California’s inland regions, including the Central Valley and Inland Empire, are the most
productive agricultural regions in the world, but that productivity is under threat from
climate change, a declining workforce, and increasing income inequality. But as is so
often the case, there is opportunity as well as peril in this situation. California is the
global leader in innovation, and Inland presents a chance to create something
completely new: a bioeconomy. This approach leverages modern information and life
sciences technologies to optimize resource use while fostering rural development
through new markets and innovations. A bioeconomy would increase innovation and
output beyond agriculture, forestry, and fisheries to create a range of new and
innovative technologies encompassing energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and carbon
sequestration. It was also enhance circularity, where residue products of production
activities are reduced, recycled, and reused.
California’s roadmap to a bioeconomy will take good policymaking, economic incentives
and a commitment to the transition, but these are all things that the state has
accomplished in the past. And there are excellent models from which to borrow,
including Japan (for labor saving and upskilling), Denmark (for the “Triple Helix”
approach, which incorporates business, academia and business perspectives), and
Israel (for water).
The Inland California project is a project of four University of California campuses
(Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Riverside) under the auspices of Labor and Automation in
California Agriculture (LACA), with the support of the Public Policy Institute of California,
Carnegie California aswell as regional economic development organizations in the San
Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento.