Death Looms For A Flood-Control Project

STEELE BAYOU, Miss. — Seven decades of hydro-engineering have transformed the lower Mississippi Delta from wetlands to dry fields of cotton and soybeans. Levees and canals funnel runoff from hundreds of thousands of acres here to a huge set of metal gates that sit across Steele Bayou.

Steele Bayou near the hamlet of Redwood, Miss., where the Army Corps of Engineers planned to build two large pumps as part of a flood control project. More Photos

The groundwork has been laid for the pumps to be installed near the Steele Bayou Drainage Structure. More Photos >

The debate over whether the Delta’s transformation was an engineering feat or environmental folly winds up here, too.

For the farmers of south-central Mississippi, who see the changes as a triumph over nature, one job remains for the Army Corps of Engineers: building two huge pumps near the Steele Bayou gates. They believe the $220 million flood control project could increase their crop yield on marginal land. That, in turn, would increase their federal subsidies.

The Environmental Protection Agency has notified the corps that it intends to veto the pumps — the first time in more than a decade that the agency has used this unilateral power.

The project’s opponents and supporters agree it would destroy or degrade at least 67,000 acres of wetlands, four times the size of Manhattan. The area affected, an E.P.A. official wrote to the corps earlier this year, represents “some of the richest wetland and aquatic resources in the nation — a breeding and spawning ground for fish and a haven for migratory fowl.”

But supporters of the pumps have not given up. “The pumps,” said Ray Mosby, the editor of the Deer Creek Pilot, a weekly paper in Rolling Fork, “are part of the cultural fabric here.”

The project, to be built between the Mississippi River and slow-flowing Yazoo River near the hamlet of Redwood, is one most farmers in the area have counted on since the Army Corps of Engineers first proposed it in 1941, when the impact of the destructive Mississippi flood of 1927 still resonated and Congress made flood control the corps’ main job. Even in their absence, the pumps are a palpable presence in this empty landscape, which is so flat that elevations are measured to the inch. “The pumps here have an almost mythic quality,” Mr. Mosby said.

“People here have been led to believe that if we get the pumps this is suddenly going to become a land of milk and honey,” he added. “They don’t exactly know how that is, mind you, but they just know it’s true.”

Underneath the pumps argument is a more basic question: What is the best use for this land? How much should be farmed? How much should revert to woodlands?

One of the staunchest opponents of the pumps is T. Logan Russell, the executive director of the Delta Land Trust. Mr. Russell argues that too much woodland and wetland was sacrificed to agriculture four decades ago and that the pumps would only protect land that never should have been cleared. With federal encouragement, farms spread eastward from the rich soils close to the Mississippi River when soybean prices rose sharply in the 1960s.

“The low-lying, clay-ey soil there is prone to flooding,” Mr. Russell said.

But increasing farmland increases the opportunity for federal price supports. Some of the nation’s biggest recipients of the supports are in the lower Delta.

Phillips Farms, with offices in Holly Bluff, about 40 miles north of Vicksburg, took in $8.6 million in federal farm subsidies from 2003 to 2006, — mostly related to cotton, according to data from the federal Department of Agriculture compiled by the Environmental Working Group. John Phillips III, the proprietor, said that from 2001 through 2006 his farm operations lost more than $2 million despite the subsidies

Not all the farmers are in that league, however, and not all residents are farmers. The two counties of the lower Delta, Issaquena and Sharkey, are losing population because of the difficulty in making ends meet.

Issaquena County’s population has fallen by 26 percent since 2000, and now stands at 1,675, with most residents living north of the flood-prone areas. Neighboring Sharkey County has 5,571 people, down 16 percent in the last seven years. Farms are consolidating. But large or small, farmers still want to farm as much land as is profitable.

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