Drought Catastrophe Stalks Australia's Food Bowl
Date: 30-Aug-07
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Rob Taylor
Sheep and cattle farmer Ian Shippen stands in a dying
ankle-high oat crop under a mobile irrigation boom stretching
nearly half-a-kilometre, but now useless without water.
"I honestly think we're stuffed," he says grimly.
"It's on a knife edge and if it doesn't rain in the next
couple of weeks it's going to be very ugly. People will be
walking off the land, going broke."
Shippen's property "Chah Singh" sits in the heart of
Australia's Murray-Darling river basin, a vast plain bigger
than France and Germany, home to 2 million people and in good
times the source of almost half the nation's fruit and cereal
crop.
But years of drought, which some blame on global warming,
have savagely depleted the huge dams built 60 years ago to hold
the snow melt from the Australian alps and push it hundreds of
kilometres inland to the parched west for farm irrigation.
The Murray-Darling normally provides 90 percent of
Australia's irrigated crops and A$22 billion (US$18.1 billion)
worth of agricultural exports to Asia and the Middle East.
But with some crops now just 10 days from failure, farmers
are to receive no water at all for irrigation through the
summer, while others will get a fraction of their regular
entitlement to keep alive vital plantings like citrus trees and
grapevines.
The massive Hume Weir, which can hold enough water to fill
seven Sydney Harbours, is so dry that a lakeside holiday
village is now half-a-kilometre from the depleted shore and
rods to measure water depth stand on bare rock far from the
waters' edge.
"It's grim. The water is not there," says Wendy Craik, the
head of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission which oversees
storage in the country's longest river and dam system.
DANGEROUS DROUGHT
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard warned of an
"unprecedentedly dangerous" drought in April and advised the
nation to pray for rain as economists warned the dry would wipe
one percent off the A$940 billion economy in 2006-07.
Those prayers were answered briefly in May and June after
winter storms lashed the east coast and major cities, bringing
localised flooding and seemingly the end of a dry spell which
has lasted near a decade in some areas of the country.
But by bringing hope, the rains ironically may have also
worsened the drought's impact on battling farmers through the
hot months ahead.
"We thought it was just going to keep on raining. When you
go into drought people normally just lock up and don't spend,
but after that rain everyone just went out and spent money to
plant crops and climb out of the hole they were in," says
Shippen.
Near the town of Griffith in the Murrumbidgee River valley,
renowned for its citrus and wines, thousands of oranges lie
rotting under rows of trees stretching to the horizon under
relentless blue skies.
"We are in the lap of the gods and rainfall. The trees are
under a great deal of stress and any adverse weather or hot
weather is creating an enormous amount of fruit drop," says
second generation citrus grower Louis Sartor.
Sartor's father Giulio was among the Italian immigrant
pioneers who opened Griffith to farming in the 1950s and he
still works at age 80, pruning back trees against the drought.
"He thinks it will pass. He came here from Italy when it
was like going to the moon. He is the total optimist," says the
nuggety Sartor over tea and biscuits in his still-leafy garden.
CLIMATE SCEPTICS
Sartor, like many conservative Australian farmers, is
deeply sceptical about climate shift's role in the drought,
despite a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
predictions that temperatures could rise by 6.7 degrees Celsius
by century's end.
"Find me the scientist that can stand up on a platform and
say 'I know'," he says.
That scepticism runs even deeper south along the Murray,