Musings: Go Figure

It's pretty easy to rally support when you're pitting them poor little east Maui taro farmers against big bad A&B and its “theft of native water rights.”

Which is why the Senate Water, Land and Ag (WLA) committee yesterday deferred SB 3001. The bill would have allowed entities that have existing month-to-month revocable water leases — and have applied for long-term leases — to continue operating under a holdover permit while the pending disposition of water rights is settled, even if that takes more than the one year specified by law.

Though bill opponents are gleefully chortling about sticking it to A&B, they seem to have forgotten the many small farmers, ranchers and even homeowners who will be adversely affected when the overdue revocable water permits are yanked.

KIUC rate payers also could be impacted, since the two diversions that support the utility's upper and lower Waiahi hydroelectric plants are managed under revocable permits. KIUC noted in its testimony that it applied for a long-term lease in 2004.

Yet that application is still pending, 12 years later, because the state functions as slow as molasses. So what are short-term permit holders to do in the interim? Nothing involving water is resolved within a year in Hawaii, especially when every decision is subjected to litigation.

Indeed, it was a Hawaii Circuit Court decision that invalidated the present diversion of Maui streams on the grounds that the holdover status of the permits exceed the applicable time limit.

As an aside, I find it humorous that activists applaud the courts as “upholding justice” when they issue a decision like this. But when they rule against the anti-GMO initiatives, groups like Babes Against Biotech launch personal attacks against judges on social media, deriding them as unethical stooges in the pay of corporations. 

There's no question that the revocable permit system for land and water needs some serious revamping, both to protect the environment and traditional uses, and also to give farmers and ranchers a level of security that will allow them to invest the time and money that's required to succeed. But something has to be done to protect the little guys while it's being hashed out.

A&B has private wells and ample financial resources to weather this storm. Small farmers and ranchers do not. They're being thrown under the bus in the drive to wrest water away from A&B. It's the same short-term, vindictive thinking that has people going after the seed companies, without a thought as to what will happen to agriculture and that land if they disappear.

Well, some people have given it more than a thought....

While this has been billed as supporting east Maui taro farmers, I wonder if taro production actually will increase with the allocation of more water. We've seen a drop in taro farming on Kauai because it's hard work, for not much dough. It's hard to imagine the dynamics are any different on Maui, given the associated economic pressures of the gentrification that's occurring in Keanae and Hana.

The contorted belief systems around these complex issues were expressed in this bit of testimony from a woman living on Hawaiian Homelands in Anahola:

STOP STEALING OUR WATER...NO WATER=NO FOOD, NO FOOD=REVOLUTION, REVOLUTION=NO TOURIST INDUSTRY, NO TOURISM=NO MONEY....GO FIGURE!!

Yeah, go figure. Because I sure as hell can't follow this logic, which does not factor in how much water the visitor industry uses, nor the fact that most of the food is being produced by small farms that depend on the irrigation systems and diversions that began with sugar.

In a similar disconnect, anti-GMO activists repeatedly reference the lack of human feeding studies to bolster their claims that GMO foods are unsafe. Yet attempts to conduct human feeding studies on a banana fortified with Vitamin A were met with serious blowback from University of Iowa students, who collected 57,309 petition signatures in opposition.

So the foods are unsafe because they haven't done feeding trials, but they can't do feeding trials because those are unsafe.

It's just like all the newbies and dreamers who are screaming for more local food, even as they repeatedly — and apparently, for some of these twits, unknowingly — screw over the small ranchers and farmers who are trying to produce it.

You just can't have it both ways. 

Which is why some of us see this anti-ag activism as merely the latest attempt to gain control of land and water, and thus power, in Hawaii. But given the fear-mongering, short-sightedness, self-serving agendas and ignorance of some of the major players, it's hard to imagine they'd be any better stewards than the Big 5.