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Paper short abstract

In California, groundwater regulation is creating both scarcity and property. In this context, fights over groundwater allocations have generated new class identities around locality, farm size and production system. These are struggles pver both the future of farming, and the control of rents.

Paper long abstract

In 2014, to confront plummeting groundwater levels, the state government of California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). This law empowers local agencies overlying groundwater basins to create and enact plans for regulating its extraction by establishing allocations to landowners. I follow this process in the Valley of Cuyama, home to massive industrial carrot farms that have been mining groundwater for 50 years as well as a small and scattered population of small and medium farmers and ranchers. Residents have developed a notion of class based in property size and residency (small and medium vs. large), ownership (family farms vs. corporate agribusiness), as well as productive modes and methods (industrial vs. artisanal). And while the executives and lawyers of the large farming corporations insist on equality of allocations (and reductions), the small farmers and ranchers argue that equity and justice should be the guiding principles for distributing the scarce resource among dramatically unequal class actors. These differing principles of distribution index different visions for the future of rural California, but in all cases SMGA is turning groundwater into property, and formalizing its value as rent. Who owns the water is now as important as what they do with the water. This paper suggests wider conclusions about the increasing importance of groundwater rents, and the politics that produce them, as rural societies around the world face the hard limits of depletion and scarcity.