Toxic Water? No Thanks.

I’ve never consciously thought about how lucky I’ve been throughout my life to have drinkable tap water. But yesterday an article in the New York Times made me think twice about how lucky we all are. The article is titled “The Problem is Clear: The Water is Filthy.” The article describes the life people in Seville, CA, a small, impoverished agricultural community whose tap water is contaminated and deemed toxic to drink. Seville’s groundwater is contaminated due to over 50 years of animal waste, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers being deposited into the land through farming.

The author chronicles the daily lives of citizens of Seville who have to fill up five-gallon jugs at a corner store every day in order to be able to cook, bathe and brush their teeth. The local school has to budget up to $500 dollars a month for bottled water in order to provide water for its students.

One of the points of this article is to show how migrant agricultural workers often bear the “social costs” of food production. Learning about social and environmental damages to small agricultural towns like Seville reminds me that our ability to buy cheap produce in the supermarket does not come without ramifications. We need to remember and realize that there is an entire population of people whose lives are explicitly dedicated to meeting the food needs of people like us. While I have driven by some of these communities in California and seen them in real life, I find myself constantly forgetting of the fact that cheap food usually means a compromise for either food companies or their workers. More often than not the burden usually falls on the workers.

As we’ve talked about in class, there will always be some form of negative ramifications of farming. While farming will never be perfect, we need to make a stronger effort to try to reduce the negative environmental outcomes of large-scale farming practices. Of course there are pros and cons to using pesticides and chemicals on certain crops, but examples like Seville make me more sympathetic to forms of farming that do not contaminate the environment. In cases like this, the lives of many are put in jeopardy in order to increase corporate profits. I find this problematic. Should clean water be a right that everyone is entitled to? I think the answer is undoubtedly yes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/tainted-water-in-california-farmworker-communities.html?hp&_r=0