California Gov. Jerry Brown defended his decision not to put water restrictions on his state’s agriculture industry Sunday.
After taking an unheard-of step to order mandatory water-use reductions throughout the state this past week, Brown said that because California’s farms are “providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America,” it is not time to examine water limits for them just yet.
“The farmers have fallowed hundreds of thousands of acres of land,” Brown said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They’re pulling up vines and trees. Farm workers who are very low end of the economic scale here are out of work. There are people in agriculture areas that are really suffering.
“If you don’t want to produce any food and import it from some other place, of course you could do that,” he said. “But that would displace hundreds of thousands of people and I don’t think it’s needed.”
The water plan, announced last week amid a terrible drought, imposes a 35 percent cut on household and business water usage.
