Philobiblon

Twenty years ago now, when I was studying agriculture at university, there was just dawning an awareness that much of the arable farming in Australia, and particularly the irrigation farming, was unsustainable. Ancient soils were having unprecedented quantities of water poured on them, and the rising water table was bringing millennia of salt to the surface; trees were still being felled, destroying the land’s capacity to retain moisture (and soil) in Queensland, at the start of the great Murray-Darling system that is Australia’s only great river and on which the entire city of Adelaide depends for water. (And there were even government subsidies for felling these trees, at least until a few years ago – any Australian readers know if there still are?)

Yet still the fantasy continues. A story in tomorrow’s SMH (time difference) starts by excitedly saying record prices are being offered for Australian rice. Then, and only then, does it say that many farmer’s water allocation has been cut to zero due to the acute shortage, so very few of them will be getting these “record” prices.

On September 19, the federal commodities forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, slashed its rice crop forecast to less than 40 per cent of last year’s 1.05 million tonnes.
The next day, the NSW Department of Primary Industries went further, estimating the area of rice-growing land would be 20 to 30 per cent of last year’s.
“This is an incredible climatic event, the worst drought in recorded history, and we’ve got the joy of living through it,” said the president of the Ricegrowers Association of Australia, Laurie Arthur. “There’s not going to be more than a quarter of last year’s production.”

Even if you ignore the strong possibility that the greenhouse effect is starting to have transformative effects on climate (a largish “if”), Australia still, astonishingly doesn’t get the fact that “drought” (by definition supposedly an extraordinary event) is a normal part of the Australian climate.

I’m reminded of an expert I interviewed many years ago who said the only sustainable “farming” in Australia would be to turn nearly all of it over to the kangaroos and harvest the meat from them. Except that won’t go a long way towards feeding 20 million people.