There is no droughtThere is no drought. It is climate change, and things will be this way for a very long time.
There, I said it. In case you aren't from Australia, this wide brown(er) land has been going through a dry spell for the last few years, as it did for a few years before this spell as well. Drought is common to this part of the world, but the world has since moved on.
The first politician to stop banging on about this fictional drought and call it for what it really is will get my admiration, at least until the next thing to piss me off comes along. Yes, I know that "climate change" is a term that conservatives use to make our impending doom sound more manageable, but it is much closer to the truth than "global warming". The planet will be affected in fits and spasms of varied consequences. For us Australians, our lot in this sad state of affairs is reduced access to water.
Everyone is lectured at to save water. Some cities are on permanent water restrictions, a few towns are even looking at evacuation. Boy howdy, we city-slickers better smarten up our act.
But wait... what's this?
Approximately 75% of Australia’s water is used in irrigated agriculture. [...] About 20% of total water use is for urban and industrial purposes, the remainder for other rural uses such as stock and domestic needs.
Australian Water Resources Assessment 2000. Surface water and groundwater - availability and quality
This wasn't the statistic that I was looking for, but it will do. I had a faint recollection of Victoria's two biggest irrigators using more water per year than all of Melbourne, but I can't find any trace of it on the Internet. Why the hell are we growing rice? Or cotton? Those fucking farmers suck down water to try and make a living from their heavily subsidised crops and then cry foul when they're asked to be reasonable.
What's that? We need our farmers for the valuable export dollars that agriculture brings in? Any scrap of land that can grow a plant should be utilised? That's bullshit. Here's another fun fact:
[...] approximately 80% of the agricultural profits at full equity were derived from less than 1% of Australia's land.
Australia's Natural Resources: 1997-2002 and beyond
Admittedly, less than 1% of Australia is still more than some countries have available for farming, but I'll cherrypick through any stale report to prove a point. The sky won't fall in if unproductive farms are closed for good. Thankfully, the Government is waking up to this fact and are finally paying farmers to leave the land and become productive members of society.
Oh, wait, I knew that this was too good to be true. In the same breath that he uses to announce these payments, Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile bangs on about how important it is to retain our wallowing agricultural wet dream for the good of securing our national food supply. Hey Mark, if want to guarantee our nation's "food security", then I suggest that you drop some tariffs and get cosy with those South American countries that are getting all of our rainfall.
I'm not anti-agriculture. I was born and raised in a country town and my father's side of the family were orchardists. I am a realist. Australia is a desert, who are we to treat it otherwise?
Well, that's my rant over with. Sorry for the long delay between posts, I'm a busy man. As a way of saying sorry, here's our PM with his eye on the electorate.
Note to self: add this post to the list of other posts to remove when I run for office in thirty years time.
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He's talking to Tony Abott on the phone, giving him a lurid description of the view. That's why Tony turned up late for that health "debate" - he was busy jacking off to wingman Johnny's breathy orations. Incidentally, how politically astute was Nicola Roxon, leveraging Tony's cock-up to the hilt (tee hee) making some endearing wise-cracks while he wasn't present and getting him riled up enough to swear at her on camera when he was - with that and the super-clinics idea she's won a few points from me, but her health plan is still far from satisfactory).
As far as your observations on the drought and farming, i'm not sure we need to start importing everything and give up on home-grown produce, but i think you're right about exactly what crops we grow and how we use the land available. There's been a lot of good work done by farmers who've diversified and started tree plantations near farms which do well economically (but possibly only because of subsidies), help absorb CO2 and also help to stop the salinity that occurs, which has a decent value adding effect to their holding and produce. Corn for ethanol is taking off in the states (again heavily subsidised), but then ethanol takes a fair amount of water to refine - so do you use a bit of water now in order to lower emissions, slow climate change and hopefully bring back more rain in the long run?
Bill Heffernan has been put in charge of a $20 million task force to look into the feasibility of large-scale agriculture in the north ("what if we could use that aboriginal-owned wet-land actually FOR something...") and so far the return on that investment seems to be "nah, she's not really a goer, mate," and the rationale is "because if it could be done it would've been done already."
It does seem that agri-industry is too busy trying to forge ahead with business as usual and coming up with piece-meal tech solutions to patch up problems with what already exists instead of re-assessing what our resources are and what would constitute the best value use of those resources, showing a bit of innovation and trying something altogether different.
