Oz: global warming blamed
2007-04-20 11:52
Sydney - An unprecedented drought that has withered Australia's major food production zone could be a taste of things to come as global warming ramps up, experts said on Friday.
Prime Minister John Howard said the six-year drought was so extreme Australia may have to import food while fears are mounting that supermarket prices will skyrocket if no rains fall within the next few weeks.
"The best thing that people could do is to pray for rain, and I mean that," Howard told public radio.
The prime minister has refused to blame the "unprecedented dangerous" crisis directly on climate change.
But scientists said the link between climate change and the drying up of rivers in the vast Murray-Darling Basin, Australia's prime agricultural region, was strengthening.
"You can't say that definitively, but I guess on the balance of evidence from southern Australia, rainfall patterns appear to have shifted," Adelaide University's professor of natural resources science Wayne Meyer said.
"There's no question about the evidence in terms of increased temperature. We have seen this persistent increase in temperature over the last 30 or 50 years. All the projections are that that will continue."
Meyer said Australia, with its warm climate, vast deserts and lack of mountains, would be one of the first countries in the world to be hit by the hardships caused by global warming.
Murray-Darling region 'to lose all their irrigation water'
"We are the ones that are going to be at the forefront because we're less buffered," he told AFP.
On Thursday, Howard warned that farmers along the Murray-Darling region would lose all their irrigation water if rains do not fall by June.
The Murray-Darling river system in southeastern Australia covers more than one million square kilometres, including most of New South Wales state and large parts of Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.
Containing 72% of Australia's irrigated crops and pastures and much of the nation's grape crop, it is regarded as the country's food basket.
Farmers say that unless drenching rains fall within weeks, the drought will devastate grape, citrus, stone fruit and apple production, cripple the wine industry and see food prices soar.
"Well, we'll never prove it's climate change until after the event but a lot of farmers have said this drought has the fingerprints of climate change all over it," the government's Murray-Darling Basin Commission chief Wendy Craik said.
Further water restrictions needed
As the country debates further water restrictions for major cities, building desalination plants to provide fresh water, and even transplanting farms to the tropical north, the opposition has attacked the government for its previous climate change scepticism.
"It's not the Howard government's fault in itself. I mean Mr Howard can't make it rain, I understand that," Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"But for half a decade or more the government has been in a state of denial on climate change and water."
Environmental historian Daniel Connell said it was irrelevant whether the current water shortage was a result of the drought or global warming - cultural change was now needed to ensure water was used more efficiently.
"This is an indication of what's going to happen in the future," the Australian National University academic told AFP.
"These are the sorts of conditions we need to be able to manage. Society has got to change its attitude to water and how it uses water."