I keep wondering why I added my name to an email list AL Monitor uses to send mail concerning lobbying in Washington. Then I run across something like this from last Friday:
This newsletter reported last week that Saudi-owned alfalfa farm Fondomonte Arizona recently hired the Rose Law Group out of Scottsdale to lobby on “agriculture and employment issues.” Now the Guardian sheds new light on the issue with an in-depth look look into Saudi efforts to exploit loose water regulations in the drought-stricken American West to grow food for Saudi cows.
Which leads to this Guardian article:
Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town’s 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.
Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.
Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.
The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.
Each month, Fondomonte Farms loads the alfalfa on to hulking metal shipping containers destined to arrive 24 days later at a massive port stationed on the Red Sea, just outside King Abdullah City in Saudi Arabia.
The efficiency of the global transportation system continues to amaze me. More importantly, the ability of the Saudis to export the ruination of an ecological system, while not uncommon, is quite troubling, and speaks to the current position of royal agency the dollar has achieved in the American system – much to our unconscious (mostly) distress.
