Drought is endemic to Australia. Access to water is a defining feature of the Aussie lifestyle, affecting everything from literature to the economy, demographics (80 percent of the population lives near the coast) to the gritty Aussie spirit.
Australians might be accustomed to bouts of dry weather, but they’ve never experienced anything like this: They are presently enduring theworst drought in recorded history. It’s not just a few parched parcels of land groaning for relief. Almost the entire country—which is nearly the size of the contiguous United States—lacks for water to one degree or another.
Water restrictions, many severe, have been imposed in every major city across the country. Drought is transforming the nation. Just ask the farmers. Since 2003 drought has driven more than 10,000 Australian farming families off the land. Thousands of others have gone bankrupt.
The suffering isn’t confined to farmers. Food bills in Australia have risen 45 percent in the past decade. Moreover, the consequences are truly global; they ripple beyond the Australian coastline, and even now are affecting you!
Take wheat, for example. Global supplies are stretched, which has resulted in price rises in a range of goods from bread to beer, not to mention bread shortages, even riots, in some countries. The drought in Australia—which is typically the world’s third- or fourth-largest wheat exporter—has slammed wheat production just as the world is coming to really need its typically overflowing wheat silos.
From 2005 to 2006, Australia’s wheat exports dropped by 46 percent, and then fell another 24 percent last year. Hopes are high at the moment that this year’s wheat harvest will exceed last year’s dismal figure, thanks to some solid rainfall in some prime wheat regions and a 13 percent increase in the amount of land sown to wheat. But with the drought still far from broken, future wheat production remains uncertain.
The same goes for crops such as barley and canola. Once the second-largest canola producer in the world, Australia has seen its production slump drastically in recent years. The harvest for the 2005-06 growing season was 1.4 million tons. By the 2006-07 growing season, drought had shriveled that figure to 573,000 tons. Some decent winter rain has expectations high that this year’s canola harvest will rebound. Still, it will take years of substantial and consistent rain before canola production reaches pre-drought levels, which amounted to more than 1.7 million tons a year.
Meanwhile, in the critical Murray-Darling Basin—a massive region with rich alluvial soil commonly called Australia’s breadbasket because it produces 40 percent of Australia’s fruit, vegetables and grain—a decade-long drought is slowly choking the volume of produce. Scientists have warned that the drought in this region is so bad it’s close to causing irreversible ecological damage.
And weather experts believe the drought will only get worse.
It’s a grim picture. Not just for Aussies, who will assuredly have to continue adapting to life with a lot less water, but also for the world, particularly Asia and the Middle East, which relies heavily on Australia for critical agricultural products.
Fact is, the majority of our food is no longer produced locally. We live in a globalized world where the quality, volume and price of your food is largely a function of the agricultural success or failure of other countries. That’s why you ought to be concerned about the drought ravaging the land Down Under!