And of course, as i always do, i must mention the fact that population reduction is the most obvious answer to every resource problem we have. If you reproduce you're lowering the quality of life for everyone already in existence. Hopefully Australia will institute a "Zero Child Policy" and when i'm of retirement age we'll all be living high on the hog with abundant resources for all, and the cellular senescence reversal and oxidation resistance biotech i'll have been working on will make those worthy the first practical immortals, thus ushering in the next evolution of man by my own hand. Yeah. That'll be pure awesome sauce. And farmers will be growing GM animals for human organ transplants, whose meat will also be tender and tasty, and there'll be no "ethical implications" because all the superstitious/religious/metaphysical thinkers will have gone to their respective "after-lifes" allowing the critical thinkers to inherit the world as they should. And then we'll all move to Mars coz the sun will have burnt off enough core hydrogen and progressed far enough through the main sequence that Earth will be toast anyway, and we'll look back and laugh at our mortal ancestors' futile attempts to save a naturally doomed planet during the "big climate change scare of 2007". And you know what comes next. Robot bodies, aww yeah. Then we won't need to farm shit. Mars doesn't have much arable land anyway, so it'd be harder than simply eliminating the need for food. 'S'got lotsa iron tho, so we'll be kept in spare parts. There probably wouldn't be a need to keep to the standard form factor either, once we worked out how to develop new brain-cybernetics interfaces, so i'd vote for some kind of universally-rotational, many-tentacled arrangement.
Ahh, the future of the human race. So bright i have to wear shades.
so you're hopping on the climate change bandwagon too?
i say it's overhyped, politically charged propaganda.
Some thoughts:
their heavily subsidised crops
Links please, it was my understanding that Australian farm subsidies et al got gutted in the 80's.
drop some tariffs
See above. Most foreign ag products are kept out on the not too unreasonable issue of quarantine. Not high tariffs.
75% of Australia’s water is used in irrigated agriculture
The products of which wind up shoved down the maws of us city slickers no?
The sky won't fall in if unproductive farms are closed for good
Amen brother, the Coalition are pro free market only when it suits them.
"what if we could use that aboriginal-owned wet-land actually FOR something..."
'Hey guys, y'know how we took all that land away from you ohh, 200 years ago or so, well sorry about that, but this time it's different, we're all really really hungry, so if you could just move along there...'
Hopefully Australia will institute a "Zero Child Policy"
I hope you don't believe in a welfare state then. Aside from the, you know, human rights issue here.
WiseGuy: http://www.blogger.com post haste!
Dr dooshy: How's about writing a post sometime? Hey? How about that. That would be fun.
Mat: Along with paying farmers to leave the land, the latest round of agri-welfare includes laxly means-tested dole money and interest rate subsidies (see leaving the land link above). Separate to that, producers also enjoy a variety of fuel subsidies that us plebs (and certainly farmers from more agriculturally suited countries) don't get. Some crops are also lightly subsidised if they're bound for humanitarian markets, but I have no problem with that.
As for the water used in irrigated crops eventually being consumed by us city folk anyway idea, our water is too precious to waste on food that we could easily and cheaply import. As a carbon tax will make investment in alternative fuel sources more attractive, pricing our water more realistically will drive a change in how we view food imports.
Quarantine does have an impact. An example that springs to mind is bananas. Remember a year or so ago when that cyclone hit and bananas shot up in price? The inability to import bananas from the Pacific island nations lead to a hike in the price of bananas which in turn was used as an excuse for an interest rate rise. It seemed farcical at the time, but our sunburnt country is too fragile to be relied upon to be our food basket.
and certainly farmers from more agriculturally suited countries
Well thats just patently untrue.
(go to the graph at the bottom first)
Ag subsidies are a popular populist measure the world over.
Yeah, perhaps "suited" was the wrong word to use. I certainly wasn't going to say agriculturally "reliant", that would make me sound like I had some kind of crazy globalisation/anti-globalisation barrow to push. Lets say... "developing countries". All sides of politics like that term. Just because a government can afford to subsidise its farmers doesn't mean that it should.
As an aside, I'd love to see where Australia would place in Table 2. Internet cretins, GO!
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