Klamath farmers go it alone

The Oregonian Editorial Board points out how farmers lost out on $175 million in federal farm bill money for refusing to consider buy outs of willing land owners.

This time, Klamath farmers themselves wrenched shut the spigot that would have brought relief to their thirsty, polluted basin in Southern Oregon.

These farmers are responsible for the possibility that the Klamath Basin may end up without a dime of the $180 billion farm bill nearing final approval in Congress.

It was their leaders in the Klamath Water Users Association who preferred to kill a $175 million Klamath relief package rather than accept even a token effort to buy out willing farmland sellers and reduce water demand.

It was the farmers' strongest advocate in Congress, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who muddied the Klamath issue by offering a competing amendment to the bipartisan plan cosponsored by Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith and approved by the Senate.

It was the great friend of the farmers, the Bush administration, that couldn't muster even half-hearted support for the Wyden-Smith amendment.

Clearly, the fertilizer suppliers and other business leaders who dominate the Klamath Water Users Association are betting that they can do better than the farm bill and the Wyden-Smith amendment. They are quietly confident that the Bush administration will eventually sweep in with a Klamath rescue package more to their liking.

Well, maybe. But how much will the Bush administration really deliver for water cleanup, wetlands restoration, endangered species protection -- all the things that federal biologists insist are necessary if the farmers are to receive their full allotment of water over the next decade?

You have to love the timing of the feds' release of their biological opinion: They laid out their prescription for clean water the same day the farm bill went dry for the Klamath.

Wyden and Smith fought late into the night Thursday and all day Friday to get Klamath funding back into the farm bill. They have vowed to push some more on Monday, but the bloated farm bill, a vast balloon of federal aid to sugar producers and grain growers inflated by farm-state members of Congress, will soon float out of their reach.

We can all guess what happens next in the Klamath Basin: not much. Some of the most polluted water in Oregon won't get cleaned up. The damaged wetlands won't be restored. The salmon and suckers will keep teetering on the edge of extinction. The lawsuits will keep flying back and forth.

And now the water will keep flowing to irrigators.

Right up to the next drought.