Sunday, October 10, 2010
It never rains, but pours
The weekend papers are full of the cuts to irrigation entitlements that farmers throughout the Murray-Darling basin will have to endure to ensure the future health of the most famous river system in Australia.
Twelve years of drought strengthened the hand of environmentalists as we watched the Coorong National Park and Murray lakes slowly dying of thirst through the over extraction of water further upstream.
Naturally, farmers are up in arms. Less water means that their ability to grow food will be reduced, leading to a loss of income. What this means to you and me is that food prices will have to rise to reflect the new reality. If we want to save our national icons, we will have to pay more at the checkout for scarcer produce.
So on top of already huge rises in our water bills to pay for a desalination plant to secure our future water supplies, it looks like rises in the cost of fruit and vegetables are just around the corner too. It seems a little strange that after the wettest September on record across Australia to be staring at price rises due to water shortages.
Perhaps it's time we started to look at structural changes in the way and the things we farm.
How is it that one of the driest continents in the world grows both cotton and rice, crops that traditionally require huge amounts of water for their production? How is it that Cubbie station, just one farm, has permits to divert and store more than 500,000 megalitres of water, enough to fill Sydney Harbour?
There's no doubt that mistakes have been made in the way in our which precious water resources have been allocated in the past, but in order to protect our future, changes will have to be made, changes that will affect all of us.
Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Oh, planting a vegie patch might not be such a bad idea either.
Twelve years of drought strengthened the hand of environmentalists as we watched the Coorong National Park and Murray lakes slowly dying of thirst through the over extraction of water further upstream.
Naturally, farmers are up in arms. Less water means that their ability to grow food will be reduced, leading to a loss of income. What this means to you and me is that food prices will have to rise to reflect the new reality. If we want to save our national icons, we will have to pay more at the checkout for scarcer produce.
So on top of already huge rises in our water bills to pay for a desalination plant to secure our future water supplies, it looks like rises in the cost of fruit and vegetables are just around the corner too. It seems a little strange that after the wettest September on record across Australia to be staring at price rises due to water shortages.
Perhaps it's time we started to look at structural changes in the way and the things we farm.
How is it that one of the driest continents in the world grows both cotton and rice, crops that traditionally require huge amounts of water for their production? How is it that Cubbie station, just one farm, has permits to divert and store more than 500,000 megalitres of water, enough to fill Sydney Harbour?
There's no doubt that mistakes have been made in the way in our which precious water resources have been allocated in the past, but in order to protect our future, changes will have to be made, changes that will affect all of us.
Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Oh, planting a vegie patch might not be such a bad idea either.
2 Comments:
The cost and volume of water needed to re-produce the scale of production - but on fifteen million household blocks instead of the current super-efficient farms - would be astronomical, rendering the environmentalists' desire for a pre-European Murray-Darling river system the wet dream that it is.
Cubbie station itself has developed flood harvesting and run-off retention systems that make the Victorian Government's 155 'target' look like profligate waste. I'm looking forward to Labor and the Greens tear themselves to bits over this. Back to the polls!
Yes, the rice and cotton crops make me m-a-d. I feel for farmers; it cannot be easy to grasp the concept and being made to feel as though they haven't been managing the 'droughts' must hurt - a lot. Hard too for people in the city who just turn on a tap and water flows out...but something has to change. Dairy farming, on the scale that we've become accustomed to, in a dry country is a kind of madness too.
Grow yer own!
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