This story about Australia was posted this morning. Wikipedia describes the Murray-Darling basin as the most important Agricultural area in all of Australia.
Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent’s food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought – heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.
The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia yields 40 per cent of the country’s agricultural produce. But the two rivers that feed the region are so pitifully low that there will soon be only enough water for drinking supplies. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that is only just starting to wake up to the severity of the position.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, a hardened climate-change sceptic, delivered dire tidings to the nation’s farmers yesterday. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will die, along with livestock.
Read the rest of the story about Australia’s environmental disaster at The Independent.
[tags]Australia, drought, famine, farming, weather, climate-change, global warming, earth day 2007, crops[/tags]
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