Contents - Greenmount Press

Water Matters…
Series supported by Valmont
Water policy strikes at the heart
of our food security
■■By Julian Cribb 1
If Australia’s security agencies got wind of a terrorist plot to
destroy vital national infrastructure, eliminate companies and
thousands of jobs, cost the Australian public billions of dollars
and undermine the health of the community, our governments
would – presumably – mobilise all our national resources and
defence forces to prevent it.
The trouble is the perpetrators in this scenario are Australian
governments themselves – federal and state and of both political
complexions. And the scenario is real.
As the world grapples with its third food price crisis in four
years, our governments and their bureaucracies are steadily
dismantling one of Australia’s most productive and important
industries – the irrigation sector that supplies most of our daily
needs for milk, fruit, vegetables, cotton, rice, meat and other
products essential to a healthy diet and living standard.
Irrigation channels that have fed Australians for a century are
being bulldozed and farmers’ water supplies turned off or sold
off for non-food uses. Water prices are soaring. Food industries
are contracting, local food companies being sold offshore or shut
down, around 100 regional towns are dying and many farmers
are quitting agriculture for good. A growing flood of overseas
food – grown cheaply in Asia often using water horribly polluted
with industrial poisons, heavy metals and pesticides – now lines
the shelves and freezers of our shops and supermarkets.
Not content with this, federal and state governments have
also methodically demolished Australia’s irrigation science efforts:
the Irrigation Futures and e-Water CRCs, the National Program
for Sustainable Irrigation (NPSI), the CSIRO Irrigation Division,
Land & Water Australia have all been wound up while state
irrigation research and extension has been decimated. This will
ensure Australians will not have the knowledge we need to grow
more food with less water as the climate changes.
It may be that our governments and bureaucracies do not
know it takes over 1000 tonnes of water a year to feed an
Australian.
Or maybe they simply do not care if Australian food prices
go through the roof and scarcities erupt as we increase our
dependence on imports as the world food supply becomes less
secure. But it is hard to find any rational explanation for why this
vital sector is being cut down.
In the Olympics of shortsighted decision-making, jeopardising
the backbone of the nation’s future food security has to be a
Gold Medal contender. We now rely on overseas suppliers for 30
per cent of our fruit, 20 per cent of our vegetables, three quarters
of our fish – and there is growing economic pressure to shift the
dairy industry to China or NZ.
Precision Irrigation Made Easy
CENTRE PIVOT and
LATERAL MOVE IRRIGATION
18 — The Australian Cottongrower October–November 2012