AUSTRALIA: October 6, 2008
CANBERRA - The rapid march of climate change across Australia's main
food-growing region has caught the country by surprise and will reshape
farming across an area bigger than France and Germany, says the top water
official.
"I think we've been caught unawares," Murray-Darling Basin Commission Chief
Executive Wendy Craik told Reuters, glancing out at the unusually hot spring
weather baking much of the continent's southeast, where many Australians
live.
"It's happened very suddenly. It's right outside any of our experience over
117 years of records, and this year is proving to be not so good either,"
said Craik, who faces a Herculean task of allocating dam water levels now at
historic lows.
Craik manages river flows and dam storages across a vast plain that is home
to 2 million people and half the nation's farms, watered by the Murray and
Darling rivers and producing $17 billion (US$13.2 billion) worth of food
exports for Asia and the Middle East.
But a decade of drought increasingly blamed on climate change is shrinking
rivers and threatening fruit and vegetable production on sprawling semi-arid
fields, which Craik says have relied on half-a-century of irrigation to
thrive.
Water in the past came from the massive Snowy Mountains Scheme, a chain of
alpine dams and underground pipes built after World War Two to hold and
divert snow-melt from east to the western Murray-Darling.
But irrigation is now threatened by what scientists say is the "accelerated
climate change" already occurring in Australia and bringing more frequent
storms, droughts and estimated average temperature rises of between 1.4 to
5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100.
KEEPING THE WATER FLOWING
Wheat growers hope recent rains will still bring them through this year with
a bumper crop. But fruit, rice, cotton and dairy farmers face savage cuts to
irrigation licence entitlements by authorities across four basin states,
advised by Craik.
"We do actually have a step-change in inflows into the system," says the
former biology and fisheries scientist, now one of Australia's most
influential bureaucrats.
"Most of the dams and weirs were built during the second half of the last
century. Most of the irrigation entitlements were handed out then, when it
was relatively wetter. We've set our system up for times when it was more
benign," Craik says.
Even in good times, only 12 percent of rainfall runs into rivers or soaks
into the ground in the world's driest populated continent, with the rest
lost to evaporation.
That leaves Australia with just 1 percent of water carried by the world's
rivers, despite having 5 percent of total land area and only 21 million
people.
Modelling released by Treasurer Wayne Swan on Friday forecast the nation's
population would more than double to about 45 million by the end of the
century.
The centre-left government has allocated A$10 billion (US$7.8 billion) to
improve water infrastructure, buy back water licences handed out too freely
to farmers over many years and begin a bruising arm-wrestle with states over
control of scarce water resources.
Basin farmers, Craik says, will have to cope using water-saving drip
irrigation and drought-resistant crops, pointing to grape growers who
produced a near-record 1.83 million tonne-crop this year despite the current
drought.
"I think the halcyon days are over. But improved efficiencies and improved
technologies will go a long way," she says.
But growers have also begun to move beyond the basin, which has
traditionally grown 70 percent of irrigated crops.
Parts of northern Australia, for example, receive large amounts of monsoon
rain, some of which is captured in large dams, such as the Ord River
Irrigation Scheme in northern Western Australia state.
"I suspect we will increasingly see more grown in parts of northern
Australia, and other areas. The basin now accounts for only 45 percent of
irrigated cropping by value, down from 70. It's already starting to reduce,"
Craik says. (US$1 = A$1.27) (Editing by David Fogarty)
Story by Rob Taylor
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
