In a word, politics, Sal. The water is provided to the cotton growers at an incredibly low price. Despite the huge tonnage of water required to produce a ton of cotton, and the great scarcity of water in Australia, irrigation water typically accounts for between 1% and 2% of total on-farm costs - in other words, for all intents and purposes, we give it away. Many of the large cotton producing companies are not even local: they are US-owned.
The great difficulty is that, in an orgy of development-fever, state governments bent over backwards to provide water rights to would-be irrigators as if there was no limit to the amount of water available (Queensland and NSW in particular) and wound up by selling more water than actually exists. Only in flood years is it possible to fulfill all the existing water rights, and flood years are getting few and far between.
Everybody knows that we need to cut back. Trouble is, everybody knows that it's those greedy mongrels in the
other state that have to do the cutting.
Our farmers are different, of course. (This is pretty much what all four Murray-Darling Basin states believe. Of late they have taken to saying nice, co-operative things in public forums, but you have to wonder how sincere it all is.
The current problem is that we are stuck with a good many irrigators who have bought farms in all good faith and with a reasonable expectation that "their" water would go on being provided for virtually nothing pretty much forever. Now they discover that their huge investments are looking down the barrel, and many are faced with bankruptcy.
It's going to take a long time and a lot of hard negotiation to sort out. In the end, I think it is a more or less inevitable result of the blinkered attitude we Europeans had when we first arrived in the wide brown land. Somewhere deep down, we thought that Australia was much the same as England or the USA, that we humans could spread out across the continent , bringing our sheep and our cattle, our wheat and our traditional farming practices, and if we cut down enough trees and dammed enough rivers, and ploughed the dirt long enough and hard enough, it would eventually turn into Kent or Indiana.
South Australians learned the lesson early: late in the 19th Century they were carving out pastoral leases in the desert north of Adelaide. There was a series of good, wet years around that time. Then the drought of the 1890s hit: their fresh-plowed land turned into dust and blew away, and to this day you can still find ghost towns in outback South Australia where people tried to farm land that just won't support crops or livestock.
In the wetter eastern states, the dream remained alive much longer. Mildura pioneered irrigation as soon as the steam-driven pump became viable, and met with great success. More and more water was pumped out of the Murray, and then the Darling. By mid-century, there was not much left.
This is when the visionary Snowy Mounains Scheme was adopted. By sheer brute force, we would dam all the wild rivers flowing outwards to the sea, and send their "wasted" water through giant tunnels to the headwaters of the Murray. The task was enormous, but the dream drew people on, and the scheme was eventually completed - at a cost that was vast in monetary terms, significant in human terms (over 100 men died building the Snowy Mountains Scheme), and catastrophic in environmental terms. The Snowy River in eastern Victoria, for example, was reduced from its former grandeur to a pitiful trickle:
one percent of its natural flow remained. (Victoria is now committed to restoring 17% flow to the Snowy over the next ten years or so, and although we are only up to 2% flow so far, it is already showing results: the Snowy River wildlife is taking the first steps towards recovery.)
The Snowy Scheme, we all thought, would, by the sweat of our brows and the interest on our foreign loans, turn inland Australia into what it always should have been in the first place: a northern-hemisphere Garden of Eden, full of green and growing things.
It didn't work.
Inland Australia stil grows a great deal of produce, but the rivers are dying (the Darling in particular is in terrible shape - right now it is not flowing at all and this is the one time of year when the rivers are usually in flood), and the rising water tables produced by wholesale tree-felling and over-irrigation have poisoned vast areas of once fertile land.
Slowly, ever so slowly, Australians are starting to realise that imported British or American land management practices simply don't work here. This is because:
- We have only about 8% of the water that UK or the USA has.
- We don't have real seasons as you have them in the northern hemisphere. The key issue with the Australian climate is not the amount of rain we get, nor even the long, dry summers, it's that you can't ever rely on the rains. Some years they come, some years they don't. It is not at all unusual to go for 7 years at a time without good rain. It's not unusual to have massive floods. It's not the climate, it's the variability of the climate.
- We have older soils thn Europe or North America - much older. Australian soils have been exposed to deep weathering for hundreds of millions of years, and (in most areas) the nutrients have long since been washed out of the rocks. (In Europe, by contrast, you have young land, and it has recently been cleansed and renewed by glaciation during the ice ages. Your soils are rich - so rich that you can abuse them for hundreds of years and do little harm. Our soils are more like those of the Middle East: fragile. Treat them wrong, and they never recover.
For an example, consider the fabled cedars of Lebanon. Have you seen any great forests in Lebanon lately? All cut down and the soil blown away. Now it's a desert. Or consider the Fertile Crescent (parts of Israel, Afganistan and Iraq), where humanity first grew grain and tamed domestic animals 10,000 years ago. The Fertile Crescent no longer exists: it's a desert: killed by deforestation, over-grazing, and irrigation salinity. The area we modern people call "the fertile crescent" is the Tiogris-Euphrates delta. And it
is fertile. It ought to be: 10,000 years ago it was ocean: it consists entirely of the topsoil of the original Fertile Crescent, washed down the twin rivers into the sea. It's all that's left.
Err .... I seem to be off-topic.
The point is, here in Australia we have an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals that have, over millions of years, adapted to the unique challenges this continent offers. Many Australian plants (including quite a few that are related to your South African ones, Sal, as I'm sure you know) have adapted so well to low-nutrient conditions that they die if you fertilise them.
What produces the greatest diversity? Lush, fertile country with plenty of nutrient and water? No! Harsh conditions produce diversity. Fertile soil simply favours whichever species can out-grow and out-compete all others: the weed species, if you like. Barren soil , if you leave it long enough - 30 million years or so - produces an astonishing and subtle diversity of flora, each species finding a particular niche: perhaps a slightly more acid spot, or a sandy rise, or an association with another, unrelated species. Fauna too: this barren continent hosts no fewer than 900 different bird species, each with its niche.
Everywhere in this country you see examples of the way that native creatures have adapted. Think of the marsupials, for example. Does Australia have kangaroos because the more advanced placental mammals never got here to out-compete them? No: the fossil record shows that Australia had both placentals and marsupials in the Cretacious, but the marsupials survived while the placentals died out.
Placentals do well in good conditions because their huge young are born so well-developed: they have a head-start, if you like. But when you cannot ever be sure if the winter will bring rain or not, and you cannot rely on plentiful spring growth to feed on while you come to term, pregnancy is a huge risk. One bad season and you can lose both mother and child.
This is why marsupials do so well here. A baby kangaroo is the size of a peanut. If the year is good, it will grow and thrive. If the year is bad, no matter: the mother can grow another peanut next year.
They go further than this though: they start a pregnancy and then put it on hold: the fetus remains in the mother without developing until conditions are right. Rains are unpredictable, and occurr in patches. It is necessary to travel huge distances to find good feed. This is why kangaroos have huge elastic tendons in their legs: that graceful hop isn't for ultimate speed (though they can travel fast at need), it is for economy: every landing winds up the "spring", so the next hop requires hardly any energy at all. Kangaroos can travel further on less energy than any animal of similar size. That's no accident.
Enough: I could go on giving examles all night and this post is far too long already.
Slowly, ever so slowly, we are learning the lesson our Aboriginal people learned 50,000 years ago (after they had produced their own ecological disaster here): that fragile land needs gentle treatment, that working
with the land produces long-term results, and trying to beat it into submission in the vain hope that it will turn into something that it never was and never can be produces only heartbreak.
