Australians Must Pray For Rain

I was reading an article on-line about how Australia is suffering from a terrible drought, and it is getting to the point where Prime Minister John Howard is saying that irrigation systems may have to be cut off to parts of the country where most of the food is grown.  This, as you can imagine, will hugely devastate Australian farmers, and it will also effect consumers because the prices of goods are expected to drastically increase.  Howard said, “It is a grim situation and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain.”

The only way that the irrigation system will not need to be turned off is if there by some miracle is a massive amount of rainfall in the country in the very near future.  Otherwise, it looks like the water irrigation systems will be turned off around mid-May.  The Murray-Darling River Basin is where the problem is most prevalent.  This is where the  country’s farms are, and it “accounts for 41 percent of Australia’s agriculture.”  You can imagine how much the country will suffer if this area is not able to produce crops any longer. 

The green section of this map is the Murray-Darling River basin.  As you can see it takes up an extremely large portion of the country, and this is the area that is most effected by the drought.

Image source: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/7/7b/250px-Murray-catchment-map_MJC02.png

Some of the more effected industries are: cotton, wine, rice producers.  For example, “Cotton lint production has plummeted to 250,000 tonnes in 2006/07 from 597,000 tonnes the year before, and from 819,000 tonnes worth almost A$2 billion in 2000/01, before the drought.” If this trend continues cotton production in this area will essentially not exist in about 2 years.  Wine production has been greatly suffering from the drought as well.  The amount produced this year was down 30% from the previous year and was the smallest amount that has been harvested since 2000.  Rice production has drastically dropped as well.  “Australia may not have a rice crop at all this season if it gets no irrigation allocations, Laurie Arthur, president of the Ricegrowers Association, told Reuters.”

This is a terrible situation that this country is in, and parts of it have been suffering from this terrible drough for nearly 10 years.  However, “the March end of the El Nino Pacific Ocean weather pattern which brings severe drought to Australia’s populated east has also heartened farmers.”  I sincerely hope that the Australians’ prayers for rain are answered and that the country is able to recover successfully after this what seems to be a never-ending drought is over.

Source: http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41474/story.htm