Drought threatens crop catastrophe, Australian prime minister says
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Agencies in Canberra
Friday April 20, 2007
The Guardian

Australia will have to cut irrigation to prime farmland, decimating
harvests, unless heavy rains break the worst drought in 100 years, the
prime minister, John Howard, said yesterday.

Prolonged drought has reduced Australia's rivers to a trickle, forcing
many cities and towns to impose drastic water restrictions as reservoirs
dry up. A contingency plan prepared for the government said that unless
water catchments across the country received heavy and widespread
rainfall before mid-May, allocations for irrigation would be stopped,
presenting a threat to farmland in the critical food bowl of the
Murray-Darling river basin.

"It is a grim situation and there is no point in pretending to Australia
otherwise," said Mr Howard.

"We must all hope and pray there is rain," he told reporters at
Parliament House in Canberra. "If it doesn't rain in sufficient volume
over the next six to eight weeks, there will be no water allocations for
irrigation purposes in the basin [until May 2008]."

Parts of Australia have been in the grip of drought for a decade and the
dry spell is expected to wipe up to 1% off the A$940bn (£391bn) economy
in 2006-07. Australians could face big food price rises if no water is
allocated to Murray-Darling basin farmers, irrigators warned.

The drought has already severely reduced production of irrigated crops,
including cotton lint, wine grapes and rice. Australia may not have a
rice crop at all this season, Laurie Arthur, president of the
Ricegrowers Association, told Reuters.

"If it stays dry, there will potentially be catastrophic losses," he said.

Mr Howard said he did not want to talk in "apocalyptic terms" about
whether towns would run out of water completely. "The longer it goes on,
the harder the impact. These are just stark facts," he said.