Public Opinion

this is a very interesting article from the uk's 'the guardian' newspaper in relation to this...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1346106,00.h
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Sydney dispatch

Plunder down under

David Fickling on how agriculture is drinking Australia dry

Monday November 8, 2004

Australia may be dry but it is not parched. The perception of the
country as a "wide, brown land" is widespread but it does not bear much
relation to the reality of living there.
Certainly, Australia is the driest continent in terms of rainfall per
square kilometre. But, unless you are a biologist, that is not a very
useful way of considering aridity. Governments are concerned about the
quantity of fresh water available for each resident, and on that measure
the country is swimming.
Australia's small population and fertile coastline mean that the average
resident has access to three times as much fresh water as the average
Dutch citizen and 170 times as much as the average Jordanian. If the
country had the same population as the US, which covers a roughly
similar area of land, Australia would be in trouble. But, in fact, it
has the same population as Texas and considerably more water.
The entire north and north-east of the continent have the same, humid
climate as south-east Asia and China; its southern edges have the
Mediterranean climate of Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey; weather on the
south-east coast is like that in the UK. Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin get
twice as much annual rainfall as London, and Adelaide is the only
Australian state capital to get less rain than the British capital.
Even when you take into account the continent's drought-and-dearth
climate and the higher rates of evaporation under the southern sun,
Australia's renewable fresh water supply is still roughly three times
that of the UK's. In Europe, only Norway and Russia have greater
supplies of fresh water.
None of this is to say that Australia should be profligate with its
water. Indeed, it is heartening that, on the whole, Australians take
conservation of their resources so seriously. The rest of the world
could learn a great deal from a country where, as in Western Australia,
three-quarters of homes have dual-flushing toilets and two-fifths have
low-flow shower heads.
But there is something false about the apocalyptic tone that normally
attends discussion of water here. State premiers scare their citizens
with bedtime horror stories of dry times ahead and raise phantom images
of coastal cities dying of thirst. Reports warn that even modest levels
of immigration will raise the population to levels that will drink
Australia dry. Average suburban Aussies believe that it is their
washing-up bowls and morning showers that are draining the water from
their continent.
But while Australian householders are getting out their ration cards,
farmers are sitting down to a banquet. In 2000, the country used 25m
gigalitres of water - roughly enough to fill Loch Lomond 10,000 times
over. Just 2m gigalitres of that total went to households, and nearly
half of that, in turn, was used to water gardens. The vast bulk of it -
17m gigalitres, nearly 7,000 Loch Lomonds - was used in farming.
And yet farming is rarely discussed when the question of Australia's
water shortage comes up. A government-sponsored water conservation
website, www.savewater.com.au, offers advice on "greywater" treatment
systems, rainwater tanks and the best economy dishwashers for use in
restaurants, but makes no mention of the big irrigation industries that
consume most of Australia's water.
That blind spot is depressingly common. Water shortages are a matter of
constant debate in Australia, but no one ever seems to question why so
much water goes to agriculture. In fact, the only time the words
"agriculture" and "water" are linked in Australian public discourse is
when a drought year comes round in the four-year El Nino cycle, and
Australians are hit with pleas to increase allocation for the
beleaguered farmers.
Putting agriculture into the equation gives the lie to some of the
discussion about the unsustainability of immigration. Since the late
1960s Australia's population has nearly doubled to 20 million people, a
far greater increase than the usual projections up to 2050. But, while
in the past 40 years unprecedented strain has been put on the water
supply, it is not because of all the new householders: domestic water
usage has increased by 500,000 gigalitres since the late 1960s, but the
water diverted for agriculture has gone up by 10m gigalitres - 20 times
the amount allocated to households.
Of course, Australia needs agriculture as much as any other country
does. But the amount of water used on the country's farms is out of all
proportion to their social, environmental or economic value. Vast
amounts of the dry continent's precious water supply goes not towards
growing the country's food supply but supporting politically sensitive
industries.
Take sugar. Travel up the east coast from northern New South Wales to
the far north of Queensland and you pass endless stands of sugar cane.
Thousands of hectares of coastal forest were pulled down to make way for
the cane farms that now dot a string of marginal electoral seats along
the country's east coast.
A century ago, sugar was a profitable industry - not least because most
of the workers were indentured labourers from Melanesia, living in
conditions one rung above slavery. Nowadays, a global oversupply has
made the cane industry so uneconomic that Canberra levies three cents on
every kilo bag of sugar, to stop the country's 6,500 cane farmers going
bankrupt. But while local pundits view the 330 gigalitres a year used in
flushing toilets as a profligate waste of resources, the 800 gigalitres
used growing sugar is rarely commented upon.
Cane is not even the worst culprit. One way of measuring the efficiency
of water usage is to work out how much of the resource you need for a
dollar's worth of finished product. On this measure, healthcare and
education use seven litres of water for each Australian dollar (40p),
banking uses nine litres, and most manufacturing comes in at less than
50 litres.
Irrigated agriculture consumes scales of magnitude more water. It takes
1,200 litres to make a dollar's-worth of sugar and 1,500 litres to make
dairy products or cotton to the same value. The most thirsty crop is
rice, which consumes 7,500 litres of water for every dollar of value.
You might not have thought a place as dry as Australia would be in the
rice business. But dotted along the Murray River valley, the continent's
only major river, there are dozens of farms that collectively use almost
as much water growing rice as Australia's 20 million people use for all
household purposes.
The Murray has a pivotal role in Australian geography and history.
Aborigines once built fish farms and Europeans floated paddle-steamers
along it; its floodplain cuts a fertile swathe through south-eastern
Australia, supporting unique flora and fauna. Adelaide would be a desert
without it.
But like its American counterpart the Colorado, the Murray's flow is
declining. Salinity is making the land surrounding it barren, and only
rarely does water issue from its mouth. Upstream, on the farms of
Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, there is water aplenty; rarely
does any of it meet the sea. The Murray is dying so that Australia can
export rice to China.
That is no idle claim. An exhaustive scientific report last year
concluded that the degradation of the river could only be arrested by
returning 1,500 gigalitres to the river a year; local farmers have even
squealed at a more modest agreement to return 500 gigalitres.
But rice on its own uses 2,000 gigalitres of the Murray each year, and
Australia's 800 cotton growers, who are also mainly based around the
Murray, use 2,900 gigalitres of water each year. That last figure is
equivalent to 18 times the amount of water used by the UK's entire
irrigated agriculture industry.
How can a country that cries water poor continue to consume it in this
manner? How can a country with one-third of the population of the UK use
nearly 100 times as much water on irrigated farming and then lay the
blame on householders for their bathroom habits?
It is not that water restrictions should be loosened. Australian cities
still need to conserve water, partly because they depend upon the
relatively small amount in local catchments, not the total supply in
this vast country.
Some farming is also necessary to support the population, nutritionally
and economically, but a dry continent, such as Australia, should be
concentrating on cereal crops, fruit and vegetables and livestock rather
than cotton, rice, and sugar, which together account for more than
one-third of the country's agricultural water usage.
If Australia were serious about preserving its water, it would not
tolerate the vast waste and devastation of native environments that this
amount of irrigated agriculture entails. There is a beam in the eye of
the farming industry, while householders fret about the motes in their
own. Water conservation may begin at home but it should not end there.

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