no match for the Muddy. Some years it’s as docile as a house cat, others it more resembles a lion.
Now, giant agribusiness owners in Louisiana want to finish a project begun in 1941 to drain land in the Lower Mississippi Delta, a gradual transformation which has taken the region from wetlands to dry fields of cotton and soybeans, as levees and canals funnel runoff from thousands of acres to a huge set of metal gates sitting across Steele Bayou.
The Army Corps of Engineers proposes to install two huge pumps, known as the Yazoo Pumps, at an estimated cost of $220 million. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), speaking out for the first time in decades on an environmental issue, has declared it will veto the idea.
EPA officials, who have for years "dumbed down" the agency’s science in response to political pressure, have put the agency in a position where its recommendations are no longer regarded as valid. This recent move, which appears to be an actual attempt to protect the Lower Mississippi Delta wetlands, is astonishing, and may signal a turning of the tide for environmentalism (a change of heart likely triggered by the upcoming presidential election). The EPA, which is being taken back to court by 18 states for its failure to regulate emissions which lead to global warming, is apparently developing a conscience, if rather late in the game.
The pump veto is justified. The area contains about 67,000 acres of critical habitat for fish, ducks, geese and other aquatic wildfowl. In spite of small farmer’s hopes, increasing the size of arable land will primarily benefit agribusiness giants who grow cotton and soybeans (think Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill). The project, officially designated flood-control for poor Delta communities, will, in fact, deliver four-fifths of its economic benefit to these agribusiness cartels. Poor Delta farmers will not benefit; their incomes have not risen appreciably in six decades. The land itself, mostly clay and prone to flooding, is marginally useful for growing crops, but critical to migrating waterfowl and other aquatic denizens.
Since 1997, the government has subsidized these agribusiness giants to the tune of about $120 billion, or one-third of the nation’s net farm income. Subsidies have made agribusiness richer, concentrating farming power in the hands of a few – literally driving out the small family farm – and resulted in non-competitive crop prices on items like cotton, with which poor, third-world countries like Africa can’t compete. It has also driven the price of rural property through the roof, impacting the price of homes and taxing average Americans – at both the property tax and table level – while filling the pockets of agribusiness corporations.
Subsidized agribusiness is, in fact, the motivating force behind the push for ethanol, leading to unsustainable food prices on grains worldwide, and threatening entire regions with starvation. Ethanol itself is not particularly environmentally friendly, requiring almost as much energy to produce as it delivers, and delivering emissions that will negatively impact the health of populations and the quality of the ozone layer itself.
I applaud the EPA. Late is still better than never, and I would like to see our future president reduce the amount of farm subsidies, bringing land values in the U.S., and grain crops everywhere, back to levels the average consumer can afford.
Disclosure: I don’t own ADM or Cargill stock.