Who Wouldn’t Be Stunned?

Rarely does the U.S. Department of the Interior take such dramatic action that people are left dumbstruck. But that is what happened when the department announced that it would close immediately the 1,200-acre Kesterson Reservoir and halt irrigation-water deliveries to 42,000 acres of farmland in the western San Joaquin Valley. Who wouldn’t be stunned? The department has argued for months that the drainage of contaminated irrigation-runoff water into the reservoir did not constitute an emergency.

The Interior Department, in fact, resisted as too precipitous a state Water Resources Control Board order in February giving it three years in which to clean up Kesterson--part of a national wildlife refuge. It would be wrong, the federal officials emphasized, to impose economic hardship on farmers by forcing land out of production.

Yet that is precisely the effect of Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel’s sudden order last Friday, based on his lawyers’ reading of a 1918 treaty to protect migratory waterfowl. Waterfowl have been born dead or deformed because of natural selenium leached from the soil by the farm-water runoff that drains into Kesterson.

There is a crisis--a serious one. But the waterfowl issue is only a small part of it. Thus it was puzzling that Hodel suddenly seized on the international treaty as the dubious excuse for closing Kesterson, which existed before the refuge was created. The real dilemma is that 300,000 acres of the 600,000-acre Westlands Water District ultimately may have to be drained of waste irrigation water to remain productive, and no one knows what to do with this agricultural sewage. Westlands has been a headache for the Interior Department ever since it was created in the 1960s to bring arid land into production. The irrigation project is heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers to provide water at less than cost to farms, which often produce federally supported crops. More than half the area threatened with the water cutoff was planted in cotton in 1983-84.

Perhaps Interior wanted to pass a hot political problem off to Congress, the state and Westlands. But the problem will not go away. Several longterm, costly solutions are possible, such as desalination or recycling of the wastewater. Ultimately the public must decide how much it is willing to pay to keep some cropland in production.

For now, Interior appears to have eased its threat of cutting off irrigation water for this growing season. That is only fair. A few farmers should not be forced into overnight bankruptcy over a problem that, with U.S. government assistance, was years in the making.