The fires that have ravaged Los Angeles for more than a week have killed at least 27 people and destroyed more than 16,000 hectares. In these difficult times, however, the spotlight is on two of the city’s richest residents: Stewart and Lynda Resnick, agricultural magnates whose farms are devouring the rare and vital resource that is water.
A family that has “more water than the entire city of Los Angeles” uses. Since last Tuesday, January 7, the flames that have devastated the City of Angels have killed at least 27 people and forced hundreds of thousands of Americans to evacuate. In the midst of drama, the city faces controversy from the ultra-rich, notably the much criticized Resnick couple. Stewart and Lynda, agribusiness billionaires specializing in pistachio, are accused of absorbing all water resources, while Los Angeles firefighters are struggling to get a single drop out of fire hydrants, said the Daily Mail.
While the homes of their famous neighbors went up in smoke, the Resnicks’ Beverly Hills mansion and the Picasso artworks that adorn its walls were spared the Palisades and Eaton fires. The criticisms against the couple, relayed by our British colleagues, point to the links of these “those farmers from Beverly Hills” with the Democrat Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California and other influential political figures. Relationships that could be one of the reasons the state is facing such an environmental apocalypse.
A business empire that sucks up massive amounts of water
“The Resnicks are powerful and their control of so much water is ridiculous,” filmmaker Yasha Levine, co-director of the documentary “Pistachio Wars,” released Sunday, January 12, told the Daily Mail.
“How can a family have more water than the entire city of Los Angeles, which has nearly 4 million inhabitants, consumes in a year?” said the filmmaker, who considers that wildfires, chronic regional droughts, and other environmental problems are part of a “larger political-technological machine, to which Los Angeles and the Resnicks are plugged.”
With a fortune estimated at $13 billion, Stewart and Lynda Resnick are part of California’s richest farming group, with some 74,866 hectares (185,000 acres) of land, in addition to a stake in the Kern Water Bank, a reservoir of more than 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) of surplus water in the San Joaquin Valley, which extends south from the Sacramento Delta to Stockon, in the Central Valley region of California. Land that allowed them to build the “Wonderful Company,” a sprawling business empire that includes Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Wonderful pistachios, Fiji water, Halos tangerines and the Teleflora flower delivery service.
-If the Resnick empire has engaged in several charitable actions linked to the fight against climate change, culture or even education, it is regularly criticized for the massive quantities of water sucked up by their operations, but also for their control over political leaders and, thus, control an ever-increasing share of this rare and precious resource.
A company founded at the expense of the fight against drought
In 2016, an investigation by the American investigative magazine Mother Jones revealed that the Resnicks’ agricultural businesses consumed, in some years, more water than residents of Los Angeles and the entire Bay Area. Francisco reunited.
The report also claimed that the company was built by controlling the water supply and skillfully maneuvering behind the scenes of California’s convoluted water politics, including befriending the politicians who run the Golden State. For example by making six-figure donations to state governors, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jerry Brown. In 2021, according to our colleagues across the Atlantic, they paid $250,000 to a campaign aimed at preventing Governor Gavin Newsom from being removed from office.
In the 1990s, the couple reportedly purchased tens of thousands of acres of almond, pistachio and citrus trees at rock-bottom prices in and around Kern County in the San Joaquin Valley. At that time, California was building new water infrastructure with taxpayer dollars to divert streams and store water to supply farms and towns in drought-prone regions during seasons when drought rain was not falling. An action in the shadows whose repercussions are felt decades later, with the devastating fires raging in Los Angeles.
