Drought catastrophe stalks Australia's food bowl*

By Rob Taylor
Reuters
Tuesday, August 28, 2007; 7:46 PM

MOULAMEIN, Australia (Reuters) - A thin winter green carpets Australia's
southeast hills and plains, camouflaging the onset of a drought
catastrophe in the nation's food bowl.

Sheep and cattle farmer Ian Shippen stands in a dying ankle-high oat
crop under a mobile irrigation boom stretching nearly half-a-kilometer,
but now useless without water.

"I honestly think we're stuffed," he says grimly.

"It's on a knife edge and if it doesn't rain in the next couple of weeks
it's going to be very ugly. People will be walking off the land, going
broke."

Shippen's property "Chah Singh" sits in the heart of Australia's
Murray-Darling river basin, a vast plain bigger than France and Germany,
home to 2 million people and in good times the source of almost half the
nation's fruit and cereal crop.

But years of drought, which some blame on global warming, have savagely
depleted the huge dams built 60 years ago to hold the snow melt from the
Australian alps and push it hundreds of kilometers inland to the parched
west for farm irrigation.

The Murray-Darling normally provides 90 percent of Australia's irrigated
crops and A$22 billion ($18.1 billion) worth of agricultural exports to
Asia and the Middle East.

But with some crops now just 10 days from failure, farmers are to
receive no water at all for irrigation through the summer, while others
will get a fraction of their regular entitlement to keep alive vital
plantings like citrus trees and grapevines.

The massive Hume Weir, which can hold enough water to fill seven Sydney
Harbours, is so dry that a lakeside holiday village is now
half-a-kilometer from the depleted shore and rods to measure water depth
stand on bare rock far from the waters' edge.

"It's grim. The water is not there," says Wendy Craik, the head of the
Murray-Darling Basin Commission which oversees storage in the country's
longest river and dam system.

DANGEROUS DROUGHT

Australia's Prime Minister John Howard warned of an "unprecedentedly
dangerous" drought in April and advised the nation to pray for rain as
economists warned the dry would wipe one percent off the A$940 billion
economy in 2006-07.

Those prayers were answered briefly in May and June after winter storms
lashed the east coast and major cities, bringing localized flooding and
seemingly the end of a dry spell which has lasted near a decade in some
areas of the country.

But by bringing hope, the rains ironically may have also worsened the
drought's impact on battling farmers through the hot months ahead.

"We thought it was just going to keep on raining. When you go into
drought people normally just lock up and don't spend, but after that
rain everyone just went out and spent money to plant crops and climb out
of the hole they were in," says Shippen.

Near the town of Griffith in the Murrumbidgee River valley, renowned for
its citrus and wines, thousands of oranges lie rotting under rows of
trees stretching to the horizon under relentless blue skies.

"We are in the lap of the gods and rainfall. The trees are under a great
deal of stress and any adverse weather or hot weather is creating an
enormous amount of fruit drop," says second generation citrus grower
Louis Sartor.

Sartor's father Giulio was among the Italian immigrant pioneers who
opened Griffith to farming in the 1950s and he still works at age 80,
pruning back trees against the drought.

"He thinks it will pass. He came here from Italy when it was like going
to the moon. He is the total optimist," says the nuggety Sartor over tea
and biscuits in his still-leafy garden.

CLIMATE SCEPTICS

Sartor, like many conservative Australian farmers, is deeply skeptical
about climate shift's role in the drought, despite a UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions that temperatures
could rise by 6.7 degrees Celsius by century's end.

"Find me the scientist that can stand up on a platform and say 'I
know'," he says.

That skepticism runs even deeper south along the Murray, with many
farmers certain irrigation shortages are the result of government
bungling and a determination to claw back precious water for a green
agenda driven by majority city-dwellers.

"I class this as a human-induced crisis, not a climate induced one,"
says Neil Eagle, 79, a fourth-generation citrus grower at Barham, a
retirement and farming haven on the Murray.

Eagle's forebears settled this so-called "Golden Rivers Country" in the
1890s, bringing paddleboats into the area and opening up irrigated
cropping in a region verging on desert.

"I believe it was warmer in the 1930s and 40s than it has been in the
last 50 years. These things are cyclical," he says.

At the same time environmental scientists like Australian of the Year
Tim Flannery argue the continent is a "harbinger" of climate shift and
experiencing accelerated greenhouse warming.

They want to pipe the open irrigation ditches carved laser-straight
across the landscape and cut back water use by 1,500 gigaliters to
protect long-term river health.

"If we are going to devastate the regions for agricultural production,
that's exactly what will do it," says a frustrated Eagle. "If that sort
of insanity does not prevail, there's no reason we won't get good years
again."

CLIMATE BELIEVER

But dairy farmer Phil O'Neill, who faces ruin with his critical water
allocations cut, suspects climate change may be a part of what some say
is the worst drought for a century.

"I'm a bit of a believer. This weather change combined with cyclical
downturn in rains, it's a bloody disaster," he says.

O'Neill, a stocky 49-year-old with huge hands and steel-wool hair, is
one of the last dairy farmers near Barham, with the long dry having
already forced most others off the land.

With a rueful smile he says he spent A$300,000 to keep going through
last summer and wont be doing it again, instead opting to sell off parts
of his cherished 1,100 acre farm.

"There is 30-40 years of breeding there and it could all be gone soon,"
he says, his voice cracking with emotion as he hefts three-day-old
calves onto pickup truck for sale or slaughter.

FEAR EPIDEMIC

George Warne, the head of Murray Irrigation, lives in Barham and is
training staff to spot depression in farmers as the drought hits harder.

"There's an underlying epidemic of fear and worry out there," he says.
"We've got all the signs of a stressed community."

Reserve Bank figures show rural debt has risen sharply from A$26 billion
in 1999 to A$43 billion in 2005. "We are hearing stories of farmers
defaulting on lease payments," Warne says.

Adding to the economic vice are rising interest rates, with most farmers
already heavily in debt for millions of dollars worth of tractors,
harvesters and irrigation equipment.

Warne backs a A$10 billion plan put forward by Prime Minister Howard to
protect water supplies in the months ahead, but which is being whittled
back by bickering between competing states over water. Howard wants to
seize control of the river system to end state squabbling and make water
a nationally-controlled asset.

Shippen says the drought and a new sense of the importance of water in
the driest inhabited continent, with prices having gone from A$30 a
megaliter to hover near A$800, will change Australian farming forever
and make some irrigation unviable.

"It's going to be a massive change," the one-time rice farmer says. "I
spent the first half of my life developing irrigation and I'll spend the
second half pulling it down."

To Warne the only solution to a disaster threatening to unravel whole
rural communities is in the heavens.