AUSTRALIA: July 11, 2008
CANBERRA - The prolonged drought in Australia's Murray-Darling river system
is worsening and the country's main food bowl may forever be changed by
accelerating climate warming, government officials said on Thursday.
Despite good autumn rains, June inflows into the river basin were the lowest
in more than a century on record and climate experts are tipping a 60-70
percent chance of below average rain in the next decade, with the year ahead
likely to be a "shocker".
The drought will hit irrigated crops like rice, grapes and horticulture the
hardest, but would have less impact on output of wheat, which depends
largely on rainfall during specific periods and is on track to double after
two years of shrunken crops.
"Regrettably, the drought is getting worse," said Wendy Craik, chief
executive of the government's overseeing Murray-Darling Basin Commission,
revealing June inflows were only 95 gigalitres against a long-term average
of 680gl.
"If the sort of climatic regime we've had in the past couple of years
becomes a feature of the future, it's pretty clear we don't have the volume
of water available that we've had in the past. Clearly the basin is not
going to be the same," Craik said.
After good early rains, which briefly eased Australia's worst dry spell in
100 years, dry weather has set in again in the past three months, plunging
more rural areas back into drought.
The Murray-Darling, an area the size of France and Germany, produces 41
percent of Australia's agriculture and provides A$21 billion (US$20 billion)
worth of farm exports to Asia and the Middle East. Some 70 percent of all
irrigated agriculture comes from the sprawling region.
Wheat is grown throughout areas surrounding the basin and the brief wet
spell prompted many growers to "bet the farm" on a good season, hoping
another brief break in the long dry will come at the right time for a bumper
harvest.
Although the June dry spell forced analysts to revise down their initial
forecasts for a near-record crop, current expectations for a harvest of
about 23 million tonnes would be well up from 10-13 million tonnes over the
past two years.
Neil Plummer, Senior Climatologist at Australia's National Climate Centre,
said rains barely dented the drought, or the one-in-two chance of a dry year
ahead. As well, long-term trends now pointed to 6-7 years of below average
rain each decade.
"Autumn can only be described as an absolute shocker in terms of climate
conditions for the basin," Plummer said.
Craik said while the basin was expected to have enough water for critical
needs in the coming year, many irrigators would face zero or near-zero water
allocations and environmental river flows would be slashed to a bare
minimum.
The warming outlook for what is already the world's driest inhabited
continent would also force hard decisions on river use, with the water
needed to save threatened lakes more than the total extracted last year by
basin irrigators, she said.
The government's top climate adviser, economist Ross Garnaut, last week said
the Murray-Darling could be devastated by climate change without global
action, with irrigated agriculture slashed by 92 percent.
The current drought has already wiped more than A$20 billion from the
economy since 2002.
But Craik said growers were proving surprisingly resilient, pointing to
barely changed grape harvests last year, which dropped from 1.9 to 1.8 mln
tonnes as farmers introduced more water-efficient cropping systems.
"Farmers can be incredibly adaptable," she said. (Additional reporting by
Michael Byrnes; Editing by Jonathan Leff)
Story by Rob Taylor
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
