Australia may be dry but it is not parched. The perception of the country as a ”wide, brown land” is widespread but it does not bear much relation to the reality of living there.
Certainly, Australia is the driest continent in terms of rainfall per square kilometre. But, unless you are a biologist, that is not a very useful way of considering aridity. Governments are concerned about the quantity of fresh water available for each resident, and on that measure the country is swimming.
Australia’s small population and fertile coastline mean that the average resident has access to three times as much fresh water as the average Dutch citizen and 170 times as much as the average Jordanian. If the country had the same population as the United States, which covers a roughly similar area of land, Australia would be in trouble. But, in fact, it has the same population as Texas and considerably more water.
The entire north and north-east of the continent have the same, humid climate as south-east Asia and China; its southern edges have the Mediterranean climate of Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey; weather on the south-east coast is like that in the UK. Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin get twice as much annual rainfall as London, and Adelaide is the only Australian state capital to get less rain than the British capital.
Even when you take into account the continent’s drought-and-dearth climate and the higher rates of evaporation under the southern sun, Australia’s renewable fresh water supply is still roughly three times that of the United Kingdom’s. In Europe, only Norway and Russia have greater supplies of fresh water.
None of this is to say that Australia should be profligate with its water. Indeed, it is heartening that, on the whole, Australians take conservation of their resources so seriously. The rest of the world could learn a great deal from a country where, as in Western Australia, three-quarters of homes have dual-flushing toilets and two-fifths have low-flow shower heads.
But there is something false about the apocalyptic tone that normally attends discussion of water here. State premiers scare their citizens with bedtime horror stories of dry times ahead and raise phantom images of coastal cities dying of thirst. Reports warn that even modest levels of immigration will raise the population to levels that will drink Australia dry. Average suburban Aussies believe that it is their washing-up bowls and morning showers that are draining the water from their continent.
But while Australian householders are getting out their ration cards, farmers are sitting down to a banquet. In 2000, the country used 25-million gigalitres of water — roughly enough to fill Loch Lomond 10 000 times over. Just two million gigalitres of that total went to households, and nearly half of that, in turn, was used to water gardens. The vast bulk of it — 17-million gigalitres, nearly 7 000 Loch Lomonds — was used in farming.
And yet farming is rarely discussed when the question of Australia’s water shortage comes up. A government-sponsored water conservation website, www.savewater.com.au, offers advice on ”greywater” treatment systems, rainwater tanks and the best economy dishwashers for use in restaurants, but makes no mention of the big irrigation industries that consume most of Australia’s water.
That blind spot is depressingly common. Water shortages are a matter of constant debate in Australia, but no one ever seems to question why so much water goes to agriculture. In fact, the only time the words ”agriculture” and ”water” are linked in Australian public discourse is when a drought year comes round in the four-year El Nino cycle, and Australians are hit with pleas to increase allocation for the beleaguered farmers.
Putting agriculture into the equation gives the lie to some of the discussion about the unsustainability of immigration. Since the late 1960s Australia’s population has nearly doubled to 20 million people, a far greater increase than the usual projections up to 2050. But, while in the past 40 years unprecedented strain has been put on the water supply, it is not because of all the new householders: domestic water usage has increased by 500 000 gigalitres since the late 1960s, but the water diverted for agriculture has gone up by 10-million gigalitres — 20 times the amount allocated to households.
Of course, Australia needs agriculture as much as any other country does. But the amount of water used on the country’s farms is out of all proportion to their social, environmental or economic value. Vast amounts of the dry continent’s precious water supply goes not towards growing the country’s food supply but supporting politically sensitive industries.
Take sugar. Travel up the east coast from northern New South Wales to the far north of Queensland and you pass endless stands of sugar cane. Thousands of hectares of coastal forest were pulled down to make way for the cane farms that now dot a string of marginal electoral seats along the country’s east coast.
A century ago, sugar was a profitable industry — not least because most of the workers were indentured labourers from Melanesia, living in conditions one rung above slavery. Nowadays, a global oversupply has made the cane industry so uneconomic that Canberra levies three cents on every kilo bag of sugar, to stop the country’s 6 500 cane farmers going bankrupt. But while local pundits view the 330 gigalitres a year used in flushing toilets as a profligate waste of resources, the 800 gigalitres used growing sugar is rarely commented upon.
Cane is not even the worst culprit. One way of measuring the efficiency of water usage is to work out how much of the resource you need for a dollar’s worth of finished product. On this measure, healthcare and education use seven litres of water for each Australian dollar (40p), banking uses nine litres, and most manufacturing comes in at less than 50 litres.
Irrigated agriculture consumes scales of magnitude more water. It takes 1 200 litres to make a dollar’s-worth of sugar and 1 500 litres to make dairy products or cotton to the same value. The most thirsty crop is rice, which consumes 7 500 litres of water for every dollar of value.
You might not have thought a place as dry as Australia would be in the rice business. But dotted along the Murray River valley, the continent’s only major river, there are dozens of farms that collectively use almost as much water growing rice as Australia’s 20 million people use for all household purposes.
The Murray has a pivotal role in Australian geography and history. Aborigines once built fish farms and Europeans floated paddle-steamers along it; its floodplain cuts a fertile swathe through south-eastern Australia, supporting unique flora and fauna. Adelaide would be a desert without it.
But like its American counterpart the Colorado, the Murray’s flow is declining. Salinity is making the land surrounding it barren, and only rarely does water issue from its mouth. Upstream, on the farms of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, there is water aplenty; rarely does any of it meet the sea. The Murray is dying so that Australia can export rice to China.
That is no idle claim. An exhaustive scientific report last year concluded that the degradation of the river could only be arrested by returning 1 500 gigalitres to the river a year; local farmers have even squealed at a more modest agreement to return 500 gigalitres.
But rice on its own uses 2,000 gigalitres of the Murray each year, and Australia’s 800 cotton growers, who are also mainly based around the Murray, use 2,900 gigalitres of water each year. That last figure is equivalent to 18 times the amount of water used by the UK’s entire irrigated agriculture industry.
How can a country that cries water poor continue to consume it in this manner? How can a country with one-third of the population of the UK use nearly 100 times as much water on irrigated farming and then lay the blame on householders for their bathroom habits?
It is not that water restrictions should be loosened. Australian cities still need to conserve water, partly because they depend upon the relatively small amount in local catchments, not the total supply in this vast country.
Some farming is also necessary to support the population, nutritionally and economically, but a dry continent, such as Australia, should be concentrating on cereal crops, fruit and vegetables and livestock rather than cotton, rice, and sugar, which together account for more than one-third of the country’s agricultural water usage.
If Australia were serious about preserving its water, it would not tolerate the vast waste and devastation of native environments that this amount of irrigated agriculture entails. There is a beam in the eye of the farming industry, while householders fret about the motes in their own. Water conservation may begin at home but it should not end there. — Â